We’re talking about a vacation this summer so we can plan ahead. My mother (who will pay for it) said she’d love to go to Yellowstone, but it looks like it’s about a 24-hour drive for us. Still, I like the idea of going to a national park. We’re in Indiana, so this image shows about the limits of where we’re willing to drive. Maybe 14-15 hours at most, which puts most of the ones in the image in range.
However-
• We’ve already been to Indiana Dunes and Gateway Arch.
• My daughter is scared of caves, so Mammoth Cave is out.
Out of the rest, which would you most recommend so I can suggest it to my mother?
Is there anything not in Indiana that is within this area that you think is more worth visiting than a national park that also would take a decent amount of time to visit and see different things? (Not a city, obviously.)
Any advice appreciated. Thanks!
Shenandoah and the Great Smokey mountains.
Drive the blue ridge parkway. it’s about 4 days with plenty of great sights off the side of the road.
Breaks interstate Park between WV and KY is pretty nice. I also very, very highly recommend smoky mountains, I live in the region and have gone every year. Ik you said no cities but Gatlinburg area can be nice to check out after the trip if you wanna see Smoky Mountain Knife Works and all the small businesses in the rural parts of the mountains.
+1 for Smoky Mtns. So much to explore, Clingmans Dome, waterfalls, elk, bears, restaurants close by, but you can get as far away from the tourist-ty stuff as you like. Secluded cabins to downtown hotels. Dollywood for the kids is good. I live in Georgia, but try to get up there with the family every year or two. Also Smoky mountain knife works is worth it if you’re into knives, outdoors, camping…
It’s looking the most promising right now just due to all the things to do in Gatlinburg as well. We can’t help it, we enjoy a good tourist trap.
The Artisan’s Market is worth going to Gatlinburg, but avoid the main strip of the city unless you’re looking to eat. There’s maybe 4 unique shops, the rest are the exact same touristy shit under a different name.
The Knife Works will be busy, also. It doesn’t slow down. Parking will be ass. It’s totally worth it just to go into the downstairs Relic Room.
If you’re willing to go as far as Kentucky or West Virginia anyway, you should consider the Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone in KY, or the Spruce Knob/Seneca Rocks area in WV. Neither are national parks – they’re both national forests.
Both will be considerably less touristy and less crowded than (at least the popular) national parks, and you don’t have to pay just to get in, either. These two areas have some of the most bodacious geology on display on the East Coast, in my opinion, and if you’re into that sort of thing it’s well worth checking out.
The heyday of the Seneca Rocks region seems to have passed and getting accommodation there that’s not camping is trickier than it was a few decades ago, since most of the motels and hotels around the region have folded. But you can rent cabins if you plan in advance from various outfits, and there are two quite nice national forest camp sites there plus oodles of commercial/independent ones. Seneca Rocks itself is a quite striking geological feature you can hike up and stand on top of, and Spruce Knob is just a hop, skip, and a jump away and is the highest point in WV with some great and very easily accessible views from the top. Don’t forget to stop by Yocum’s general store and pet the cats when you’re there.
Dispersed camping is no longer allowed within the Seneca Rocks/Spruce Knob sphere of influence, but it is in the rest of the adjacent greater Monongahela National Forest, including in the Dolly Sods wilderness if you’re into that sort of thing. Backpacking in Dolly Sods is quite possibly the best way to see the most varied terrain anywhere east of the Mississippi within the span of a weekend and without owning a private jet. The north, east, south, and west extremities of it may as well be on different continents; it’s pretty wild.
Dispersed camping is allowed in Daniel Boone if you go there. You have to buy a permit to leave your car anywhere overnight to go backpacking but it’s only a couple of bucks. The Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone has some incredible sandstone formations including massive arches (some of which you can climb), shelter caves, cliffs, and overlooks. It’s also home to the Nada Tunnel which is pretty cool but maybe not so appealing to people who are afraid of caves because it’s basically a cave with a one lane road you can drive straight through. (It was actually originally a railway tunnel. I cannot possibly conceive of what it must have been like to cram a coal burning steam locomotive through that tiny passage, and if you see it you’ll know why. But that’s what they did back in the day.)
Civilized accommodations are easier to come by there including plenty of cabins and motels, and also hotels you can find near the interstate. If you’re into rock climbing there are also a ton of climbing routes all over the Red River Gorge.
Forget Yellowstone. Yellowstone is so popular and yet so fragile and so dangerous that the entire place is on lockdown. You spend your entire stay there on rails, pretty much literally. Everything is boardwalks and pavement and everything else that isn’t is cordoned off. Yes, this is so dumbasses cannot fall into geothermal features and be boiled alive. But it also has the net effect of causing you to take the exact same route in the exact same way and take the exact same pictures that everyone else already has. So you can have the same experience by just finding some rando’s Flickr album or whatever and looking at their pictures, because they’ll be just the same as yours. Plus the whole place stinks. Sulfur, don’t you know.
Oh, and you get to contend with access roads clogged by all the dimwits from the midwest who stop dead in the middle of everything to try to fit baby bison into their minivans, or whatever the fuck else. I went once and that was enough. I came, I saw, I bought a mug. I have no desire to go back. (Nearby Shoshone National Forest, however, is friggin’ awesome. So is Big Horn. Be sure to check out Shell Falls while you’re there and annoy your nearest creationist.)
Thanks. I’m doing some research now. Daniel Boone we could probably do over a long weekend, so that could be a separate trip. Seneca Rocks looks really beautiful in photos, but I’m not convinced there would be enough to do there to sustain a week’s vacation. As far as a cabin, my daughter always balks at renting one when we’ve suggested in the past for some reason. I don’t know why. We did it at a nearby state park when she was younger and it was fine, so I don’t know what her deal is there.
If you wanted to extend a Red River Gorge trip there’s some interesting Civil War era stuff in Winchester and Lexington. Fort Boonesborough was rebuilt as a Civil War fort and they do history presentations and era accurate crafting demonstrations. They have a working blacksmith, a soap maker, that kind of thing. The Henry Clay Estate is interesting and the Cassius Clay Estate (the abolitionist, General, and Diplomat not the boxer) is great. There’s also the Kentucky Horse Park and Keeneland. You will also be passing through the Bourbon Trail if you’re driving down from Indiana and by Big Bone Lick if you’re coming down 65.
As someone that has been to the tops of Cloud Splitter, Grays Arch, Chimney Rock, Half Moon, Indian Staircase, and dozens of others I cannot remember at the moment, Red River Gorge is the single best place in all of Kentucky.
I would go as far as it’s the only reason why Kentucky should continue to exist at all.
I would suggest Shenandoah National Park. Partly for the beauty of the park itself, and partly because the drive from Indiana will go through some gorgeous terrain. I would suggest taking route 33 through Wayne National forest in Ohio. You can stop in Athens as a halfway point, it’s a picturesque little college town nestled in the hills.
If you’re going by Athens anyways, you should definitely check out Hocking Hills! It’s a very pretty state park with some fantastic waterfalls.
My wife and I have been to Athens because my brother went to school at OU and I also know southern Ohio because I went to a training school in Chillicothe. We also just drove through northern Ohio to take a trip to Niagara Falls. I don’t know if we’ve had enough Ohio yet or not.
Fair enough, if you end up going that way anyhow, it might be worth taking route 7 along the river. It’s minimal Ohio and a very pretty drive.
Note on Yellowstone, Grand Teton is just south of it, and is much smaller, but significantly more dramatic (If you expect to summit anything there without a ski lift, good luck).
As for the east coast, New River Gorge WV is very active with guided activities, last I checked. One of the good places for rafting, also the Greenbank National Radio Observatory is within a days drive. If the Virginia(s) is your direction, in addition to the national parks, you also have the estates of some of americas founding fathers in the area, along with old battlefields that are open to the public, if history is on the menu. I would argue that the best park for hiking on the US east coast is White Mtn. State Forest in NH. Middle of ski country for the winter and summer is peak hiking for the best section of the AT (the Presidentials will kick you and your cars ass, Mt. Washington is up there and you can drive to the weather facility at the top)
