I was first in Gatlinburg when I was about 10, on an early spring vacation with my parents and another pastor and his wife. (The catch-phrase of the vacation, created by the other pastor to tease my father about his constant restlessness, was “Hurry up and relax.”) The town had its coating of tourism then, but it was much smaller and quainter. Every other business in town was owned by the Ogle family — from the resorts to the restaurants to the hill-billy broom shop. Most of that is gone. I saw the name a few places — an older, run-down hotel, some gravestones in the town cemetery and a farmstead in the National Park. We toured the farm on Thursday morning.
Here’s Noah “Bud” Ogle’s house.
Bud and his wife Cindy settled here in 1879 and their family, according to the brochure “became a prominent force in all phases of local life.”
We walked a winding trail through the woods, past the Ogle’s tub mill.
From the Ogle Farm, we took the Roaring Fork Auto Tour through stunningly-beautiful woods, stopping and getting out of the car whenever we saw something particularly amazing.
The occupants of two cars were standing along the road looking at this bear. We pulled over and got out, and soon there were about 20 cars jamming the narrow road.
A guy pointed out three cubs (he said there were three, I only ever saw one at a time, although I think I saw two different ones) high up in a very tall tree.
When we first arrived, the sow was about 30 yards off the road, down in a depression below our level, grazing through the vegetation on the forest floor. She paid no attention to the crowd of people gathering to watch her, but she kept edging closer and closer. When she got to within 15 feet, people started getting nervous and backing up. She was so close, I couldn’t fit her whole body into a photo with my camera on zoom. I never did see her look our way, but she soon turned and headed off up a rise away from us.
I was being cautious about being so close, but I also had this going for me — I’m pretty sure I could outrun several of the other people standing nearby.