Every year when data surrounding visits to US is published, there’s one clear winner: Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With as many as 12 million visitors each year, this park comes in lightyears ahead of the next busiest parks – , and which see less than five million annual visitors. But why is it so popular? After all, it lacks the sandstone towers of or the breathtaking of .
Well, for starters, location is everything. This forested park straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, sharing its vast 522,000 acres roughly equally over the two states. This places it within a day’s drive of about two-thirds of the US population, which makes it an appealing road trip in a country that loves to drive.
It’s also one of the , which is definitely a bonus, but if we’re being honest, convenience and cost are far from the whole story. Read on for nine fascinating facts about Great Smoky Mountains National Park that will convince you this park is worth a visit. The Smokies, as they’re affectionately known, are a sub-range of the Appalachian Mountains, and are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, according to the .
The oldest rocks here are over a billion years old, while the newer mountains were formed between 450 and 540 million years ago as sediment deposited by rivers and streams. Compared to the Rocky Mountains then, they're positively ancient, and there are plenty of fossils to prove it – fossils found in limestone rocks in Cades Cove are .