Powered by Lycoming: Great Smoky Mountain National Park

As we were preparing to leave Rock Hill on Monday, I looked at Dad and said "You wanna fly over the Smokies?" He started to get that homing look in his eyes. You know, the kind of look that a carrier pigeon gets when they get released, a determined steadfast look of "I want to go home" that only Lassie can truly acheive. I could tell he wanted to go home and play a round of golf before dinner. "You can see over 100miles...not a cloud in the sky....it probably won't be this good again for a while..." I let him nibble on that bait for a while, and then I set the hook. "It'll only take another 45 minutes, and I can't think of a better day to fly over the Smokies."

"Okay. Let's do it - you'll have to navigate."

No problem. I'll navigate to the freakin' rockies, just so long I get to fly!

We departed Rock Hill and bounced along in the surface winds, until we passed through the inversion layer at 6000ft, on our way to 8500ft. We were still about 100 miles from the Smokies, but the view was phenomenal. You could see the peaks of Clingman's Dome and the ridge of Mt. LeConte clearly just outside of Charlotte. We followed I-40 past Asheville and wheeled south over Cherokee and Lake Fontana before heading north over the mountains in the park. It was about 20 miles from the Smoky Mountains, that we started to experience some turbulence, so we traded up to 10,500. It was really amazing that looking at these 6500-6700ft peaks from 8500ft, you had the feeling of "are we high enough to clear?" The GPS terrain feature said so, but the eyes were afraid. Well, 4000ft of separation was plenty, and allowed for a nice altitude to take photos from. From this perch, the Smoky Mountains looked exactly like the plastic terrain/relief map of the park that I had studied again and again.

Mt. LeConte & Clingman's Dome from ~30NM away & 10,500ft MSL

Getting Closer - only about 10NM now!

Closeup of Mt. LeConte from ~10NM

Sunlight glinting off Lake Fontana, just south of the Park.

I snapped off megabyte after megabyte of digital memory as Dad banked the plane over and around Mt. LeConte. I don't know how many times we had hiked that mountain together - 8-10 times? It was really cool to be flying 4000ft above that mountain that has so many great memories for our family. I have so many memories of hiking up the Alum Cave Bluffs trail, racing my brothers up to the top, so that one of us could claim the title of "first to the top". Of course, this just meant that we arrived about 40 minutes before Mom & Dad, who were carrying the water or the food or something that we needed, but totally forgot in our race to the top.