Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Great Smoky Mountains National Park) is very nearly the most popular park in the USA: more than 12 million people visited it in 2024! Surprisingly, by this measure the park beats even such heavyweights as Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite.

Great Smoky, located between North Carolina and Tennessee, is a huge area of mountains, waterfalls, flowers, and wildlife. The park offers visitors 800 miles of maintained trails, along which you can see bears, turkeys, groundhogs, raccoons, and even elk, which were reintroduced to the park in 2001. Great Smoky has more than 1650 species of flowering plants, more than any other national park in America. This earned the park the nickname “The Wildflower Park.”

The park got its name (smoky — full of smoke) from the frequent fog that covers the hilltops.

The famous Appalachian Trail also runs through the park's protected area. It is the longest hiking route in the world, running along the park's mountain system from the state of Maine to Georgia.

How to get to Great Smoky Mountains National Park

There are 3 main entrances to the park: through Gatlinburg (Tennessee), Townsend (Tennessee), and Cherokee (North Carolina).

There are 4 visitor centers in different parts of the park:

• Sugarlands (the park headquarters is also here)
• Cades Cove
• Oconaluftee
• Kuwohi (formerly Clingmans Dome)

At these centers you can pick up maps and reference books, find out about events held in the park, and get advice from rangers. Sugarlands has an exhibit of local plants and animals and a theater showing a 20-minute film. Oconaluftee has a local history museum and a mountain farm that shows how rural people lived in the nineteenth century.

Opening hours of Great Smoky Mountains

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Information about temporary road/trail closures and other restrictions is available on the official website of the US national parks.

You can also check the hours of the park's visitor centers on this page.

Cost of visiting Great Smoky Mountains

Great Smoky Mountains is one of the US national parks with no entrance fee. This is because until 1930 the park's land belonged to a private company, and when the land was handed over to the government, a condition of the transfer was set: the park's roads must always remain free. Another important factor was that the major Highway 441 runs through the park. However, as of 2026, parking in the park for longer than 15 minutes requires a parking tag: $5 a day, $15 a week, or $40 a year.

Map of Great Smoky Mountains National Park

To prepare for a visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it helps to study the map in advance. The red lines are the park's main roads:

What to see in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

As already mentioned, one of the main attractions of Great Smoky Mountains is its waterfalls. There are really a lot of them here. The scenic trails are sure to lead you to one of the park's waterfalls.

The park's trails are an attraction in their own right, too. They are very scenic, and walking them is a real pleasure.

Where to stay in Great Smoky Mountains

There are 10 campgrounds in the park, with restrooms, drinking water, picnic tables, fire pits with a barbecue grate, and metal boxes for storing food and anything with a scent, so that bears can't get to them.

The rental price of an individual campsite (for one tent and one car) as of 2026 is $30 a night (a site with electricity at the Look Rock campground is $36).

The full list of all campgrounds in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is on the official website.

And, of course, for those who like their comfort, there are several hotels in the park and outside it. You can choose a suitable room and book it, for example, here => Booking.com