I can vividly remember the first time I traveled to The Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. My Boy Scout troop 169 was set to hike the Appalachian Trail from Newfound Gap southwesterly to the park boundary. In 1964, I was a seventh grade kid going on a grand vacation.

We hung up food caches in a futile attempt to keep bears from getting them. We drank from creeks, told campfire stories and endured long days of backpacking, blisters and hunger. We crossed creeks on log footbridges, oblivious to beautiful stone arches over the roadways and rivers, climbed steps made of native rocks and followed long walls that formed the borders of trails.