Exploring at Tuckaleechee Caverns

Vicki & the boys @Tuckaleechee
Visitor Center

If you are up for a moderate adventure on your trip to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, you may want to set aside some time visit the Tuckaleechee Caverns.

For our family, we can only take so much of the Parkway drama in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. So on our second day at The Preserve Resort near Townsend, I pulled up Google Places on my iPad.

(Note: If you haven't tried Google Places, it is a great location-based mobile site / app that allows you to find nearby attractions that may wind up being hidden gems. Gotta love mobile technology.)

Look close: Can you see the woman
in a flowing dress (dead center)

Tuckaleechee Caverns is about a 10 minute drive away from where we are staying and maybe 25 minutes from Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg.

Moderate adventure
We've been to a couple of cave tours in our day, namely Ohio Caverns in East Liberty, Ohio, but nothing that compares to the scale of Tuckaleechee caverns. It's hard to believe this cave was found decades ago by bored 6 and 8-year-old (!).

They say this is about
30,000 yrsold. No touchy!

You know right from the start you are in for a treat when you have to walk down 87 pretty narrow steps to get into the cave. Oh, and that's after you walk into the basement of the Tuckaleechee Caverns visitor center.  There are two main areas of the Caverns. The first is an up and down hike that will take you into a vast chamber that measures 300 x 300 x 400 feet. You could fit a football field in this chamber, up, down and all around.  In here, they shut off the lights to show you just how dark that dark can be. Hard to imagine those little boys explored all of that area with small lanterns!

This is the huge cavern. See the
little man in the middle. It's about
300 x 300 x 400 ft

There are a number of gorgeous rock formations to take in as part of the trail. The imagination doesn't have to run too wild to see things in the shadows, but you never feel like you are alone or in danger. The tour is well lit, but you will want to wear your tennis shoes and hang onto the rails.

The second part of the tour is much more flat and takes you to several waterfalls and springs. At one point, they even let you take a sip of the water that is running in the underground stream that help create these caverns. BEST WATER EVER!

Great Value
Like most attractions in the Smokies that aren't in the National Park, you have to pay-to-see. But this is a pretty good value. For $81, our family of five took the tour. It last over an hour and fifteen minutes and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it.  Another perk is that on a hot summer day or a cold winter day, it's a moderate 58 degrees Fahrenheit all the time.

Recommendation
Our family gave the Tuckaleechee Caverns "thumbs up" all the way around. It was a great little "adventure" to begin our week of vacation in the Smokies. We'd recommend it to families that are mobile. There are so many steps that this can't be recommended for folks who are immobile. Definitely no wheelchair access. We saw many families with small kids and it didn't seem to be a problem.