SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK · · PAGE 12. 

November 17, 2020:  Tuesday continues with the trip into to Tennessee on the north side of the mountains.  This view is looking East on the Clingmans Dome access road almost back to the US 441 highway.

This is the road sign at the junction of US 441 and the access road to and from Clingmans Dome.

This image below of US 441 is what you see if you are adjacent to the road sign seen in the photo above.

Approaching this sign from US 441 southbound is the only Google Earth provided image this good.  If you are driving to this intersection coming North, there is no good angle looking at the other side of this sign using Google Earth.

This sign is about what is just around the corner from this photo.

This image is what you can see from the US 441 highway "driving past" the overlook in the Google Earth photo car.

Google drove their photo car through the parking lot at the Newfound Gap Overlook.  This image looking southeast is what can be seen from the GPS track of the vehicle on the path closest to the wall.  If you want to use Google Earth on your computer to see these images, you can use your mouse to grab the "N" in that compass circle just below the "Exit Street View" tab on the computer screen.  Using a "drag and drop" move on the letter "N" at various positions of the compass is like turning your head to see everything captured by the Google Earth cameras that created these images.  When I set my desired camera angle and zoom settings for these pages, I used the screen capture windows function of the ALT key pushed and held down, then push the Print Screen key to save the images one at a time.  I then processed the images to select the desired part of the image to be 1,200 pixels wide for publishing to these web pages.

Here is the RED state line crossing the New Found Gap area with Tennessee on the US 441 side of the line and North Carolina on the RIGHT side of the red line toward the overlook.  The image is looking EAST.  The letter "N" in the Google Earth compass is at the "nine o'clock" position which tells us North is to the left side of the image.  EAST is UP for this image.

These Google Earth images were taken in June 2016 when summer tourism is way up as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited of all the National Parks.  This image is showing traffic going up and down the north side of the mountain in Tennessee.  The only signs posted in the park are put there by the National Park Service, not the state of Tennessee or North Carolina.  Going down seems to go much faster than climbing the mountain.

Lots of curves, then one that is different comes along.  Here is a tunnel with a curved highway going through it.

The other side of the tunnel seen above still has a couple of curves as we continue down hill.  This next image shows the curves are getting farther apart and the downward slope is getting less and less.

Here is a longer area with not much downward slope.  The hills around this area are smaller.  The rock wall on the left side of the road is gone for now.

We passed a sign that said Alum Cave Trail Head.  All these vehicles must belong to folks who like hiking and looking into caves.  The elevation is now down to 3,884 feet MSL.

We just completed a 180-degree horseshoe turn from North to South.  I don't think there are many road signs like this one here in the Great Smoky Mountains.  After a 180-degree turn, now we are coming to an over and under 360-degree turn that should save space and give up elevation at the same time.  It certainly gets your attention.

Here comes 1/4 of the way around the circle.

Half-Turn coming now.

Three-quarter turn completed where you can see the overpass looking through the trees on the right side of this image.

The Home Stretch now heading SOUTH again.

After the loop, it is out the other side and moving on again.  The road builders provided places to pull off the traffic lanes to take photos.

Just down the road is parking for the Chimney Tops Trail Head.  The COMPASS symbol in the upper right corner of this image indicates we are going in a WESTERLY direction through this area.  Editor's note:  In case you have forgotten with all these Google Earth images in these web pages, LINDA and I drove this route as part of our mountain vacation on November 17, 2020 to have some fun and see something other than the relative FLAT land of Florida where we live.  Google Earth takes millions of images from their fleet of vehicles while they drive the roads and highways of the WORLD.  When we are driving our cars, we cannot safely take pictures.