Gap and Falls (Kentucky edition)

For our entire eastern trek on Interstate 40, we never broke free of the gray. Even the Great Smoky Mountains barely poked through a misty Friday. At Knoxville we left from superhighways, heading through Fountain City and a number of rural outposts, crossing reservoirs and low mountain ridges in northeastern Tennessee. Aside from pine stands, everything was brown. A stubborn winter delayed most of the growth in Tennessee. It would also hold sway over Cumberland Gap, where no plant or tree popped signs of spring growth.

The Olde Mill's wheel still spins.

 The terrain grew more Appalachian. Outside one of the small towns dependent on the highway, a pen of bison of bison roaming one of those low hills.

 The peaks stretched higher as we neared Cumberland Gap, Tenn. The small town sat in the shadow of those craggy mountains. Wander a few hundred feet one the trails and you can enter Virginia. The Olde Mill Inn still had a working mill wheel, slowly rotating in Gap Creek, a noisy, rapidly descending stream that roared out of the Virginia hillside into a Tennessee town.

Too early to check in, we ventured through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel, which ran beneath the mountain. Opened in 1996, the tunnel allowed the closing of a windy road across the gap that notched several fatalities a year. Removal of the road led to the restoration of the Cumberland Gap to its colonial look. Like so many early paths across North America, Cumberland Gap started as a bison run, followed by Indian tribes who used the gap to cross the Appalachians. That was its strategic importance.

When the country didn’t really extend beyond the Appalachians, the gap offered an easy crossing. Daniel Boone helped blaze the original road. During the Civil War, it traded hands several times between the Union and the Confederacy, each time without shots fired

Cumberland Gap, Tenn., from the Pinnacle Overlook

What better place to take stock of the landscape than atop it all? Grabbing maps at the visitor center, we rumbled up the switchback drive to the Pinnacle Overlooks. The drive started in Kentucky, winding into Virginia even though the town of Cumberland Gap., sat 1,700 feet below the overlook platform. The distant blue gash of Fern Lake broke up the forest still dormant from winter. 

For our first night in Cumberland Gap, we had the inn to ourselves. We wandered through Middlesboro, but mostly stuck to Tennessee/Virginia side of the gap.

As we waited for breakfast and inspected an old iron furnace along a mountain-borne creek on Saturday morning, the rain picked up. We ventured over to the visitors center again, sitting through the informational film as the rain walloped the building.

Crossing back, we had to hit one essential trail. Rain or not, a hike up to the Tri-State Peak was not optional. Nancy and her dad had done the 3-mile roundtrip several years ago, and I wanted to trek up into the mountains to see that survey marker. Ponchos bought in Knoxville sheltered us. From the iron furnace the trail quickly climbed into the foothills and up into the peaks of the Gap. The trail wound deeper into a dense second-growth forest, the ruins of Civil War outposts overlooked the trail.

At the junction of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee

We turned a corner and beneath a pavilion, there it sat -the survey marker and blue plaques marking each state. The town of Cumberland Gap sat immediately below us. If we had a path to descend, we could have returned to our B&B in minutes. But it was just as well; the rain eased up on our return trip.

In neighboring Harrogate, Lincoln Memorial University hosted a decent Abraham Lincoln Museum that housed many items from Lincoln’s life and some interesting Civil War exhibits. East Tennessee never strayed from Union support during the war, so a university named for the Great Emancipator in Tennessee is not so odd. In the downpour, we stopped at a little burger and root beer stand. We took our sandwiches and stopped at one of the park’s day units in Virginia. We had the pavilion and its ample bear warnings to ourselves. Nearby, several small bison herds roamed on private property and at the entrance to Virginia’s Wilderness Gap State Park. Rain dashed any further hiking around the gap.

We had Italian food at one of Cumberland Gap’s few open restaurants and retired for a few games of chess. Sun greeted Cumberland Gap on Sunday morning, along with a dusting of snow at the mountains’ higher elevations.

Across the gap in Middlesboro, we saw the snow had coated most of the southeastern Kentucky peaks. The Cumberland River cut in as Harlan Road split off to the east. Pineville was one of the older towns I had seen east of the original 13 colonies. Founded in 1781, the small burg hugged a thatch of land below the mountains and adjacent to the Cumberland.

Breakfast began to wear off after Barbourville. Corbin approached quickly. Cruising downtown Corbin, we found numerous restaurants, all of them closed.

Down the road, we found the one restaurant no Corbin visitor skips – Sanders Café, the restored restaurant where Colonel Harlan Sanders began his fried chicken business. It was not a sit-down restaurant anymore, but a restored eating space with historical exhibits and a statue of the Colonel for photos Adjacent to the wood booths and tables, a modern KFC serves customers.

Soon Corbin fell behind us. Terrain surrounding the road fell away. We traveled a lonely ridge into Cumberland Falls State Park, which drew crowds greater than any we’d seen on the entire weekend. At Cumberland Falls, the namesake river tumbled almost 70 feet in a waterfall 125 feet wide. It was among the river’s most dramatic features and the Southeast’s most powerful waterfall. Like Niagara Falls, boulders downstream indicated the falls’ retreat upriver at a speed too slow for human witnesses.

Raging falls

On this Sunday, its power was amplified. The rainfall turned an already propulsive waterfall into a raging drop. Beaches below the falls vanished underneath the swollen river.

The falls’ best-known feature is not visible during the day. On clear nights, the misty falls often reveal a moonbow, a rainbow created by a full moon. Better weather and spring break brought crowds to the falls. We opted for another set of falls before finishing our Kentucky Sunday.

As that Sunday afternoon feeling crept in, we headed for the northeast corner of Big South Fork National Recreation area. We made our stop count with a hike to Kentucky’s tallest waterfall, Yahoo Falls, which pours over a lip of rock in this craggy, forested terrain.

Misting falls and an awesome rock shelter.

Where the trail split we followed a metal staircase down to the base of a rock wall. A creek flowed through the steep gouge in the landscape. At first glance, the centerpiece of the park unit seemed slight. The flow of Yahoo Falls trickled compared to Cumberland Falls; instead of a broad river, it gurgled away as a relatively small creek.

But Yahoo won with its scenery and solitude. Erosion had scooped a deep rock shelter behind the falls, where the fall mists cooled the air. It was not a stretch to imagine Indians camped out under the spacious shelter. A simple path led through the rock maze below the precipice. We wandered through this placid valley, crossed the creek and relished the separation from other hikers traipsing in these woods.