Yesterday’s 42 and heavy rain are this morning’s 24 and heavy snow.
My plan for today had been to hike at Tremont, so I headed up past the Tremont institute and stopped along the road to Middle Prong Trailhead. I tried taking a few pictures, but it was snowing so heavily that I was mostly getting pictures of snow, so I switched to video and then also shot some time lapse.
I have some amazing video footage from this trip, and that’s coming in a future post once I get around to editing it together – but here’s an example:
It was a very interesting day, because the lower elevations were just wet but the upper parts where covered in wet heavy snow. In many places around the park, this meant that the first forty to sixty feet above ground were just wet, and they showed their fall colors perfectly, while the heavy snow hung just above.
After shooting a couple spots, I drove east to Elkmont, where I saw this phenomenon all along Little River road. At Elkmont, I took pictures of the troll bridge for the first time, despite having hiked Little River Trail at least three times over the past few years. It’s a neat spot among the Elkmont homesteads.
I parked just outside the loop at Cades Cove’s entrance, because I knew the loop would be a logjam. I set up a few timelapses from this spot, because the clouds were wrapping around the snow-covered peaks in the distance, beyond the fall colors nearby. It was a continuous traffic jam behind me as people stopped to gawk at wild turkeys, validating my decision not to enter the loop on a weekend.