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Water
Falls on Motor Nature Trail.
There are 3
beautiful water falls that can be seen while on the Roaring
Forks Motor Trail. The first you come to on the motor
nature trail is "Rainbow Falls" which is 5.2 miles
round trip (moderate in difficulty to hike).
"Grotto Falls" wound be the next and it is 7 miles
round trip (an easier hike but a little longer) and the last
is "Thousand Drips Falls" which can be seen from the
road is the smallest but still worth stopping to look at.
More
Hiking
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A True example of wilderness and frontier
life awaits visitors mere blocks away from downtown Gatlinburg on the Roaring
Fork Motor Trail. This 6-mile auto loop travels through time, beginning in
modern Gatlinburg and moving back to early 19th-century homesteads and finally
regressing to primal, unspoiled nature.
The trip begins on Cherokee Orchard Road.
In the 1920s and 30s, this area was once a 796-acre commercial orchard and
nursery with over 6.000 fruit trees. A short three miles later stands Noah
"Bud" Ogle's Place, located at the end of Cherokee Orchard and the
beginning of the one-way motor loop. The Ogle homestead beautifully illustrates
pioneer engineering -- this was one of the few area homes of the time with
running water, pumped naturally into the house via log troughs from a nearby
spring.
Part of the motor trail follows the
original road bed which was hewed with picks and shovels in 1850. Like many old
roads, it took the path of least resistance by 
way of the creek. The wagon
passage served as an access route to White Oak Flats (now Gatlinburg) for the 25
families carving an existence out of these heavily forested hillsides. Three of
their homesteads lie along the roadway -- those of Jim Bales, Ephraim Reagan and
Alfred Reagan. Of the many areas settled in the mountains, Roaring Fork
was one of the most unforgiving, largely due to the boulder fields which made
farming extremely difficult.
Trails to three dramatically different
waterfalls begin on the motor loop. Thousand Drips Falls, a small but
nonetheless spectacular waterfall, can be seen from the road near the end of the
trip; these thin streams of water have been cutting away at the bedrock for
centuries.
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