6 replies to this topic

[GoVols]

The GoVols crew will be camping at Cades Cove CG inside the Great Smoky Mountains N.P. October 16-20. If you are in the area, stop by site C19 and sit a spell! Cades Cove, despite the lack of hookups, is one of our favorite places to camp.

Sorry we'll miss the fall rally the following weekend, but the dates didn't line up with our kids' fall break.

[Crawfish]

JT, we are planning on coming in on the 18th. We will try our best to come and see yall before you leave.


Leon

[Mrs CampingNut]

Wish we could go. I've always wanted to try camping at Cade's Cove. Any tips for dry camping?


Carmen

[GoVols]

Mrs CampingNut, on Oct 5 2009, 02:23 PM, said:

Wish we could go. I've always wanted to try camping at Cade's Cove. Any tips for dry camping?


Carmen

Use your power sparingly and have good batteries; that's pretty much it. The OEM light bulbs that Keystone uses in the fixtures are 18 watt bulbs. That's not an issue if you are plugged into AC power, but on battery power it's a huge problem. That's 1.5 amps per bulb and too many too long will suck the life out of the batts. As it happens, those bulbs are the same as the little low wattage landscape bulbs you can find in the outdoor lighting section at Home Depot and Lowes. I pulled all of the stock bulbs and replaced them with either 4W, 7W or 11W bulbs. The lower wattage bulbs give off plenty of light and save a tremendous amount of power that needs to be available for the water pump and the furnace blower (if you need heat).

I also invested in a set of six volt golf cart batteries that will give me a lot of storage capacity and can be drawn down deeply without damaging the life of the batteries. Some folks use a portable generator for providing power needs, but I don't see the need to invest in the $$ for a generator, plus I can stay in the "generator free" section of the CG and not have to listen to all those generators running. We've done 5 days dry camping at Cades Cove before with nighttime lows in the 20s and the batteries lasted just fine.

The thing probably missed the most while dry camping is the microwave and the electric drip coffee pot, but we can work around both of those.

[Contender*]

We spent a week in our hybrid back at the end of July. It got chilly at night even then. We only used the lights when we had to get though in the night. The rest of the time we had a small coleman lantern (the ones with the baseball sized globe) for light. The most aggravation IMO was the fact that we had a small fridge running on gas and had to keep running to the CG store to buy Ice for the coolers. Next time I will plan meals around things that don't have to be kept cool. CC is a great campground but a little 120 volt would be nice, showers in the bathrooms would be even better. Other than that I can't complain.

[GoVols]

We had a great time camping at Cades Cove, despite the chilly weather. Highs in the mid 40s mostly, nightly temps in the lower 30s or upper 20s. Not much color in the trees at lower elevations, there is some color above 3000' or so. We were treated to the earliest snowfall we had ever seen: it snowed about 3 inches above 3500' elevation Saturday night/Sunday morning, leaving the Smokies crest capped white the next day. It was really a beautiful sight. We dared to get into the traffic and drive up to Newfound Gap to see for ourselves. (The road was opened around 10 am Sunday to traffic.) For those of you familiar with the park, the snow line was below the level of the Chimneys by several hundred feet. On our drive up to the Gap, along with the throngs of Gatlinburg gawkers, we passed, curiously enough, 6 to 8 abandoned motorcycles all covered with snow. (I assume the road became to treacherous for the riders at some point during the night.) By the time we got to the top at Newfound Gap, it was 26 degrees, covered in clouds, and a wind blowing at 20 mph that cut right through you. The roads were ice covered and treacherous up there, and I was surprised that they had opened the road. The cold wind made it extremely uncomfortable, so we only threw a couple of snowballs at each other before heading back down again. On the way down we noticed no traffic coming up, only later to find out that they closed the road again right after we started up!

The new Trojan batteries did great, despite the fact that they have not been cycled very much and are not at full capacity yet. They kept the furnace, water pump and lights burning for four nights/days in chilly weather. Despite the lack of hookups, Cades Cove CG is one of our favorite places to camp, and we'll be back soon.

 October_Smokies_Snow_compressed.jpg (114.09K)
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[Mrs CampingNut]

Cool picture! Do you have any of the campground? One of these days we're going to go . . . (my grandfather was born there . . . and then worked at the mill later in life).


Carmen