Now that almost everyone is going to the beaches and enjoying the sun, the truth is that there are many woman who, just like me, also love to travel to the mountains and enjoy the amazing views that you get from there! Below is another msnbc.com article which shows why choosing the mountains is also a good choice:
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GATLINBURG, Tenn. - The ancient blue-green mountains with breathtaking vistas and distinctive mists are home to salamanders and black bears, 19th century log cabins, rippling streams, waterfalls and more than 800 miles of trails, including a large section of the Georgia-to-Maine Appalachian Trail.
It's little wonder the Great Smoky Mountains attracts more than 9 million visitors a year, twice as many as any other national park in the United States.
"No matter what your interest is, everybody that visits here can make a personal connection in one way or another," said Ann Froschauer, who works with key park support groups, the Friends of the Smokies and the Great Smoky Mountain Association.
"That's why we have folks who come back year after year. They bring their kids and their grandkids. Because something here touched them."The 520,000-acre preserve straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, named by the Cherokee Indians as "The Land of Blue Smoke" for its signature natural mist, marks its 75th birthday on June 15.
Featured events on the anniversary weekend include a Knoxville Symphony concert with U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander playing piano among the old cabins and barns in pastoral Cades Cove near Townsend. There also will be a groundbreaking for a $2.5 million Oconaluftee visitor center in Cherokee, N.C., that will highlight Cherokee Indian and Appalachian culture.
A Sept. 2 ceremony at Newfound Gap will mark President Franklin D. Roosevelt's original dedication of the park "to the free people of America" in 1940. President Barack Obama has been invited.
Dozens of related activities are occurring throughout the year in surrounding communities — museum exhibitions, parades, family reunions and a Dolly Parton-penned musical about the Smokies at her Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, with CD profits benefiting the park."Our anniversary has been a reason for so many people to pause and think back," Smokies Superintendent Dale Ditmanson said. "It has been a time of reflection (and) a jumping off point."
Don Shoulders of Goodlettsville, Tenn., remembers the first time he saw the Smokies in 1936.
The Depression-era farmboy was barely 17 when he signed up with hundreds of other young men in FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps. As many as 4,000 at a time would work in the Smokies, laying the foundation for the park by erecting stone bridges and buildings, cutting trails and planting trees.
"It is the first time I heard of the Smokies," the 90-year-old Shoulders said. CCC examiners in Nashville warned him about ridge-running in the mountains. "They said one leg would be that much shorter than the other when you come out," he laughed.After a long trip by train and truck, Shoulders and his comrades arrived at the former logging camp of Tremont in the middle of the night.
"We had some boys that were just so homesick they was a-crying. I felt like I had done the wrong thing ... until I woke up the next morning, and I said, 'I am in a new world!'"
Shoulders would spend three years in Tremont, earning $30 a month — $25 of which was sent home. He dug trails and performed other necessary work, including as latrine orderly. He ate well, gained weight — 127 pounds when he arrived, 150 pounds when he left — and developed an enduring fondness for the Smokies.
When he finally returned 27 years later, he said the park had been transformed, the forest restored. "It was a different place. It really changed." He's been back with his family every year since.In his 1940 dedication, Roosevelt said Americans had "used up or destroyed much of our natural heritage just because that heritage was so bountiful."
In the Smokies, he said, "are trees ... that stood before our forefathers ever came to this continent; there are brooks that still run as clear as on the day the first pioneer cupped his hand and drank from them.
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"In this park, we shall conserve these trees, ... the trout and the thrush for the happiness of the American people."
In fact, the Smokies had been heavily logged by timber companies, muddying the streams and leaving only about a quarter of the old-growth forest intact. Boar from nearby game preserves moved in, nonnative rainbow trout were stocked in streams and a blight soon killed off the massive American Chestnut trees that once covered 40 percent of the forest.
Park managers continue to battle these issues, while new pests threaten hemlocks and dogwoods and decimate the firs in the park's Nova Scotia-like higher elevations.Still, Supervisory Ranger Kent Cave said, "It is a testament to the regenerative powers of Mother Nature that the forest has regrown. It looks, I am sure, similar to the way it did when Native Americans used the land or the first European settlers came."
