ONEIDA, Tenn. John Muir really got around.
The noted conservationist and the founder of the Sierra Club gained fame for his wanderings through the Sierra Nevada high country. He also tramped in 1867 through the Cumberland Plateau of central Tennessee and Kentucky on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico.
Muir wrote of the region: “There is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing over a rocky bed at a moderate inclination.”
Today, the long-distance John Muir National Recreation Trail celebrates that trip — with what some consider one of the best backpacking trails in the Southeast.
The trail wanders 50 miles through the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area with its cliffs, rapids, waterfalls, caves, natural bridges, rockhouses, chimneys and outcroppings that lie along the Cumberland River’s Big South Fork.
It extends an additional 10 miles through adjoining Pickett State Forest and may grow some more.
The up-and-down trail through the Big South Fork runs along the ridgetops and through gorges with a variety of terrains, ranger Howard Duncan said.
It’s a great on-foot trip, if you have four or five days.
In addition to the rock formations, there are old pioneer homesteads, tumbling streams and a lot of very nice scenery along the main 600-foot-deep canyon.
The 125,310-acre area straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky line west of Oneida, Tenn., about an hour west of Interstate 75.
The trail is marked by blue silhouettes of John Muir himself.
One place where you can access the John Muir Trail is at the park’s Leatherwood Ford Trailhead, a put-in spot for paddlers and a popular place for day hikers off state Route 297.
You can head north along the river to Angel Falls, a four-mile round-trip hike along a section of the John Muir Trail. It is one of the most hazardous rapids on the Big South Fork.
The trail provides a cliff-top overlook of Angel Falls. It is a 5.6-mile, round-trip hike with a 500-foot climb.
The John Muir Trail continues north past Angel Falls and then west for 40 miles through some of the most isolated backcountry in the park.
It turns to the west near Station Camp, about in the center of the sprawling park.
The western terminus is just west of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Tennessee’s Pickett State Forest.
About 10 miles of the trail are complete on the state land and another 8Z\x miles are planned — 2Z\x miles have been cleared — by the Tennessee Division of Forestry. At Leatherwood Ford, you can cross the Big South Fork on a low-level wooden bridge. Go south about 2.3 miles to the Oneida & Western Railroad trestle that dates from 1915. The trail continues to the nearby Devil’s Den rock shelter where it ends.
Plans call for extending the trail further south: first to the park’s Honey Creek area, where a seven-mile section of trail connects with the Burnt Mill Bridge and later another nine miles to the Peters Bridge area at the extreme southern end of the park.
When completed, that will create a John Muir Trail of 66 miles on the federal Big South Fork lands, Duncan said.
Another section of the John Muir Trail is complete in southwest Tennessee: a 20-mile section along the Hiawassee River from Reliance to Farner in the Cherokee National Forest in Polk County.
There are two other long-distance options at Big South Fork: the 257-mile Sheltowee Trace National Recreation Trail and the 26-mile Kentucky Trail that can be accessed from the Peters Mountain Trailhead in the Kentucky part of the Big South Fork park.
For information on the park, contact the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, 4564 Leatherwood Road, Oneida, TN 37841; 931-879-3625 or 423-286-7275. Its Internet site is www.nps.gov/biso.
