I could hear the thunder rolling over the peak of the mountain as the sky turned ashen. My heart started racing as I realized what was about to happen. There is one suggestion that is included in every manual and pamphlet in the park: do not descend the mountain if it is raining. We were on top of the mountain- and there was nowhere to go but down. Suddenly, the sky opened up, and I knew we were trapped.
It was an 80+ degree week in the middle of August. I had been waiting all summer for it, my mom and I’s trip to Gatlinburg,  Tennessee. We had it all planned out; when we would go, what way would we take down there, what we would do when we got there, everything. We left at 8:30 AM on Saturday, August 15. We had Google Maps, Mapquest, a GPS, and an atlas to guide us. We decided to mainly follow the gps. This formidable piece of technology led us to the bottom of Ohio, and all was going good. That was until it decided to take us to a little crack town in the middle of nowhere. So, while we were trying to find the on ramp to the highway, we stopped at a Meijer there to get a camera. Let me tell you this, I felt like a yankee spy. These people had southern accents, they had that drawl, and it was kinda crazy, but in a good way.
After a ten hour drive, we arrived in Gatlinburg. The whole ride was beautiful, but the Smokies are beyond gorgeous. Everyone says that they are, but I never thought they would be this impressive. You can see the mountains from anywhere you are, it’s breathtaking. My mom decided we were going to hike the first day in Gatlinburg, and I thought it was a horrible idea. For all intents and purposes, I told her over and over that I hated hiking, but she decided anyways. We packed up all of our supplies; water, granola bars, bear spray (basically pepper spray on steroids); and we headed out. We decided to hike up to rainbow falls, because it was the prettiest waterfall there. We started hiking and I knew that we made the wrong decision. For one, the combined factors of the high altitude, the backpack I was carrying, and the fact that it was 80 degrees and humid, made it painfully hard to keep breathing. I CAN NOT BREATHE. I AM GOING TO DIE. the thought echoed in my mind as I hiked on. If I didn’t want to make my mom happy, I would be on the ground.
The air up in the mountains is thin, and it makes you pant like you just ran a marathon... when you’ve walked ten yards. We were hoping to see a black bear, that was our biggest goal for our trip. We hiked up the mountain, one jagged rock at a time. When I was about to give up, we saw the first people to walk down in the hour that we had been hiking. This was not a good sign. As we would soon find out, there are usually an upwards of 100 people climbing a particular mountain at a time, but to only see one couple in a whole hour of hiking? That was puzzling to us. As we hiked further up the mountain, I started to observe the few people that walked by. They were all far apart, they were all going fast, and they all looked like they were experienced hikers. After about two and a half hours of hiking, I was exhausted. I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT, I thought to myself. I asked the next people we saw, a middle-aged woman and her husband, how far it was until we got up to the mountain. She smiled kindly at me and answered in a southern accent, “Sugarplum, you see that big ‘ole log up there? That’s the bridge you take, and then it’s about a half a mile or so to the falls. Seeing that you’ve already hiked all this way, it shouldn’t be a difficulty. Have fun!” I was so grateful that we were almost there, I almost ran up the rest of the way. When we got to the waterfall, I couldn’t believe it. It was so gorgeous, I could’ve looked at that thing for hours. I started taking pictures, and that’s when it happened.
I heard thunder from a distance and I looked to the sky. It was rapidly darkening... In an instant, the scorching hot summer sun turned into pouring rain. My mother ran under the huge rock hanging over the side of the waterfall, and I followed. It was damp from the humidity, and now rainwater was creeping in the sides of our temporary sanctuary. I told myself, stop worrying, it will all be okay. I cowered down next to my mom, trying to stay away from the heavy raindrops. As we sat there, we discussed what we should do. We stretched our legs out, so we were sitting against the back of the rock. I could feel tiny little pricks of moisture ricocheting off the rock and onto my legs. We heard the thunder strengthen outside, and we knew we weren’t leaving for a while. To pass the time, she pulled out the booklet on the waterfalls, and as she read, I saw her eyes widen. She looked at me and asked, “Kenz, didn’t you read this at home?”
“Yeah Mom, I read all the stuff you got for me, why?”
“Did you happen to notice that this is the only waterfall that has a different skill level than the rest?” It clicked in my mind. I knew it was harder than it should’ve been. She continued, “Rainbow Falls: difficulty level, advanced; Laurel Falls: difficulty level, moderate.”
“DUDE NO WAY!!! WE DID THE HARD ONE FIRST?? HOW STUPID ARE WE?”
“Well, this was 5.4 miles as a round trip, but that would be straight. Seeing we are on a mountain, and there are rocks to climb over, and twists and turns, it’s usually double the distance.”
“We just hiked five and a half miles up a mountain,” I said to myself.
“Laurel Falls is only 2.6 round trip. And it’s paved.” By the time we figured this all out, we were really hungry. We ate a couple granola bars, and we drank some flavored water to get our sugar up for the hike down. After about a half an hour, the storm went from pouring to sunshine as fast as it came, and it was finally safe to start climbing down the mountain. When we climbed out from the rock, it was beautiful sunshine again, but it wasn’t as brutally steaming as it was before. It felt sticky, like I just fell into a jar of honey and I was trying to walk through it. It smelled like spring rain, but it was intensified, like the smell of rain, but ten times stronger. It wasn’t a regular rain smell either, it was sweet, almost. It was almost like the mountains were trying to apologize for raining on us. Now I understood why everyone got so hyped about “Smoky Mountain Rain”.
It took us a little over two hours to get to the base of the mountain. We had to go extremely slow, because the rocks were wet and it was very easy to slip and fall. It was slow and steady the whole way, and by the time we got to the car, I was exhausted and my feet felt like I had been walking for days, when we had only hiked for about five hours. After we got to the hotel, I took a nap before dinner. When I woke up, I could feel it in my whole body what I did that day. My muscles ached, when I walked it felt like I was pulling a rubber band in my leg that didn’t want to be stretched. I got dressed and we went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner, and I wore my new boots for the first time. After dinner we walked around and went into a lot of little shops. When we were walking, we passed a guy who had a rebel flag tattoo. He said he liked my boots and I said I liked his tattoo. He and his girlfriend laughed and we went our separate ways. That was the night that my mom and I went to all the moonshine places in Gatlinburg. It was hilarious, because 80% of the bartenders tried to serve me. That night, we walked around the town with two bags of leftover food from dinner, four t-shirts, two sweatshirts, and an accumulated six  jars of shine.
Looking back now, the hiking wasn’t all that bad. Sure it was excruciatingly painful afterwards, and yes, it was miserable, but would I do it again the same exact way? Definitely. The whole vacation was amazing, from the donuts and mountain dew at 7am the morning we left, to drinking Monster and blasting Cher at 10pm on the way home, I wouldn’t change a thing in between. Gatlinburg’s beauty is one of the most perfect things I’ve seen in my life, the mountains in the distance, to the rocks all around; I’d love to go back. Even though there were aches, pains, and pouring rain, there was a lot of good to come out of it too. My mom and I saw a black bear and two cubs, my mom got her moonshine and muscadine wine, I found a souvenir with my name spelled right on it, I had unlimited access to a pool for a week, and I bought the most beautiful pair of Ariat boots I’ve seen in my life. All things considered, it was probably the best week of my life. I probably drove my mom crazy with all my complaining, and I wish I hadn’t. Nothing was even that horrid, but then again, hindsight's 20/20.