GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK — The park service is crediting stopped traffic for Cades Cove being named Tennessee’s top place for peace and reflection in a statewide ranking. Ranger Wade Hutchins, who works the entrance to the scenic loop and speaks for the park on the matter, says the congestion is the reason the road won and that the park intends to keep it. The loop is the park service’s own road, a single lane that runs one way, so when one car stops, every car behind it stops too, and the drivers have nothing to do but sit and think.
Hutchins has a complaint, which is that the traffic keeps starting up again before people are finished.
“There’s a gravel pullout about halfway around with a muddy edge,” Hutchins said. “That’s where they usually start working things out. Last week I saw a woman sitting there with her phone in her lap, just looking out the windshield, and then the car in front of her pulled off and her husband started creeping up. I wish he’d left the brake on.”
A family in a minivan recently stopped the line to watch what they took for a bear. It was a stump. Hutchins considered the backup worthwhile anyway, even after the family worked out that the stump had roots.
“The dad kept pointing at the same spot,” Hutchins said. “He said there was an ear. I never saw an ear. Anyway, the woman in the car behind them had her notebook out by then.”
Hutchins said drivers who recognize a stump right away worry him, because they tend to speed up. Asked whether a deer would give visitors a better experience, he started talking about the pullout again.
“I’d still like to know what she was writing in that notebook,” he said. “She had a pen out and everything.”