Cades Cove Loop Road in Tennessee

We biked the 11-mile Cades Cove Loop Road on our second day in Tennessee.  This is a beautiful historical area with preserved 19th-century homes, breathtaking mountain views, and lots of wildlife.  It's amazing to look at the terrain map of the cove and its surroundings: it's a wide-open flat space in the middle of an area that's otherwise entirely mountainous.


Horses greet you at the start of the loop.

The views in Cades Cove are breathtaking; it's almost like being in Colorado. Almost.



A great warning sign showing a biker totally eating it.

(video)

You wouldn't know it from the frame grab, but this is a video of some black bears that were foraging for food, totally carefree, right by the loop. There was one momma bear and 4 cubs. They were only a few feet from us and were totally uninterested; they didn't even look in our direction.

This is one of the 19th-century homes in Cades Cove.

A fence and barn by the old house from the previous shot.

Another view of the 19th-century house.


I just really liked this fence, apparently.

This one is actually on the road up to Clingmans Dome, one of the tallest mountains in the state, which we drove later in the day after biking the Cades Cove loop. But the people coming down off the top said you couldn't see anything because of the clouds, so we took some photos from the road on the way down instead.