here come the miles

T minus 12 hours till I hit the road good and hard. Phone charger, toothbrush, towel. I'm sure I've forgotten something, but it doesn't matter.

I went out to the Smokies Friday morning as a little warm-up and so I could get my annual National Parks pass. I waited just past Newfound Gap for the sun to crest the mountains and peek through the heavy clouds, but it never quite made it.

Halfway up to Clingman's Dome I saw a couple other photographers on a narrow pull-off, overlooking the sea of clouds that I had just emerged from. They were a couple of older guys from Seymour, bantering about  f-stops and previous sunrises. One of them told me that this year set the record high for Clingman's Dome at a blistering 73 degrees.

The women in the giftshop of the Sugarlands visitor center had no shortage of advice when they learned what I was buying the annual pass for. "I go to Rocky Mountain National Park every year," said one. "Don't bother with Wall Drug in South Dakota," said the other, "Overrated!"

Duly noted.

The sun also rises. In case you were wondering.

3:30AM is a disgusting time. Regardless of whether you're still up or getting up. In my case it was the latter. My alarm went off, inflicting severe psychological trauma, but I managed to crawl out of bed, jam in my contacts, lace up my boots, double-check my camera gear, and set off towards the Smokies.

Every once and awhile, when I can muster up the discipline, I try to make it out to the Park to catch the sunrise. Provided I don't have work that day and can recuperate with a lengthy nap. So the plan for this morning was to drive the hour and a half through blissfully empty Sevierville/Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg and up to Clingman's Dome, from where you can hike a moderate 2 miles to Andrew's Bald, a grassy peak at the end of a ridge-line.

The ascent to Newfound Gap on 441 was a harrowing, fog-shrouded adventure, but I did make it to a nearly deserted parking lot at Clingman's Dome, where the wind was driving endless fog banks over the mountain and making 60F feel a lot colder. If there's a recurring theme to my pre-dawn excursions, it's that I always underestimate how cold it'll be, but luckily I had a blanket in the back of the car and fashioned it into an impromptu poncho before hitting the trail.

I clicked on my headlamp, and the first thing it illuminated was a sign on the trailhead marker warning of "aggressive bear activity" in the area. Just what you want to read before setting off into the darkness where every shadow becomes a snarling maw and every startled bird sounds an awful lot like a charging death-machine. To add inconvenience to paranoia, the first mile of the trail is pretty much a creek bed, littered with slick ankle-breakers and mud.

I arrived at the bald around 6:15, with dawn threatening to break, so I hurried and scouted out its eastern side for a good vantage point, but the best I could find was a gap in the skeletal limbs of a blighted tree. Oh well, I should probably do better research on visibility next time. I shot for an hour or so, then headed back up the trail a little disappointed.

Maybe 5 minutes later I stopped to try to identify a strange clucking that was emanating from the woods to my right, when a partridge waddled onto the path about 5 feet in front of me. It didn't seem phased by me at all, and continued its promenade across the trail and back into the woods. If the fowl hadn't made me pause, I wouldn't have noticed the spectacular beams of sunlight shooting between the trees and gotten some of my favorite images of the trip. This too seems to follow the pattern of my sunrise outings in that I usually find the best subjects on the way back to the car after I've "given up".

By the time I made it back up to the parking lot, tourists were beginning to file in, probably to make the half mile trek to the Clingman's Dome observation tower only to find panoramic views of the inside of a cloud. I stopped at Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville on the way home and bought a tantalizingly cheap Mora Craftline because it just looked so darn utilitarian.

Now I'm gonna go catch up on this sleep deficit. Anybody down for sun-up tomorrow??