{"id":147,"date":"2003-11-09T22:43:06","date_gmt":"2003-11-10T03:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2003\/11\/afternoon_hike\/"},"modified":"2003-11-09T22:43:06","modified_gmt":"2003-11-10T03:43:06","slug":"afternoon_hike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2003\/11\/afternoon_hike\/","title":{"rendered":"Afternoon Hike"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I went to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nps.gov\/grsm\/index.htm\">Great Smoky Mountains National Park<\/a> and made the hike up to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.onedayhikes.com\/Hikes.asp?Hikesid=61\">Alum Cave Bluffs<\/a> (follow the link for a tiny picture).  The air was cool but the skies were bright and sunny, affording great views of the surrounding mountains.<br \/>\nAn interesting factoid regarding the bluff&#8217;s history from <i>Hiking Trails of the Smokies<\/i>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>During the Civil War, Confederate Colonel William Thomas, leading a group of soldiers composed mostly of Cherokees, built a road to Alum Cave Bluffs.  Believing the minerals in the bluff, which include sulfides and salt-peter (substances essential to the manufacture of gunpowder), to be a vital strategic resource, he built a small stockade called Fort Harry near the Chimney Tops to protect his crude mine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There apparently aren&#8217;t any records on how much was actually mined there.  But had the course of history run just a <i>little<\/i> bit differently, we might be reading how a bloody showdown at Fort Harry was the pivotal turning point in the Civil War, rather than that little dust-up at Gettysburg.<br \/>\nAnyway, the hike up to Alum Cave Bluffs is a worthwhile one, earning a Resonance thumbs-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2003\/11\/afternoon_hike\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Afternoon Hike\"><p>Today I went to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and made the hike up to Alum Cave Bluffs (follow the link for a tiny picture). The air was cool but the skies were bright and sunny, affording great views of the surrounding mountains. An interesting factoid regarding the bluff&#8217;s history from Hiking Trails of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}