Great Smoky Mountains: Over the Top on Newfound Gap Road

Sugarlands Visitor Center, two miles south of Gatlinburg, is the Tennessee start of the crossing. It has a natural history museum, a staffed information desk and accessible restrooms outside the building, and it sells…

The Sugarlands Visitor Center stands at the Tennessee edge of the park, two miles from Gatlinburg, just off Newfound Gap Road. It is open daily except December 25, with a natural history museum and an information desk…

The Sugarlands was a Tennessee mountain community along this valley, with a five-cornered Baptist church built in 1816. It emptied when the national park was assembled from timber company land and some twelve hundred…

Newfound Gap Road began in the 1920s as a state highway, routed against the Park Service's wishes and later made part of U.S. 441. The deed that gave Tennessee's part to the park is the reason the park charges no entr…

The Sugarlands valley, at the Tennessee foot of Newfound Gap Road, once had a reputation that North Carolinians liked to tease it about. In 1919, writer Horace Kephart walked into these coves beside a federal revenue…

The Chimney Tops are a pair of bare rock spires on a ridge above Newfound Gap Road, capped by the Anakeesta Formation. James Mooney recorded a Cherokee name for a double peak called the Chimney Tops, Duniskwalgunyi, f…

The Loop is a spiral in Newfound Gap Road near the Chimney Tops Trailhead, where the highway turns a full circle and crosses over itself on a stone bridge. Built in 1935 by a South Carolina contractor for under eighty…

The Alum Cave Trailhead serves a popular trail that climbs Mount LeConte past Arch Rock and Alum Cave Bluffs, an overhang near 4,970 feet whose dust tastes of alum. The hike to the bluffs is 4.6 miles round trip, abou…

On the Tennessee side, Newfound Gap Road runs through the wet, high forest of a park called the Salamander Capital of the World, home to thirty-one salamander species. On a foggy April night in 1937, a scientist went…

Along Newfound Gap Road, the forest shifts with elevation from cove hardwoods to the spruce-fir forest of the crest, a climate that ecologist Royal Shanks matched to northeastern Maine and New Brunswick after five yea…

Morton Overlook, at about 4,837 feet, looks northwest down the West Prong valley that Newfound Gap Road follows toward Gatlinburg. It is named for Ben Morton, a Knoxville mayor and auto club booster who pushed for the…

Newfound Gap, at 5,046 feet, is the lowest drivable pass through the park and the top of Newfound Gap Road, where the Tennessee and North Carolina line and the Appalachian Trail cross. The stone Rockefeller Memorial s…

This overlook just below Newfound Gap looks east down the Oconaluftee valley, into the blue haze the forest itself helps make. Kuwohi, the park's highest summit, carried the name Clingmans Dome until 2024. Its road is…

The crest above this stretch of road leads to Kuwohi, the highest point in Tennessee. In the 1850s, a North Carolina congressman and a university professor feuded over the highest peak in the Black Mountains, and a Sw…

Thomas Divide, the long ridge between the Deep Creek and Oconaluftee valleys, is named for William Holland Thomas, a fatherless store clerk adopted by the Oconaluftee chief Yonaguska, who grew up to become the Cheroke…

Beech Flats Prong runs beside Newfound Gap Road on the North Carolina side. After the highway was rebuilt in 1963, acid runoff from pyrite-bearing road fill left the stream nearly lifeless for about five miles. The va…

Each fall, the Cherokee once burned the leaves off the mountainsides to gather chestnuts, and smoke drifted through these valleys. Cherokee tradition, recorded by James Mooney and still shared publicly by the Eastern…

The Kephart Prong Trail leaves Newfound Gap Road across a footbridge from a small paved pull-off. About a quarter mile up are the ruins of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, including a twenty-foot chimney, and the f…

Yonaguska, known in English as Drowning Bear, was chief of the Oconaluftee Cherokee, and the people he led became the core of today's Eastern Band. He banned whiskey among his people, signing the pledge first himself,…

Smokemont, on the Oconaluftee River, was a Champion Fibre lumber town in the early 1900s; the community had been called Oconaluftee before the company renamed it. Its sawmill helped feed Champion's paper plant at Cant…

This stretch of the Oconaluftee valley was home to settler Abraham Enloe, one of the commissioners of the old turnpike over the mountains. For generations, a western North Carolina tradition claimed a far bigger place…

Mingus Mill, a half mile north of the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, was built in 1886 and still stands on its original site, driven by a water turbine rather than a wheel. Its builder, millwright Sion Thomas Early, sawe…

The Oconaluftee Visitor Center stands at the North Carolina edge of the park, beside the Mountain Farm Museum's log buildings and fields where elk often graze. Accessible restrooms are outside the building. The town o…

The Oconaluftee Visitor Center, a mile and a half north of Cherokee, is the North Carolina start of the crossing. Beside it, the Mountain Farm Museum gathers log buildings moved from around the park, and elk often gra…