What place has these things in common: flapjacks, sex toys, Jesus and brook trout? You have to leave your comment/guess before reading any more of the post (Talking Bull, you may NOT participate).

I enjoy history and visiting historical sites. I don’t necessarily like seeing all of the museum type pieces (once you’ve seen one Civil War era gun, or button, or fork, you’ve seen them all), but rather soaking in the ambiance of the period—it may sound odd, but I like to put myself in the time and place of the event, trying to “channel” the original experience. It’s a bit naive, but there it is.

One year my wife, our two children, and I traveled to the east coast with my parents and two nieces. My father is also a history buff, so on this trip we had a fair number of historical sites on the docket. After visiting several of them I became a bit disillusioned because some of the places had become Niagara Fallen. (If you’ve been to Niagara Falls on the Canada side, I think you’ll know what I mean. The gaudy commercialization of so many places flummoxes me.) Visiting these historic sites where I expected to be swept back in time so I could relive the event in a 200 year later afterglow. Instead I saw plastic trinkets and bobbleheads of famous people heads. The same thing has happened when I’ve visited a natural feature where I expect to “commune with nature” but get diesel fumes, cheap shirts with tacky iron-on depictions and too many people.

Dan and I flew in to Nashville, Tennessee and drove straight to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Or tried to. We had to make our way through Pigeon Ford and Gatlinburg first.

I remember reading Harry Middleton’s book, On the Spine of Time, where he describes these towns in the following way: “Gatlinburg’s sudden unorchestrated splatter of neon hype and glitz, the cheap and the tacky…” I had to look up that quote right now, and interestingly enough, I came up with my thoughts about the place, as noted in the title of this post, well before finding that quote. The towns are further described by Middleton: “It was all here: God and the mountains plus indoor skydiving…something for everyone—beer, pancakes, even God. The sign said so. CHRISTUS GARDENS. AMERICA’S NO. 1 RELIGIOUS ATTRACTION. …I saw another sign advertising something called HILLBILLY GOLF…”

Since Middleton wrote this, there have been some changes, or maybe he was too polite to mention it, but there is now a preponderance of shops selling sex novelties and apparel. Pairing these shops with the neighboring religious centers makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Throw in Dollywood (a mere 17 miles from Pigeon Ford), and you can make a great mental picture of the place.

However, it might be the pancakes I’m most fascinated by. What exactly is the attraction to the pancake? For an area with a population of 6000-10,000 (some estimates put the number up to 50,000 during tourist season), they seem to have a high number of pancake restaurants per capita. Here are some: International House of Pancakes – IHOP (2 of them), Little House of Pancakes, Log Cabin Pancake House, Red Rooster Pancake House, Flapjacks Pancake Cabin, Smoky Mountain Pancake House, Parkway Pancake House, Lucy’s Pancake Grill, Pancake Pantry, Pancake Cabin, Aunt B’s Pancake House and Grill, River Road Pancake House, Atrium Pancakes and All American Pancake House.

The entire mix created a carnival-like atmosphere—the worst kind of traveling carnival that stalks America with the worldly pleasures only carnies can provide small towns. For Dan and I, this was the gateway to our worldly pleasure too: Salvelinus fontinalis, the brook trout. Specifically, the southern Appalachian strain.

Our goal was relatively straightforward: drive 80 miles from Logan to Salt Lake City. Fly 1500 miles from SLC to Nashville. Drive 230 miles to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and catch some southern Appalachian brook trout. Drive 420 miles to the Rapidan River in Virginia and catch some northern Appalachian brook trout. Drive 580 miles back to Nashville to meet up with Dan’s brother (an ICE agent who was transporting his private gun collection from Virginia to Utah). And finally, successfully transport the guns the remaining 1660 miles from Nashville, Tennessee to Logan, Utah nonstop.

When things work out as planned it is both satisfying and a little surprising. In planning for this trip our main concern was the amount of walking we might have to do to reach our targeted fish. Walking in and of itself wasn’t necessarily the problem (we’ve put in plenty of miles for fish), but rather the ratio of driving to walking to sleeping. More walking meant less sleeping. Less sleep meant that our already scary presence on the freeways would increase in danger.

To help reduce the amount of walking we would do, I sought out help from Chris Shockey, an expert on finding brookies in Appalachia. When asked, he immediately replied that he could put us into brookies 15 minutes from Gatlinburg with minimal walking. And he delivered. (Traffic being what it was, it was more like 30 minutes.)

This was a wet wading stop, so it was only minutes after parking that we were on the trail. Within a few hundred yards we were at the bridge Chris told us about. In we went and within a couple of minutes I pulled in a little rainbow. A couple more followed. Within a few pools we began taking brookies. We fished for about an hour, pulling in mostly brook trout with the occasional stocked rainbow.

The next creek was about an hour north. We pulled in to a trailhead parking lot at a campground, walked less than 100 feet, entered the creek, and Dan immediately pulled out a brook trout (a feat he repeated on the next river as well). He caught a few more before I caught my first one. We caught a dozen more between the two of us before moving on.

Even with the help of pinpointing the trout creeks, and hardly any walking, Day One proved a long, sleepless day. We left Logan Sunday night at 10:00PM, flew out of SLC at 12:50AM Monday morning, arriving in Nashville at 7:30AM Monday morning. In theory we had three hours of sleeping time from SLC to Atlanta (then a connecting flight to Nashville). As with most theories, reality didn’t meet its end of the bargain and I garnered about 20 minutes of sleep, and I’m sure Dan got about the same. We wouldn’t get any substantial sleep for another 15 hours.

days 2 – 5 to follow

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