Chasing Rainbows

18 Jan 2025

We missed the welcome sign the first day, so we made a special stop in the morning. Welcome to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park!

Yesterday we got frozen out of our hikes, so we stopped in town to buy snow spikes for our boots. They're little 1cm long steel spikes that help with traction in snowy and icy conditions. Looking at the Rainbow Falls Trail, we've got 2.7 miles of snow and ice coming up, so we're pretty happy with our purchase. Today we're going to find ourselves a rainbow!

There's a little bit of green along the river still. The trail to Rainbow Falls is mostly a climb along the river until you hit the falls.

One of the coolest things we found on the early part of the trail was bear tracks! They came down from a rock formation and crossed the river on a log.

Heading up the mountain we wound around to the sunny side of the mountain for a mile! As we came out of the shadows, we had an incredible view over the valley and up the mountains.

The only problem with this section was that the ice turned into mud. Fortunately, the ice spikes worked almost as well in the mud as they did on the ice. It felt like having a super-power. Doing Long Point Trail in West Virginia a few days ago, we had to be so careful with each step and still slipped everywhere, even falling once. With the spikes, we could basically ignore the terrain and no matter where we stepped, we had traction.

Heading back to the shady side of the mountain, we crossed a narrow but very sturdy bridge made of a downed tree.

From there, we found the falls! They were mostly frozen, but still quite pretty.

I even earned a snack!

Wait, a hiker just came by, down the barely-visible trail and said that we weren't there yet, we still had half a mile to go! 😮‍💨
Well, we put on a brave face, grabbed one more photo, and headed up the trail.

We found another waterfall! But... it's still not it.

We found another another waterfall! But... it's still not it.

We also found Cory's favorite thing: A narrow, icy bridge with no hand rails and a direct drop into river with some rocks to cushion the fall.

Fortunately, the ice spikes made it much easier than it first appeared

And finally, three false rainbows later, we found the Rainbow Falls!

We climbed 1654 feet and trekked 3 miles in the ice and snow. We were beat. But the falls were extremely pretty with the frozen blue ice all the way up.

From there, it's back the way we came. While we're not in California yet, we still found a big tree! (Cory for scale)

We passed a family coming up about a mile down, and they had just stopped for a break and made the cutest snowmen!

You can tell we were getting pooped. Every log on the path we took as an opportunity to have a quick sit down. But we went down the mountain twice as fast as we went up. Overall, it was a good hike, maybe a bit more than we were bargaining for. We were sore and very tired by the time we made it back to the car. We burned over 2000 calories on that hike!

So for dinner we went to Mama's Farmhouse and had an excellent all-you-can-eat dinner for just $12 a person!

From here, we camp one more night and head up to Kentucky to visit Mammoth Cave National Park! It's going to be cold!