This overlook just below Newfound Gap looks east down the Oconaluftee valley, into the blue haze the forest itself helps make. Kuwohi, the park's highest summit, carried the name Clingmans Dome until 2024. Its road is the only built piece of a crest-top Skyway: the Park Service dropped the eastern half, and wilderness advocates stopped the western half in 1935.
The Oconaluftee Valley Overlook is on your left, and half a mile past it, also on the left, just before Newfound Gap, Kuwohi Road climbs to the peak older maps call Clingmans Dome. That's seven miles of road each way plus about an hour on foot, on a steep paved path, open April through late November, weather permitting. The tour goes quiet up there and picks up back on this road, so follow the signs toward Gatlinburg coming down. Kuwohi means mulberry place in Cherokee, a small mystery, because mulberry trees aren't known to grow above about thirty-five hundred feet. The name came back on September eighteenth, twenty twenty-four, when the federal Board on Geographic Names unanimously approved the request of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Kuwohi Road is the only piece ever built of a bigger plan, a Skyway along the whole crest. Three wilderness men stopped the western half in nineteen thirty-five, and that same year helped found the Wilderness Society. That blue haze is mostly the forest's own doing, natural compounds that scatter blue light.
Photo: Scott Basford, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain