The Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddles North Carolina and Tennessee and is the most visited national park in the US. It is less than 3 hours away from us yet somehow we have never visited! It was definitely high on my reasons for picking Tennessee for our spring break trip.
Normally we would find some hiking trails to explore but since we were traveling with my parents, I wanted to find a different way to see the park. Pink Jeep Tours fit the bill exactly!
Started as an off-road tour company in Sedona AZ, Pink Jeep Tours now offers tours in 5 locations, including the Great Smoky Mountains. They offer 5 different tour option in the Smokies, taking different routes through the park for tours ranging from 1.5 to 3 hours. Hoping to see bears, I picked the Roaring Forks Motor Nature Trail tour since reviews indicated it had the highest likelihood of bear spottings. This tour follows a narrow winding paved road through the park, passing waterfalls, scenic outlooks, and historic buildings.
We met our guide at the Pink Jeep Tours office in Pigeon Forge. The tours have a maximum of 7 guests and we were a group of 6 so we ended up with a tour just for our group. The jeeps load from the back and have bench seats on either side. One guest must sit in the front seat for load balancing.
The tour goes through Gatlinburg on the way to the national park, but you have to get out of Pigeon Forge first! This was even more challenging than usual, as we were there during the Pigeon Forge Spring Rod Run. The classic car show had traffic snarled but our guide did her best to skirt around the outside of the town to avoid the traffic as much as possible. We did a quick spin through Gatlinburg before heading into the national park.
The Roaring Forks Motor Trail is a 5.5 mile one-way loop road through old growth forest. It is more of a woodsy, deep in the forest kind of road, not one with tons of sweeping views. But there was one pretty stop at a lookout point. Although we were there on an overcast day, the view was still impressive.
This drive also passes several historic buildings. We stopped at Jim Bales Place, which included several log buildings. We walked around the area and checked out the cabin, corn crib, and barn.
It was neat to see the old buildings but the creek that ran alongside the homestead was more popular among my crew. The picturesque stream ran over fallen trees and mossy rocks. It was a really peaceful and beautiful spot.
As the tour continued, we checked out the Place of a Thousand Drips, stopping the jeep but not getting out because there was nowhere to park until further down the road. The water flow on this waterfall varies with the season and with the rainfall, but the water has created a cool collection of grooves and channels in the rocks over time. Our guide pointed out a bear den near the top of the falls but we weren’t lucky enough to spot him.
We finished up our time in the Smokies and headed back to Pigeon Forge. We had one last stop on the way back. Off-roading is not allowed in the national park so Pink Jeep Tours has some private land in Pigeon Forge where they do a short off-road ride at the end of the tour. It was short (not much more than 5 minutes) and very contrived but still fun. The boys thought it was a blast and we’ve definitely added a true off-road adventure to our list for future travels.
Our guide on the tour was friendly, fun, knowledgeable, and very talkative! She definitely knew a lot about the Smokies (including where the bears usually are but unfortunately were not today) and we appreciated all she taught us about the area. She also introduced us to the Duck, Duck, Jeep phenomenon in which jeep owners “duck” other jeeps by putting a rubber duck and a note on their vehicle. It is a fun way to put a smile on someone’s face and it’s been neat for us to notice them on the dashboards of jeeps since then.
Overall this was a great tour for our situation. If you are traveling with people with limitations on hiking, don’t want to drive through the park yourself, or just want a unique way to see the area, Pink Jeep Tours are a great way to visit the national park. I suspect the Smoky Mountains tours are quite different from the company’s original tours in Sedona but they definitely serve a useful purpose in the Smokies and can add a lot to your visit.
