Smoky Mountains National Park

Our inner nature enthusiast came out in full-force while we were in Gatlinburg. We spent a lot of time exploring the park especially because one of the entry gates was about a tenth of a mile from our hotel. The first day we hiked 5 miles to Rainbow Falls (we were ill prepared; no water or snacks and we had the wrong shoes). Here are some pictures from the first day of hiking:

This was about  a mile into the hike.

The second day we spent a couple of hours in the car riding around the park (looking for bears). We did not see any bears but we saw several beautiful rivers and streams.

The last day we decided that we were going to get up early in the morning and go hiking on the Grotto Falls trail which is only 3 miles round trip. After driving less than a mile into the park we saw a black bear crossing in front of us! It was neat to see although I was expecting it to be much larger than it actually was. After seeing the bear I was pretty much freaked out about hiking. Drew coerced me into going anyway so I spent the next 30 minutes constantly looking behind us making sure a bear was not charging us. About a 1/5 of a mile from the top we come across a fresh pile of bear poop. Game over. I was not going any further and we made it back to the car in record time.