The Dark Side of the Great Smoky Mountains The Missing and Mysterious Disappearances in the park

The Great Smoky Mountains, what a beautiful place, nature's at it's finest, you can see for miles, mountain range after mountain range, it is so vast and so beautiful, all the mountain streams, the peak mountains in the distance, it is just magnificent. Now here the park is 520,000 acres, that's equal to 800 square miles, and with the surrounding national forest, you could easily triple the size of the wilderness in these mountain range. Some of the parks that national forest around it is Cherokee National Forest and Natalia National Forest, just to name a few of them. And you can see, here's a geological map, just a 3D map, of just how vast, how many hollers, how many ridges, how many deep crevasses and canyons and creeks, streams, that's running out of these mountains. And I would say it'd be safe to say, there's some places that man has never stepped a foot on, but it's so beautiful and it's so vast. This country and all these mountains and all the surrounding mountains, all this was Cherokee land. And I reckon they called the mountain, the place of smoke. Here's the Cherokee name. These Cherokee hunted, fought for thousands of years here. Now the settlers and white men coming here in the late 1700s, they started setting up farms and just pioneering living off the land, trying to scratch out a living. And from there, they started starting little communities, but it was a hard life. And they started exploiting the timbers, the natural resources of the park. I reckon they had chestnut oaks in here, 300 foot tall, and they really hauled them out of here. And these logging communities set up, was Elkmont, Tremont, Greenbrier, just to name a few, there's Cosby, Gatlinburg, they hauled them out of here. And the park acquired this land about 1933, I guess, and they opened it up as a park in 1934. Now here, Franklin Theodore Roosevelt opened the park up in the ceremonies in 1934. Don't know how many attended. Now today, the park went from, I guess, 40, 50, 60 years ago, from a few hundred a year to a few thousand. And about 20, 25 years ago, it was about 2 to 3 million. Now today, I'm told that it's 10 million visitors a year, 10 million visitors. I've also learned that you could take Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Yosemite, and combine all them visitors together, and they still cannot equal what the Great Smoky Mountains has in visitors every year. Of course, I can't blame them. It's such a beautiful park, but it has its downfalls. Traffic. They've been working on roads around here for 30 years, and it's still bumper to bumper. I've seen it dead stop from Gatlinburg back to 407 exit at I-40. That's a good 12 to 15 miles away. Here's Newfound Gap. A lot of visitors come and go there, right on the very top of the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee. A lot of hikers come through here. I reckon the Appalachian Trail passes right through here. Here's Clemson's Dome. It's about a half a mile to walk in the parking lot. Beautiful sight. You could see for miles and miles. Here's the tunnel to Cage Cove. I reckon it's just been newly repaired and upgraded. And here's Cage Cove. If you've been to Cage Cove, you know what you're seeing here. It's bumper to bumper, and if they see some kind of bear or deer or something, it's dead stop. You don't even know what's going on a mile ahead of you. A lot of people don't ever see no wild animals. This is the only place they ever see them. Can't say that I blame them. Beautiful wild animals. Yes, the Smokies are beautiful. This park, what people don't know, it has a dark and mysterious side to it. It's still wilderness, and a lot of strange disappearances have happened in this park over the years. There may be 10,000 visitors come in here, and only a handful go on trail. All right, here's a map of the United States. It shows all the missing people throughout the country in national parks, and you can see that's a lot of people. And here's an area that we've been talking about, the Great Smoky Mountains, where North Carolina meets Tennessee, right there along the boundary line, that mountain range, and a lot of people have been found and been missing, some good, some bad, but there's still five people missing to this day, and you can see this mountain range. It's so vast. Some places are inaccessible. So many hollers, so many crevices, so many canyons, so many ridges, and I would say that some places have never been stepped in to this day. Like I said, there's a few people goes on these trails, probably a few hundred or maybe a thousand or so, but only a handful goes off trail, and off that hop trail bunch, some places are just inaccessible. Sometimes they don't come back, and you can see these woods when you get off the beaten path. Nature's unforgiving if you're not prepared, and some of them get caught off guard, or have an accident, or get lost. Anything's possible. These woods are dark and mysterious, especially in these big old mountains where the sun probably don't hit you for an hour a day, if that's off of canopy over the trees. Now here is the list of the five people that's still missing to this day. That's Dennis Martin, age 6, 1969. Trinity Gibson, age 16, 1976. Thelma Melton, age 58, 1981. Christopher Cessna, age 45, 2011. Derek Lipkin, age 24, 2012. These five are still missing to this day, not a trace of them can be found. It's like they just, they was with a group of people, and they were just gone for a second or a minute or two, separated, and they disappeared. Some is logical, but most of them just don't make sense. Like they just disappeared off the face of the earth. Here's a map of where they was last seen at, where they disappeared. Dennis Martin disappeared up there on Spencer's Field on Appalachian Trail. He was playing in front of his parents and went behind a bush for a minute, but didn't come back out. And Trinity Gibson, she was going with a school group, Andrew's Ball, from the Cremlins Dome parking lot, and she got separated from her group just a few minutes ahead of them, and she just disappeared, never to be seen again. Emma Martin, walking with her friends in the Deep Springs area, got separated from her friends just for a minute, disappeared, never to be found. Christopher Cessna, they found his car in the parking lot at Newfoundland Gap. On the trail a little bit, they found his backpack, just like he took it off, just disappeared, walked away, no trace of it. And that Derek Lipkin, he was at Newfoundland Gap, parking lot, walked off on the trail, and never to be seen again. I couldn't tell you what happened to these five people, I sure would like to know, so the families would sure like. Again, as you can see how vast these mountains are, if you just take the time to really look at some of these maps, it's not just a little walk in a city park, this is wilderness, people. So if you get off on one of them ridges somewhere, and get down where you may walk 10 mile out of your way, if you can walk it, it's some steep country. We're going to look at some possibilities here of what could happen. Most of the time, people just get lost and exhausted, and according to what time of year it is, they get hypothermia, and they just pass away. But some cases, it's not that way. Some just cannot be explained, they just simply disappear for no good reason, and they've searched with dogs, thousands of searchers. Now here, you've probably heard of David Pelas, he's a real expert on missing, especially in these national parks. He's done a lot of investigation, so if you've not seen any of his kind of work, check him out. He's got a book series on 411 missing, a lot of stories about the smokies, people missing, and all around the country. So check him out. Right here, this is some, there's things in these mountains, there's things in the ocean that people have not seen, and they're just eventually finding it, and still you'll never see. And I'm still a firm believer in these wilderness states, things that don't want to be seen are in these mountains, hid. The Cherokee called them the sloping giant. Now I can't pronounce the word, I'm not even going to try to, so they believe in them too, because there's a lot of history and stories about these Indians seeing these creatures too. So anything's possible in these mountains, in these wildernesses. These mountains are vast, a lot of them unexplored. I thank y'all for watching, and I'll see you next time.