Blog for Zipline Attraction in the Smoky Mountains
Located in Pigeon Forge, TN and near Gatlinburg and Sevierville.
A Guided Tour of the Smokies
By Ross Bodhi Ogle
Posted on July 9, 2024
On a recent trip to two national parks in the western U.S., we discovered a cool app that provided guided tours of both parks. It's called GuideAlong, and it uses GPS technology to pinpoint your location within the park, and that prompts the app to start audio narration pertaining to that location.
Once you download the app (free), GuideAlong has downloadable audio tours (not free) that offer insights into national parks and other notable travel routes and destinations throughout the United States. And yes, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the available tours.
The tour starts in Gatlinburg and covers the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail and then takes Fighting Creek Gap Rd. and Little River Rd. (the main route from Sugarlands Visitors Center to Cades Cove) to the full Cades Cove Loop, with a side trek into Townsend. Another branch of the tour follows Newfound Gap Rd. from Sugarlands to Cherokee, North Carolina, making a slight detour to check out Clingmans Dome.
Each segment of the route features dozens of points and topics of interest, the narration for which is automatically triggered when your vehicle approaches that spot. Highlights of the Smokies cover the aforementioned Sugarlands, Clingmans Dome and Cades Cove as well as Alum Cave, Grotto Falls, Morton Tunnel, the Oconaluftee Farm Museum, Chimney Tops, Gatlinburg, Mingus Mill and The Sinks. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
The narration is easy to listen to and includes just about everything you'd want to know about the national park and its destinations – history, notable people, geology, wildlife diversity and much more. Each tour also helps you navigate the different routes within the park as you go, providing easy, turn-by-turn instructions.
The Smokies tour is $17, or you can get it as part of a larger Appalachian bundle for $37. There's even an Eastern U.S. tour bundle for $75. If you want to check it out, visit guidealong.com to listen to sample audio clips from any of the tours.
Note that we're not affiliated with this company in any way; we just think this is a useful travel tool that's worth sharing. You might also do some research on your own and find other companies that are offering similar guided tours. If so, great. But we do recommend the GPS functionality of GuideAlong, which is triggered only by your arrival at a specific point. This allows you to travel any of the routes at your own pace, and the app will always keep up with you.
The Smokies tour doesn't go any farther north than Gatlinburg, so when you do visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park (and you should definitely do that when you come to this area), you'll be on your own when it comes to visiting Pigeon Forge. Fortunately, a lot of the attractions, restaurants, shops and accommodations are located on the main route through town, aka the Parkway.
However, there are lots of other great things to be discovered off the Parkway, including Smoky Mountain Ziplines. But we're still easy to find. Just turn onto Connor Heights Rd. at the south end of the Parkway, and you'll find our Pigeon Forge zipline attraction just two miles down the road on the left.
Other notable destinations off the Parkway include Dollywood and Dollywood Splash Country, which are located on Veterans Blvd., one of the main alternate routes running from the heart of Pigeon Forge to Dolly Parton Parkway in Sevierville. Another Pigeon Forge street to keep in mind is Teaster Lane. It runs parallel to the Parkway and has its own share of theaters, attractions, restaurants and shops.
