About Me
Hi, I'm Luke
I was born and raised in the foothills of the Great Smokies, in the blueridge range of the Appalachain Mountains. I grew up hiking, fishing, mountain biking, and whatever else I could find to do in the hills around my home.
Despite that fact, in my first 18 years of life I had only once visitied the national park whose boundaries were within sight of my front porch (a short daytrip to Cades Cove as a tyke). That all changed when I moved to Knoxville for school. Today, I have spent thousands of hours within the park boundaries, hiked nearly every trail it has to offer, and fallen in love with the history, the places, and the people that make the park so special to the millions who visit every year.
"My life has been the poem I could have writ, but I could not both live and utter it"
My modern relationship with the Smokies began with my longtime roommate, and good friend, Ben. As freshmen at the Universtiy of Tennessee in the year of our Lord two thousand and seventeen it was somewhat of a rite of passage to circumvent the trail barrier recently installed by park officials due the infamous wild fires of 2016 and climb to the top of Chimney Tops, despite that being strictly forbidden (this is not an endorsment of such behavior, simply an admission). This was my first time in the park since being a very small child and my first time ever completing a hike therein. Ben and I returned to the park every so often and over the first few years of my time in Knoxville I completed most of the cliche Smokies trails (Alum Cave, Abrams Falls, etc., etc.) like every other one of my compatriots. But my intimate relationship didn’t begin until my time in Knoxville was coming to a close, and took a global pandemic and a fortuitous series of unlikely events to come to fruition.
There is a saying among the natives in the regions encompassing lower Appalachia, “He who removes a pebble from a stream alters the course of the river forever.” One of my pebbles was in the spring of 2020. The national park had just reopened from an extended closure due to the outbreak of Covid in the United States and I, being one of the few remaining students in Knoxville, was bored and lonely and so undertook two seemingly seperate endeavors to remedy each. First, I decided I would take the invitation to return to the Smokies the coming Saturday to complete another cliche (though less common, due to the difficulty) hike up to Rocky Top, a place that resides deep in the hearts of us Volunteers. And secondly, I would invite my friend Tim (a Knoxville native, and therefore still around) to dinner on Friday. Tim and I had actually met in the national park as freshmen volunteering knocking over rock cairns from Little River in Elkmont (Smokies lessen #1: don’t stack rocks from creeks, the natives were right about the pebble thing, and we don’t want to alter the course of real rivers, just metaphorical ones)…Anyhow, somewhere along the course of that dinner I mentioned my upcoming journey to Rocky Top and Tim somewhat invited himself to come along (maybe a slight breach of decorum, but a welcome one). The next day we did go to Rocky Top together and decided we should keep hiking together for as long as our schedules and mutual unemployment would allow.
Well it turns out if a global pandemic is good for anything, it’s freeing up your schedule. Plans were altered; internships were cancelled; and what became of that first hike was a year of returning to the park every week with two simple goals. The first being to hike every trail in the park, what the locals call “mapping”, but secondly, and far more importantly, tospend as much time emersed in nature as we could before having to submit to the duties of “real life”. In that year in the woods conversations were had and decisions were made that would alter the lives of the both of us forever. I for one decided to move to Illinois to pursue a higher learning in structural engineering, and Tim decided to become somewhat of a modern nomad, discovering the world as he saught to discover himself. As for goal #1, Timhas since finished all of those trails; I never did (though I’m working on it). Moving across the country certainly puts a damper on your annual milage it turns out. Either way, achieving goal #2 was the part of that year that really stuck with me, and turned me into the person I am today.
Ben and I in front of the infamous Chimney Tops gate
Tim and I setting off on our first hike to Rocky Top
The three of us eating lunch atop Sterling Mountain fire tower on a foggy day
"Nature always wears the color of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it"
So why, after all these years, have I decided to start this blog. Well, a couple of reasons. One is homesickness. I so deeply miss my life in the mountains. I have now been a midwesterner for a a time unbelievable to myself, and while the midwest comes with benefits of it’s own, certainly one of them is not the fulfilling of my outdoors needs. Corn fields are a poor substitition for forrest and streams. Therefore it is my joy to live vicariously through the people who are enjoying the mountains, some of them for the very first time. And that brings me to the second reason. The Smoky Mountains and surrounding area are a very popular place to visit, and almost as soon as the good people of Illinois realized where I was from they began asking my advice on what to do on their own family vacations, bachelor weekends, and girls trips to the Smokies. Through this I learned not only that my knowledge of the area had a real use that could bring small though not insignificant improvement to peoples lives, but also that giving that advice would be much easier if it was just stored somewhere permanently instead of me having to write a new essay-length email every time a new person headed down south.
So here it is: all of my knowledge stored for the greater good of mankind. Use it wisely, or don’t. Just whatever you do, have fun, leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures, pack in, pack out, be kind, rewind…and all that jazz.