Gatlinburg

Three weeks ago, the spate of wildfires that had plagued the Southern Appalachians for over a month took an especially tragic turn when one of them struck the resort town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

The various fires in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina had already burned a significant amount of forest land, produced a lot of aggravating smoke, and even forced a few small communities to take the precaution of evacuating, but as far as I know had not previously destroyed structures or taken human lives.

That changed with the Chimney Tops 2 fire, so named because it was the second wildfire to originate at Chimney Tops, a prominent pinnacle shaped mountain. It swept down the western slopes of the Smoky Mountains on the back of 80-mph (130-kph) gusts of wind and devastated parts of Gatlinburg and its surroundings, incinerating or damaging some 1600 buildings and leaving at least 14 people dead.

It seemed unimaginable that the normally damp, even soggy, Smoky Mountains could spawn a blaze big enough and wild enough to ravage an entire town. (Those mountains get their name not from smoke, but rather from fog and mist.) But it did, thanks to unprecedented drought conditions in the Southeast. In the wake of the fire, Gatlinburg and the national park that is the town’s lifeblood were mostly closed to the public for over a week, also highly unprecedented.

More than any of the almost yearly big wildfires typical of the American West, this tragedy hit home for me, since I have a long, intimate history with that part of Tennessee.

Unlike the world-famous Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks, the Great Smoky Mountains park, which straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina state line and is a little smaller than Lapland’s Urho Kekkosen Kansallispuisto, probably isn’t familiar to folks in Finland.

Yet it is the most-visited park in the United States, a destination for some nine million tourists, picnickers, campers, hikers, or mere sightseers every year. Luckily, for the sake of the park’s endless wild spaces, the majority of this vast horde of people never ventures more than a few steps from their cars, leaving most of the park untouched by humans.

Most of this recreational car traffic moves over the Newfound Gap Road, a two-lane highway that cuts the park in half as it crosses over the spine of the Smoky Mountain range. At either end of this winding 34-mile (55-kilometer) road lies two tourist towns hugging the very edge of the park boundaries.

The one on the east, Cherokee, North Carolina, within the Eastern Cherokee Indian Reservation, always had a tacky feel to it, at least when I was a kid. Along the main street fronted by cheap souvenir shops, you could see black bears in cages and local Cherokee men oddly decked out in Plains Indian war bonnets, all for the sake of attracting and amusing tourists. There was an atmosphere of a carnival midway. 

(This made Cherokee the perfect setting, I guess, for the final scenes of German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s iconic movie “Stroszek”, which weirdly enough includes an arcade chicken dancing to corny music.)

On the other hand, Gatlinburg, at the other end of the Newfound Gap road, to me always had a more up-scale vibe to it, though the town (with a current population of about 4000, about the same as Lapland's Ivalo) did exhibit some symptoms of a tourist trap, such as a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum. 

My first visit there was when I was very young, maybe just a new-born. According to family lore, my parents had such a hard time finding a place to stay that they finally had to settle for a motel so run-down you could see the stars through the holes in the roof.

Things were a bit more prosperous there when I started making my own visits, back in high school and college, and my memories of the place are all good. By that time, my buddies and I were making epic hiking trips in the Smokies, in summer but later also in winter. At the end of some of the winter trips, after a few nights sleeping in tents in below-freezing temperatures, we would drive down to Gatlinburg to check into a motel.

Having just finished walking in the woods for a few days, once in Gatlinburg we naturally switched gears and spent our time walking around the town. I remember wandering around little pedestrian alleyways, deserted, the shops closed, the cold nighttime air filled with music, probably Christmas music, piped in through hidden speakers. It was a nice solitary atmosphere.

I also remember driving into Gatlinburg on a rainy night at the end of December. After coming down the mountain, enveloped in the deep blackness of dense woods in every direction, we ran -- with almost no warning -- headlong into the blaring lights of the bustling resort town. It was startling. Since I wasn’t used to driving at night in unfamiliar places, I found it a bit nerve-wracking cruising down the street, the pavement wet and glistening in the confusion of lights, from traffic and shops, all the while keeping an eye out through the rain for tourists on the verge of stepping off the curb. It was in many ways a premonition of what driving is like in Helsinki in the depths of a November night, still unpleasant.

On that night, New Year’s Eve 1974, we hunkered down in our motel, and celebrated “camping-style”. We set up our little, Swedish-made Svea 123 hiking stove (I still have it!) on top of the motel-room cabinet and fired the thing up (talk about fire hazards) so we could boil tea water and make hot rum toddies. They put us in a holiday spirit, for sure.

By the next morning, temperatures had dropped and the streets of Gatlinburg were covered in a treacherous layer of ice. We put the tire chains on my father’s pick-up truck and left town heading downstream toward Pigeon Forge. As there was no way we were going to risk going back across the mountain, we had no choice but to return to Georgia along the around-about, low-land route. Somehow when I think back on that morning, I always hear in my mind Linda Ronstadt singing a plaintive song, something that must have been playing on the radio as we left.

A year or two later, we started making yearly family trips to Gatlinburg to ski at the nearby ski area, almost 1500 feet (460 meters) above town, called Ober Gatlinburg. Naturally. Underlining the European feel evoked by that Germanized name, the resort operates a giant aerial tramway, like you find in the Alps, that would take us directly from Gatlinburg’s main street up to the ski lodge. Our parents weren’t skiers themselves (far from it), but they were happy to indulge their children by arranging what became a family holiday tradition, one that I still have fond memories of.

Since those long-ago family trips, I’ve been to Gatlinburg only once or twice, the last time in 2001 with my own kids. We mostly just passed through. On a trip to Georgia last year, I could have visited the Smokies, driven over Newfound Gap and dropped into to Gatlinburg to get reacquainted.

But I didn’t, and now I regret that. If I ever get back there, even if it’s years from now, I’m afraid it will still feel forever changed by a tragic wildfire that no one expected. 

Gatlinburg, before the recent fire.
Photo: Bilnutne

Skiing

Finns, inhabiting a country that is in deep freeze much of the year, are fanatics about winter sports.  You name it, if a sport requires snow or ice or teeth-chattering cold temperatures, there is a Finn somewhere ready to jump at the chance to do it.  Or at least watch it.  Skiing, ski jumping, hockey, snowboarding, skating, ice-fishing are all popular, though ski jumping – for reasons anyone who has seen it up close will appreciate – is a sport that most people are happy to experience as mere spectators.  With their feet planted firmly on the ground.  Conversely, ice fishing is a solitary (some might say reflective) pursuit.  While I’m sure it has its own special joys, I pity the soul who would see ice fishing as a spectator sport.


Of all these sports, by far the most popular with folks who actually want to get out in the bracing air and enjoy themselves is skiing, and mostly this means cross-country.  Downhill skiing is quite popular, too, especially in Lapland where Finland’s only world-class slopes are located.  Still, downhill skiing will never have nearly the impact on Finnish culture as the traditional cross-country, or Nordic, skiing that Finns have been doing for millennia.  It was some 5000 years ago that the idea of using two slabs of wood to travel across snow first caught on across the northern fringes of Europe and Asia, including present-day Finland. 

Holiday traffic in Paloheinä

Practically everyone here has skied at some point in their lives, and many do it regularly.  It’s been reported that some 15% of the population ski at least three times a week.  I can believe it on a day like today, Epiphany, a public holiday in Finland.  (Epiphany commemorates the Three Wise Men’s visit to Bethlehem, bearing the gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh and, apparently, a day off work for Finns.)  When skiing today near Paloheinä, the premier skiing center in Helsinki’s central park, there were easily a few hundred skiers with me on the groomed trails that wind for kilometers through fields and woods.  I’m lucky to live close enough that it’s only a five-minute walk from my front door. 

Skiing begins early in life here.  Most parents have likely strapped baby skis on their kids’ feet before they turn three (for our kids it was under two).  Group outings on skis are a regular activity for kids, from in pre-school to high school.  After that, the level of interest (or willingness) seems to drop off dramatically for the current generation of young folks.  In fact, many of the skiers you see on the trail are middle aged or older, which doesn’t always hamper their ability to overtake me as I prod along the trail at my own deliberate speed. 

As you might guess, I ski old school.  I would love to fly across the snow using the sexier “skating” technique favored by the more serious skiers nowadays, but alas, I don’t have the coordination to manage it for more than a few meters at a time.  I don’t feel so bad about it, though, since like most foreigners here, I don’t have the advantage that Finns have of being able to ski before learning to ride a bike.  That’s not to say that I was a complete skiing newbie when I first arrived here.  In fact, strange as it seems, I had my first introduction to cross-country skiing way south of the Mason-Dixon Line. 

Back in March of 1978, a friend and I went hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains, a range of mile-high peaks on the North Carolina-Tennessee border.  Protected by a 770-square-mile (2000-square-kilometer) national park, the Smokies is the biggest chunk of mountain wilderness in the Southeastern US, a paradise for hikers and black bears, and a place my friends and I had visited many times before, also in winter. 

For this trip, our goal was to hike a couple of days along part of the Appalachian Trail, which in the Smokies runs along the backbone of the range over some of the highest elevations east of the Mississippi.  It was to be an easy two-night trip covering a bit more than 20 miles, starting from Newfound Gap, a high pass on the crest of the Smokies and good jumping off point for the AT.  

Helsinki boasts hundreds of kilometers of ski trails.

Though it was late March, practically full-blown spring elsewhere in the South, at Newfound Gap (at over 5000 feet, 1500 meters) there was almost a foot of fresh snow.  And this was on top of a previous snowfall of almost a foot that had earlier frozen into a rock hard surface.  The new snow made walking difficult.  A foot of soft snow itself isn’t hard to walk through, but when it hides “postholes”, it can present challenges.  By “postholes”, I mean deep “foot prints” punched through the hard crust of the old snow by the last hiker to pass through.  Completely hidden deep under the new snow, these quickly became little pit falls. 

As we made our way up the trail, we’d take one step in not-so-deep snow only to -- without warning –- hit a foot-deep posthole with the next step and plunge into snow over our knees.  It made for frustratingly slow walking, and after a mile or so of this, we’d had enough.  Luckily, there was an alternative. 

The stretch of the AT we were on parallels the Clingmans Dome road, a spur highway that runs along the Smokies crest that is closed to traffic all winter.  We decided hiking on the unplowed road had to be easier, and at the first opportunity, we crossed over the ridge to find it. 

The road was great, and afforded better views of the valleys below than we would have had from the trail.  And the snow covering the road, untouched by other hikers, made for much easier walking.  That didn’t mean, however, that we were entirely alone.  At a particularly secluded section of the road, we were surprised to meet a small party of cross-country skiers from Michigan.  I’d never seen anyone ski touring anywhere, and I was impressed that these folks would drive more than 500 miles (nearly 900 kilometers) for the chance to glide undisturbed across miles and miles of fir-covered mountaintops. 

It appealed to me, and two years later, with another friend I tried it for myself, touring along that same stretch of closed, unplowed road on skies we rented in Cherokee, North Carolina.  We liked it so much that the following weekend we made the three-hour trip again to Cherokee to buy our own skies.  Mine still hang in my parents’ basement in Georgia, mostly unused.  But I did venture out on them a couple more times before moving to Helsinki, where the forest scenery – while not as solitary and mountainous as in the Smokies –- is still perfect for skiing.  Especially when it’s all just outside your own front door.