Why Great Smoky Mountains Is More Dangerous Than You Think

A 16-year-old girl stepped off a school field trip bus in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1976. Within 45 minutes she was gone. Fifty years of searching has produced not a single thread of clothing, not a fragment of bone, not one verifiable trace. She was not the first. She was not the last. And the park has never once advertised what it keeps. More people visit the Smokies every year than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Zion combined. More people have died inside its boundaries than in any other national park in the eastern United States. The two facts are not unrelated. #GreatSmokyMountains #NationalParks #MissingPersons #Hiking #TrailSafety #Appalachian #WildernessHazards #TrueStory #Outdoors #Survival #NaturalDisasters #hikingsafety