Smoky Mountains Vacation: Baskins Creek and That's a Wrap!
Smoky Mountains Family Vacation Day 5: Baskins Creek and That’s a Wrap! A lovely view from early in the trail. Since it was all uphill heading back, we were even MORE grateful to see this the second time around! At this point, I finally found a reliable website for analyzing trails. Hiking in the smoky’s ( hikinginthesmokys.com ) includes a succinct overview of each trail, including total trail length, features you will see and (THIS IS KEY!) elevation gain. (The site then continues to offer a very accurately detailed description of the walk-through…and I am not getting paid to advertise!) I found the elevation gain stats to be much more useful than the overall trail difficulty rating. I mean…I don’t like to consider myself completely out of shape (and there were others less fortunate than myself on many of the trails we conquered), but what many websites rated a 5 or 6, I would tend to give a 5,000. I don’t know upon what type of person we tend to base these difficulty ratings,