Great Smoky Mountains: Day 1

I've decided to blog on our trip last week, one day at a time... so here's the first entry.

The kids had "Fall Break" this past week, so I took the week off and we went camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  The park is a HUGE mountainous park that lies along the eastern Tennessee border with North Carolina.  It was lovely.  We departed on our adventure early last Monday, and after a stop a Bass Pro Shops, we were on our way into the park.

The word on the street was that the park can be crowded, so after a little research, we discovered a rather remote camp, called "Big Creek".  Big Creek only had 12 camping sites, and it had no RV capabilities, and it was located along a dirt road that had some single lane bridges, so we figured it was a safe bet.  It was glorious.  We set up camp on Monday morning, and played in the creek.  We fished, though caught nothing.

Native brook trout are much easier to spook and are much more suspicious of unnaturally-appearing objects.  And they have a keen sense of smell, though from what I've read, it's hard to measure precisely how keen.  It has been demonstrated that a salmon with its supernatural sense of smell can detect when a man sticks his hand in the water 100 feet upstream! It has also been said that the olfactory system in fish is several times better than that of a good bird dog. There are differing reports of the actual numbers of olfactory cells in dogs, humans, and fish in what I've read, but suffice it to say that on average, the reports claim dogs have anywhere from 20-40 times more olfactory cells than humans.  Wow.  To dumb it down for myself, I thnk of the following analogous question:  Would you be hesitant to take a bite of a delicious-looking turkey dinner if it smelled like used motor oil? Ugghhh.

Okay, enough with fish biology, I just remember why trout bait is really nasty smelling:  the bait smell has to over power the smell of the human that put it on the hook.  So I had to tell the girls that when they're using flies instead of bait, they've got to be careful not to touch the fly if they can avoid it.

I got a few bites using a brown-colored Elk Hair Caddis fly, but landed nothing.  I gave Lilly fly casting lessons later, hoping that would yield more success.

Monday was Dan's second birthday, so we had baked potatoes covered with Que Bueno nacho cheese sauce (his favorite!) and Dump Cake with Ice Cream!  It was delicious!  I have to say that the gift of 50lbs of Que Bueno nacho cheese sauce that Nana and Papa sent Dan is still yielding meals of delight!  It was funny to see Morgan's reaction after tasting the Dump Cake and Ice Cream.  She exclaimed, "Oh Gosh!" and leaned back in ecstasy.