To view various lovely, natural, historic and special Tennessee sights—including a preserved piece of homestead history, a serene passage alongside a mountain stream and a unique, magical-looking hillside springhouse—take the Twin Creeks Trail, just outside of Gatlinburg.
Connecting the Ogle Place homestead site within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Gatlinburg’s Mynatt Park, the 2.2-mile trail travels in between two gurgling creeks, as its name suggests.
In the late 1800s, Noah “Bud” Ogle constructed a cabin, a barn and a mill in the hills just outside of Gatlinburg. The structures still stand today, protected for national park visitors to experience and commemorated on the National Register of Historic Places.
A 0.7-mile nature loop trail travels around this Ogle Place area and, spurring off from this loop, the Twin Creeks Trail heads downhill to the north towards Gatlinburg, making a peaceful, fairly level walk alongside, naturally, a couple of creeks.
Portions of the trail were a little soupy in places on a cool December day, but overall the trail is in good shape and easy to navigate, containing a small bridge crossing one of the creeks at one point and a few other points that necessitate crossing a stream over rocks.
The creeks quietly flow alongside the trail, which sits not far from Cherokee Orchard Road within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The remnants of an old chimney, or a rocky structure of some sort, stands near the creek at one point. Other stone walls still stand in other places, which, according to another hiker, served as property boundaries for families in the area predating the formation of the national park in the 1930s.
Approximately a mile from the Ogle Place, the Twin Creeks Trail crosses a paved roadway that leads to an area of the park containing a research center that includes the Twin Creeks Science and Education Center and various National Park Services Natural Resources Center buildings—where fire prevention, nature preservation and other scientific work is carried out—as well as picnic pavilions and parking areas. Discover Life in America, a nonprofit dedicated to discovering and understanding biological diversity in the Smokies, has placed its headquarters within this Twin Creeks area as well.
Carved into the hillside directly behind the Discover Life in America building sits a unique park attraction.
A stone arch supports an opening in the hillside leading to a wonderfully designed rock springhouse still flowing with mountain spring water, a unique structure not necessarily labeled and promoted as an official national park tourist attraction but a lovely sight that park visitors have dubbed the “House of the Fairies.”
A rock staircase leads to the top of this structure, where visitors can imagine settlers from long ago retrieving their clean water from the area.
Heading back to the Twin Creeks Trail, hikers can choose to continue on the trail for another approximate mile to arrive at the Gatlinburg city limit and Mynatt Park, an area with basketball and tennis courts and fishing access on Le Conte Creek, or head back to the Ogle Place.
In total, the Twin Creeks Trail journey—all the way from the Ogle Place, passing by the science center and the Fairy House, onto Mynatt Park and back—is a 4.5-mile trek, with some gentle elevation changes at points but a fairly easy degree of hiking difficulty and plenty of Smoky Mountain flora and fauna to view.
(Note: as of 2023, a parking tag is required to park anywhere within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; the cost for tags is $5 a day or $15 for a week.)
Ogle Place Parking Area
Cherokee Orchard Road, Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Mynatt Park
622 Historic Nature Trail, Gatlinburg, Tennessee
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Photos by Sarah Mayo
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