Hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

About the Authors Liz Etnier Mike Etnier Spring Wildflower Hikes in the Smokies Gregory Bald Roundtop Schoolhouse Gap Chestnut Top Defeat Ridge Return to Hiking in the Smokies

Recent Hikes White Oak Sinks – April 21, 2008 Six of us walked into White Oak sinks, in the Smoky Mountains, via Schoolhouse Gap Road. I prefer to go in that way, as we see lots of wildflowers along the road bank, as well as enjoy the pastoral valley we walk up. We counted 30 species of flowers that we saw this day. You can click on this link and then click on "photos" to see the photos I have posted on my blog for White Oak Sinks. When I first starting hiking in the Smokies, in 1997, White Oak Sinks was still a carefully guarded spot that had little foot traffic going into it. However, several newspaper articles have appeared in the last few years describing the beauty of the Sinks, and giving detailed instructions on how to get to them. Now it is not unusual to see groups of as many as 50 people walking in White Oak Sinks, and inevitably stepping off the trails and stomping and killing many, many plants. More disturbing now is the fact that many people are even more thoughtless, and walk off the trails intentionally to get a better view or photograph of something they can see right at the edge of the trails. On the day we hiked into the Sinks, we saw several photographers lying in the middle of a bunch of plants, trying to focus from ground level on a flower. We even saw someone sitting on the ground, about 5 ft off the trail, surrounded by Trillium grandiflorum (I hated to think how many she was sitting on). In the past, the trails have gone around the edge of the sinkholes that have Virginia bluebells and Shooting stars, but now, someone has cut a trail to the bottom of the bluebell hole, and we saw people scambling up and down the trail to photograph bluebells at the very bottom. I shudder to think how many bluebells were killed cutting the trail, and by people slipping up and down it. A particular fear is that the trail was cut so someone could poach the bluebells. White Oak Sinks is a very beautiful, but fragile ecosystem, and it is rapidly being destroyed by people who only think of themselves, and seem to have no knowledge of how disastrous their actions can be.