I hiked the Appalachians to connect with nature—here's how

Somewhere in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, 40m below ground, guide Timothy Alva adjusts his flashlight. Stalactites drip, creating pools of light that glitter like jewels. Caverns appear bubble-wrapped, seamed with rainbow streaks of silver, yellow sulphur and red oxide. Apart from the pipistrelle bats, crystal spiders and poisonous salamanders, we’re alone in this strange, lost underworld. The darkness groans.

I tell Timothy it feels like the caves are alive. “They are breathing — through water, air and oxidisation, growing right in front of us,” he replies. Wearing a cowboy hat and inked with knuckle tattoos, the former Everglades boat captain, alligator wrangler, Louisiana kayak guide and ordained minister is Hollywood’s idea of what a caving guide should look like. “Sometimes, when I feel my breath on my skin, I think it’s something else, but everything can be explained.” Ahead, the tight tunnel vanishes into a darker chamber. We stoop, squeeze through a gap and find we’ve been transported into the pages of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I’m in southeastern Tennessee chasing autumnal adventures in and around Chattanooga. In April 2025, it became the US’s first National Park City — one of a small but growing global network of wild urban hubs. The Raccoon Mountain Caverns, five-and-a-half miles of rock tunnels just a 10-minute drive from the centre, are as appropriate an introduction as it gets.

There are around 10,000 cave ecosystems in Tennessee, more than in any other US state, around 7,000 of which are within an hour’s drive of the city limits. It helps that Chattanooga lies at the foot of the Cumberland Plateau, almost the southernmost tip of the Appalachians, occupying a river valley characterised by a fractured symmetry of steep cliffs, tablelands, waterfalls and forests. It’s a place for engaging your senses: hearing rivers splash, trees shake and boots crunch; breathing cool air scented with redbud and maple.

The Raccoon Mountain Caverns offer an alternative view of this landscape, leading explorers through some of North America’s most rugged terrain. On Timothy’s map, there are skull-and-crossbones motifs — sudden drops, dead ends, who knows what — and caves with names like the Birth Canal, Bowel Passage and Bone Scraper. In 1967, country legend Johnny Cash — burdened with a drug and alcohol problem — entered Nickajack Cave, a half-hour drive east of here, intending to commit suicide. He instead experienced a spiritual awakening, an episode that led to him overcoming his addictions, as he later recounted in his autobiography.

“Watch your head on the can opener,” Timothy says, nodding to a sharp-toothed rock as the roof abruptly lowers. Sheet-like flowstone drops off a sheer precipice. Calcite draperies — known as ‘cave bacon’ on account of their white-and-brown bands — take shape. He points out other formations before they ambush us: stone chandeliers the colour of ash, sparkling fists of calcified rock, pitch-black rimstone pools and soaring organ pipes. “You develop a sixth sense down here,” he says.

A taste for green

Timothy is not the only local closely attuned to the natural world. Overseen by the National Park City Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit organisation, the National Park City movement is adopted around the world by grassroot initiatives rethinking how urban areas interact with nature. It has the support of local governments, but it’s driven by communities. Since its launch in southeastern Tennessee, 50 organisations and nonprofits here have partnered in its mission.

“There are other cities that function as gateways to America’s national parks, but we’re not the opening chapter — we’re the novel,” says Brian Smith, project lead of Chattanooga National Park City, the alliance that masterminded the initiative. We meet later that day for a walk beside the Tennessee River, which winds through Downtown Chattanooga. “The initiative started by asking what our city would look like if we applied the ‘leave no trace’ principles and ‘team effort’ stewardship of a US national park to an urban setting. If you consider where we came from, there was a lot we had to change.”

For generations, the Chattanooga Choo Choo train station was a critical hub of freight and passenger rail operations, connecting the Midwest and Deep South, with coke foundries and chemical factories proliferating in its wake. Smog hung heavy in the valley.

Children went to school in white uniforms and returned charcoal grey; headlights were needed at midday. In the late 1960s, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare called the city out as the dirtiest in the country.

Most locals say this reality check kick-started Chattanooga’s pivot towards the environment. Private investment reduced the city’s reliance on the railroads. Pollinator gardens bloomed, the state’s first litter booms (floating barriers) were introduced on historically polluted creeks. All this in walking distance of the revamped Chattanooga Choo Choo, no longer a rail hub but a complex spanning restaurants, honky-tonk bars, a hotel and — of course — green spaces. “Our community feels ownership of our outdoor areas,” says Brian, “and it helps that life here is so connected to nature.”

Up on Lookout Mountain, overlooking Downtown Chattanooga, mist-cloaked forests provide shelter for white-tailed deer and bobcats, while raptors wheel above the escarpment’s sheer cliffs. Along Glen Falls Trail, a mile away, nature leaps to life in successive waterwalls. The Tennessee RiverLine, the longest water trail in the US, which will soon offer 652 miles of kayaking, passes right through the city.

Better still for visitors, an entire tourism industry is springing up around the new designation. Where the steep-sided hills of the Appalachians give way to the city, the Tennessee River offers canoe, kayak and paddleboard launch points. The Chattanooga Public Library has an outdoor section loaning sleeping bags, tents and backpacking gear to inspire back-to-basics adventures. Further afield, the Wauhatchie Pike historic pathway is now home to America’s largest natural urban bouldering park.

“We’re not encouraging people to bike 4,000m mountains,” says Brian, as a group of teenagers cycles past. “We’re educating our community about what’s already here, and making it accessible to everyone.”

Heading for the hills

Part of what’s here is the 2,192-mile Appalachian Trail. Unspooling from nearby Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin in Maine, it’s the world’s longest hiking-only footpath. To complete the 293-mile Tennessee section, blister-footed dawdlers and dreamers must trek through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a stretch that’s widely billed as the trail’s most beautiful.

My own two-day pilgrimage through these woodlands will take me only a fraction of the full distance, but the going isn’t always easy. US author Bill Bryson, who wrote about his failed attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods in 1997, gave up when reaching the national park. With rugged temperate forest and variable elevation gains, the Smokies conjure their own microclimate, and any romanticism about its famously hazy-blue mountains is quickly rebuffed by unpredictable downpours.

They ambush me as I meet Kindel Page from Smoky Mountain Guides for a hike into the backcountry. Though, sporting a parka and worn baseball cap, she seems like she won’t be put off by a little rain. We join the path at Newfound Gap, a half-hour drive from the base-camp town of Gatlinburg, 150 miles from Chattanooga. Our Everest today is Kuwohi, the highest point on the trail at 2,025m.

As we hike the rain-splattered path, Kindel gives a botany masterclass, the shifting light helping her pick out different species. Old man’s beard, a lichen that acts as a natural antibiotic and potent fire starter. Broadleaf plantain, nature’s sticking plaster. She scrapes some bark off a sweet birch and draws it up to my nose; it’s nature’s toothbrush, and smells like mouthwash. “Knowing this stuff brings us back to our origins,” Kindel says. “We were hunter-gatherers. I still am one.”

The trail meanders, with the mountaintops of the Tennessee-North Carolina state line snuffling above the mist, and we rise to a summit plateau. The clouds lull. The air thins. We climb the Kuwohi Observation Tower, amid mountains sacred to the Indigenous Cherokee and Muscogee people, who first shaped the area’s identity. The foliage is a technicolour coat of autumnal colour; there’s a sea of Fraser fir green, but also ripples of marigold and orange. The sky feels enormous.

Finding communion

Of the 14 million annual visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, only 3% stray farther than a mile beyond the roads and into the mountains. You can hike for days along its ravines and river trails in near solitude, passing ghost towns, abandoned logging camps and ramshackle farmsteads marooned in the meadows, left behind by the Cherokee natives, Scots-Irish settlers and loggers who once lived here.

On my last day, on a trail around 30 miles west from the park’s Gatlinburg entrance, I leave the high-altitude ridges for Cades Cove, a low-lying valley. In summer, the glade heaves with drivers following a loop road, but in late autumn, I’m alone on the path. In the midst of the scene are stables and empty pioneer cabins, as well as a white southern gothic Baptist church, weathered and phantom-like.

At its back, I find a neglected upright piano and, on its deck, an open hymn book, its pages turned to He Hideth My Soul. The lyrics, speaking about rivers of pleasure, clefts of rock and the feeling of rising into the clouds, seem to chime with the realities of hiking through the Appalachians. I sit and play for a while, as if in communion with the nature around me, and all those who must have tinkled these out-of-tune ivories over the past century. I hold the last note, allowing it to echo under the worn wooden beams; it aches with melancholy, then I let it go. That’s the way of it, when exploring the Appalachians. They bring you down and raise you up — literally and metaphorically — and haunt your imagination.