Buckhorn Inn

We pulled into Buckhorn Inn a little after eleven at night, which isn't how you're supposed to arrive anywhere. There was a door code out front and a key in an envelope with my name on it, and that was the entire check in. We were hiking Alum Cave up to LeConte Lodge the next morning, and I'll be honest, I picked this place because it was close to the trailhead. That's a bad reason to pick a hotel. It worked out anyway.

Buckhorn has been taking people in since 1938. It sits on twenty five acres up a road most folks drive right past, and from the front porch you're looking straight at the mountain you're about to climb. I've stayed in a lot of places in the Smokies. This is the one I keep thinking about.

Douglas and Audrey Bebb built this place in 1938. They'd come down from Illinois. Doug's parents had been down to see the brand new national park, told the two of them there was something here worth building, and offered to help pay for it. Doug's brother Hubert was an architect and sent down the plans. Local crews put up the lodge and the first two cottages in 1937 and 1938 without electrical power, because there wasn't any yet.

Doug planted more than three thousand hemlocks and white pines across what had been cleared farmland, specifically so that you couldn't see another building from the porch. It worked. He dammed a low spot to make the pond. He found a white dogwood growing on the property that actually had a scent, named it Fragrant Cloud, and patented it.

The inn says it's the oldest place to stay still operating in Sevier County and the third oldest business in Gatlinburg. That's their claim rather than mine, but I haven't seen anybody come forward to argue with it. The Bebbs ran it until 1978. The Young family from Knoxville had it for twenty years after that. Lee and John Mellor have had it since 1998, and Lee is who you'll talk to.

The address is 2140 Tudor Mountain Road, Gatlinburg, Tennessee. From traffic light 3 in Gatlinburg you take Highway 321 north about six miles to Buckhorn Road, which is also Highway 454, then go six tenths of a mile to the sign at Tudor Mountain Road. Downtown Gatlinburg is 5.1 miles behind you and Pigeon Forge is about eight. Knoxville's airport is roughly an hour out.

Gatlinburg's parkway will wear you out. That's not a complaint, it's a scheduling note. Buckhorn is five miles from all of it and feels like a different county.

There are twenty units and they come in four flavors.

Rates are what the inn posts on its own site and they don't swing by season the way most Gatlinburg lodging does. Confirm when you book.

Breakfast is included and it's one seating. Eight to nine thirty, seven days a week, everybody comes down at the same time and sits at the same long table. I know that sounds like a lot to ask of a person in the morning. It's the best thing about the place.

It starts with fruit and muffins that come out of the oven warm, and then you pick one of four things: something sweet like pancakes or French toast or waffles, a special egg dish, eggs however you want them, or cereal. Buttermilk biscuits are nearly always going. We had eggs, bacon, potatoes, fruit, and coffee I'd have gotten up early for, in green mugs, at a table already set for everybody, with Mount LeConte out the window.

Dinner is three courses at a set price, served at seven, by reservation only, and it's open to the public, not only to guests. Forty five dollars a person Sunday through Friday and fifty on Saturday, which includes homemade bread, iced tea, and coffee after. The menu changes every night of the week, so what you get depends on what day you show up.

Call 865-436-4668 to book it. Cancel at least twenty four hours out or you get charged. Tell them ahead if you need vegetarian and they'll handle it. There's a wine list.

They will also put together a sack lunch for twelve dollars if you order it the night before, which is exactly what you want if you're getting on a trail in the morning. I wish I had known that before we hiked.

Twenty five acres of forest and meadow, and a wall of windows in the great room pointed at Mount LeConte. You're seeing all three of LeConte's peaks. It's 6,593 feet, the third highest peak in the park, and the morning after we sat on that porch looking at it we walked up it.

The pond is spring fed, sits below the inn, and has frogs, carp, bass and a pair of mute swans. The self guided nature trail takes one to two hours and the inn describes it as moderately difficult, which I'd say is honest. Trees and shrubs are labeled along the way, including the Fragrant Cloud dogwood.

Near the end of the trail there's Rachael's Labyrinth, a circular path sixty feet across laid out in local fieldstone, named for Dr. Rachael Young from the second family that owned the place. The inn says it's one of the largest meditation labyrinths in the country. I walked it at seven in the morning before anybody else was up and I'm not going to pretend it did nothing for me.

There are three gardens, a library, a terrace with rocking chairs facing south, and a lower common room with coffee and a deck.

Buckhorn sits inside the Great Smoky Mountain Arts and Crafts Community, which is an eight mile loop of more than seventy independent studios, galleries and shops. This isn't a gift shop strip. These are people who make things. You can walk out of the inn and be in it.

The park boundary and the Greenbrier area are about a mile out. Greenbrier is a quiet way into the park that a lot of people miss because it doesn't have a big sign on the parkway. Downtown Gatlinburg is five miles. Pigeon Forge and Dollywood are eight.

And if you're doing what we did, the Alum Cave trailhead up to LeConte Lodge is a straight shot from here. That's a separate guide and a separate pair of legs.