June 01, 2015 - Fireflies at Elkmont

June 01, 2015

I got an email with a dozen photos from Denise, the nurse who had been camping in Site 8 for about a week. She is the one who told us about the drunk driver in the pickup truck. Holy cow, it is a wonder the stupid girl did not get worse than a huge knot on her forehead,

She had spun gravel 10 yards down the campground road before ending up on top of a boulder. Both front tires were in the air.

It is hard to believe there is not some damage under there, but I’m pretty sure she drove away the next morning, after the trash truck pulled her off.

Spence stopped in for his cup of coffee, as usual, at 0830. He said he has never been to see the fireflies in Elkmont and didn’t want to go along with us. I have been looking forward to it since last year. Andy was happy to go see the fireflies because I told him we could stop at Mellow Mushroom for a pizza on the way.

Spence was busy trimming the grass, poison ivy, and moss around the perimeter of the campground parking lot when we walked around in the morning.

Andy posed for me next to the huge tree in Site 2.

I noticed some of those little sprouts in the moss on the roof of the registration kiosk today. I wish I could get an internet connection to find out what they are. Moss blossoms?  Fungus?

We walked along the creek path and spotted a few more saplings that have been cut down for firewood by campers. I may have to move up my forecast for when the campers are going to denude the valley for firewood.

We took off in the afternoon and made a stop at Lowe’s for a flashlight for Andy to replace the one he misplaced the night of the horse-and-buggy incident. Naturally, I love flashlights and had to have a new one too. The next stop was the Mellow Mushroom in Pigeon Forge. I took my computer and did an email send/receive after we ate.

On the way into the park, we stopped at the welcome center to look for Meigs Line – Rangers rediscover a two-century-old disputed boundary between the U.S. & Cherokee Nation  by Dwight McCarter and Joe Kelley. Michael Aday, the park librarian and archivist, had recommended it to us last year. They had sold out at the welcome center and the woman called the Sugarlands visitor center to see if they had any. Negative. Then she called the Moonpie General Store in Pigeon Forge. They had one and held it for us at the register. Moonpie happened to be practically next door to the Mellow Mushroom. We were driving in circles.

We wandered around a bit and also picked up Buffalo Bill’s America and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I am still smarting from not having read it when we took the trolley tour of Savannah years ago. It was all the tour guide talked about and I was clueless.

We drove back into the park and went straight to Elkmont for the last night of firefly viewing before the official event. Boss Larry had recommended the cemetery as a good spot to watch the show. We were hours early, but that gave me time to look around. Wow!  I was enchanted  with the old buildings. I can’t look it up to find out any more about it, but is must have been a resort before the park was established. It was a walk back in time. There were maybe two dozen cottages along a straight road. 

Some were small and several were quite large. They were all run down. U. S. no trespassing signs were posted, but all the doors were open. I went inside two. A blue cottage has a large front porch and a warren of rooms, some very large.

The cottages uphill from the parking lot were in worse condition than those downhill. Several of them were falling down. I didn’t go in them, but peeked inside the door of a few. It is easy to imagine the vacations spent here and the hours people must have spent in these cottages. I am sorry that that is not the time period the park sought to preserve. They are amazing.

We were happy that we bought some books on the way because we had forgotten to bring our current reads. We sat in the car reading and waiting for dark. We had some rain, but it stopped before dark. The parking lots filled up and cars were milling around looking for some place to stop. We took our umbrellas and walked up to the cemetery. It was interesting, in that most of the names were ones we recognized, either from our reading, park locations, or from street and business names in the area.

It never did get very dark. There must have been a full moon above all those clouds. We didn’t see any fireflies in the cemetery, but the woods surrounding it were full of them. It was awesome, and that overused word is appropriate here. There were more fireflies than I’ve ever seen in one place. There were thousands of them. When they flashed, it was like a Christmas tree covered in blinking lights. After a while, they synchronized their flashing. They would all light at the same period for five or ten seconds and then all stayed dark for five or six seconds. A few didn’t quite have the rhythm. All the fireflies in the forest were not together either. Those in one direction were synchronized and those in another direction were synchronized, but the two areas did not match each other. Sometimes it was like a “wave”; they would light up and the ones nearby would start, and the wave of light would move around us.

We did not see anything like the U-Tube videos we saw last year where they all blinked on and off at exactly the same time, but we are guessing that it is a bit early in the mating season and that might happen in the next week or so. It was still amazing. Even if they were not perfectly synchronized, there were so many of them that the forest was a twinkling fairyland. I got what I went for and went home happy. It was after 0100 before we got home. Search U-tube for “fireflies Elkmont” and you should find several good videos of the phenomenon.

Continuing the theme of wet leaves: