Elkmont Cabins Virtual Cache
Hidden : 1/11/2003
Difficulty:
1 out of 5
Terrain:
1 out of 5

Size: Size: virtual (virtual)

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Geocache Description:


LOGGING REQUIREMENTS

• In April 2017, many of the remaining, dilapidated homes on the outskirts of Elkmont were demolished. The coordinates take you to the site of one such house. Take a picture of you or your team standing at this spot, and upload with your log.


Enjoy a short walk along a side street above the Elkmont Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There were once over 100 vacation cabins in this area in 1934 when the land was bought by the Park Service. Today, only about a dozen remain; many had fallen into disrepair over the years and the rest were torn down in 2017.

After 14 years as a virtual cache, the home at these coordinates has been removed, but you can still enjoy the walk through this ghost town.

The campground is closed in Winter, but the roads should be open all year. A few parking spaces are found at the gate, but during busy times you might have to park a quarter mile down the road at the Jakes Creek trailhead. The trip is no more than a four to five minute walk each way along a wide gravel road.

The coordinates should lead you to the paved trail/road on the outskirts of what was once a neighborhood. Note that, as several signs remind you, all homes in this area are closed to the public; you can walk or drive by most, but do not go cutting through the yards (most of which are overgrown anyway) or try to enter any buildings. They are closed for a reason, many of them are no longer structurally sound.

Continuing in your car toward the Jakes Creek parking will take you on a tour through the old neighborhood. There are a total of four trails in the area (the one the cache is on and 3 others accessible from Jakes Creek Trail parking). There is also a short nature trail which starts at a parking lot before the trail parking which I believe is at N 35 39.464 W 83 34.844 , though I have not double checked these coordinates. If you look hard enough, you can even find some larger buildings and even cemeteries on some of the other roads nearby.
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Note 9/9/05: We visited the site on August 31 and spotted a very large chestnut down a side trail at N35 39.201 W083 34.752. It appears healthy (no signs of chestnut blight) and one of the guys with us (who knows more about distinguishing between species of chestnut than I do) believes that it isn't an American chestnut, but that it's too big to be a Chinese chestnut. We're guessing that, since this was at one time a neighborhood, the tree is a hybrid that came out of breeding efforts sometime around the 1930's. If anyone who knows anything about chestnuts wants to take a look and tell me what you think, I'd really appreciate it.

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