The Smokies Snow Last Monday

The Smokies Snow Last Monday
Jan 26th 2008
wolfmoonsleddog
Southeast
Location: Northwest GA
Time - 9:33pm
Temperature:Â 42 degrees F
Conditions: Cloudy
Forecast: Cloudy tonight, sunny tomorrow. Lows in the 30s and 20s

Okay, so here’s what happened on the way back from the Winterfest last Monday. We took a detour through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park - right up and over Newfound Gap. There. Was. Snow. A lot of it. I started going crazy in the lower elevations when there was around an inch. At Newfound gap there had to be 4-6 inches! Glorious!

We pulled over at the entrance to Clingman’s Dome Road (which is closed during the Winter) and I unloaded Calypso, took the kicksled off the roof and helped my Dad put it together. While I was doing this, a family with several kids (who had large, round plastic sleds that Calypso did not like for whatever reason) walked over. One boy, about 9 or 10 I think, said “Are you going mushing?”

Mushing. Not dogsledding or worse, sled-dogging. Mushing. Turns out he was from the Atlanta area and a musher and dog had done a program at his school. Looks like sled dog publicity is everywhere.

I ran a little in the snow and had a great time. Unfortunately, a bit of the road had been scraped and Calypso, trained to run on a path, kept trying to run on the bare road rather than in the snow. Fortunately I found a ski trail and that helped.

When I was sledding back towards the parking area, we came around a curve and saw…a woman walking two huskies!

Turns out she and her husband were ALSO from Georgia. They were very interested in my kicksled since they had huskies. I showed them my scooter and they were even more interested in that. I told them about scootering and directed them to dogscooter.com . Who knows, we might have a couple new Georgia mushers soon…