Great Smoky Mountains National Park Trivia
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97 free Great Smoky Mountains National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Great Smoky Mountains National Park trivia quiz covers the most visited national park in the United States, straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina line along the crest of the Appalachians. Questions range across the peaks (Kuwohi, Mount Le Conte, Mount Guyot), Cades Cove, Newfound Gap, the Appalachian Trail, the waterfalls and the extraordinary biodiversity: 1,900 black bears, 30-odd salamander species, 1,500 flowering plants and the synchronous fireflies of Elkmont. There is plenty of history too: the Cherokee name for the range, the loggers who took two-thirds of the virgin forest, the Knoxville woman whose Yellowstone trip started the park movement, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s $5 million, the families evicted from Cades Cove, Franklin Roosevelt's 1940 dedication and the 2016 wildfires. There are also a few practical questions on entrances, roads and the parking tag. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a car game on Newfound Gap Road or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or National Park Service pages and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our US National Parks and Yellowstone quizzes next.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Unlike most big US national parks, Great Smoky Mountains National Park has never charged visitors what?
An entrance fee
An entrance fee has never been charged: when Tennessee handed the main road over the mountains to the park in 1951, the deed barred tolls on it, and federal law rules out entrance fees where a park's main road must stay toll-free.
Q 02Among US national parks, the Great Smoky Mountains holds which record?
Most visited
Most visited by a wide margin: the park logged about 12 million visits in 2024, so it is almost always busy, with trailhead car parks often full between 9 am and 2 pm.
Q 03What happened to Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies, in 2024?
Its Cherokee name was restored
Its Cherokee name was restored: the US Board on Geographic Names approved Kuwohi in September 2024 after the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians applied for the change and the Park Service backed it.
Q 04The name Clingmans Dome honoured Thomas Clingman, who later became what?
A Confederate general
A Confederate general: Thomas Clingman was a US senator when the peak was named for him in 1859, was expelled from the Senate for siding with the South and became a brigadier general in 1862.
Q 05LeConte Lodge, just below the summit of Mount Le Conte, holds which record in the eastern United States?
Highest guest lodge
Highest guest lodge: it sits at about 6,400 feet and began as a tent camp in 1925; because no road climbs the mountain, every guest still has to hike up to stay the night.
Q 06Which pack animals carry fresh supplies up to LeConte Lodge, which no road reaches?
Llamas
Llamas climb the Trillium Gap Trail three times a week with the lodge's fresh supplies; they took over the job from horses and mules in the 1980s.
Q 07The Cherokee name for the Smokies, Shaconage, refers to what colour of smoke?
Blue
Blue smoke: the haze behind both the Cherokee and the English name is no smoke at all but a natural mist given off by the dense vegetation.
Q 08With 31 species, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is nicknamed the world capital of which animals?
Salamanders
Salamanders thrive here because the cool, wet forests suit amphibians that take in water through their skin; five of the world's families live in the park, and the red-cheeked salamander lives nowhere else.
Q 09What makes up roughly 85 percent of a Smokies black bear's diet?
Plants, berries and nuts
Plants, berries and nuts make up most of what the park's roughly 1,900 black bears eat; acorns and other nuts matter most in autumn, when the animals fatten up for winter.
Q 10Crowds gather near Elkmont in the Smokies each late spring to watch which insect put on a natural light display?
Synchronous firefly
The synchronous firefly, Photinus carolinus, flashes in unison for about two weeks around early June; so many people come that the park hands out its parking passes for the show by lottery.
Q 11What is the busiest spot in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a cleared valley ringed by an 11-mile one-way loop road?
Cades Cove
Cades Cove's loop passes cabins, barns and churches left by its farm families; it closes to vehicles each Wednesday from May to September so cyclists and walkers can have the valley to themselves.
Q 12When Cades Cove joined the park, what did the Park Service do with its newer frame houses?
Demolished them
Demolished them: most families lived in modern frame houses by the 1930s, but the Park Service kept only the log cabins and barns it thought best showed pioneer life.
Q 13Who were Cades Cove's first permanent European settlers, arriving in 1818?
Q 21Which company logged the valleys around Elkmont in the Smokies from 1901 to 1939?
Little River Lumber Company
The Little River Lumber Company hauled its logs out on its own railroad and, under the deal by which it sold its land, kept cutting until 1939, years after the park was established.
Q 22For most of its 72 miles in the Smokies, what does the Appalachian Trail follow?
The state line
The state line runs along the crest of the range and the trail keeps to it, rarely dropping below 5,000 feet, so the highest point on its whole route from Georgia to Maine is here.
Q 23What is the tallest waterfall in the Smokies, dropping 100 feet near the base of the range's second-highest peak?
John and Lucretia Oliver
John and Lucretia Oliver survived their first winter only because Cherokee neighbours gave them food; their log cabin is now the oldest building in the cove.
Q 14Where did Franklin D. Roosevelt formally dedicate the park in September 1940?
Newfound Gap
Newfound Gap sits where Tennessee meets North Carolina at the centre of the park, so Roosevelt's ceremony on 2 September 1940 took place in both of the states that had bought the land.
Q 15Whose $5 million gift in 1928 rescued the campaign to buy land for the Smokies park?
John D. Rockefeller Jr.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave the money through a fund named for his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, matching what the two states and their citizens had raised.
Q 16How was the Mountain Farm Museum in the Smokies created in the 1950s?
Moving old log buildings to one site
It was made by moving old log buildings to one site: most of the farm's houses, sheds and workshops were hauled in from valleys across the park so visitors could see a mountain homestead in one place.
Q 17Which travel writer, author of Our Southern Highlanders, was a key champion of the Smokies park?
Horace Kephart
Horace Kephart was a St. Louis librarian who broke down, moved alone to the North Carolina mountains in 1904 and wrote Our Southern Highlanders; he campaigned for the park but died in 1931, before it opened.
Q 18Which president signed the 1926 bill that authorised a national park in the Smokies?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge signed it in May 1926, but the act carried a condition: the federal government could take charge of the park only once 150,000 acres had been turned over to it.
Q 19When the Smokies park was proposed in the 1920s, which was the only national park east of the Mississippi?
Acadia
Acadia, on the coast of Maine, was the lone eastern park among 17, which is why a federal committee went looking for more in 1924 and recommended the Smokies and Shenandoah.
Q 20Great Smoky Mountains National Park protects one of the largest surviving stands of what in the eastern United States?
Old-growth forest
Old-growth forest survives here because the park was created while loggers were still working through the mountains, which saved the slopes they had not yet reached.
Ramsey Cascades
Ramsey Cascades is no roadside stop: reaching it takes a strenuous 8-mile round trip that climbs more than 2,100 feet, and the park warns hikers never to scramble to the top.
Q 24Which US highway crosses the Smokies between Gatlinburg and Cherokee via Newfound Gap?
US 441
US 441 crosses the crest as Newfound Gap Road; before the interstates it was the main road between the two states, and trucks and other commercial traffic are still barred from it.
Q 25A section of US 129 along the western edge of the Smokies is nicknamed what for its extreme curves?
Tail of the Dragon
The Tail of the Dragon packs 318 curves into 11 miles of US 129 at Deals Gap on the park's western edge, a magnet for motorcyclists and sports-car drivers.
Q 26Which Tennessee county, home to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, anchors tourism around the Smokies?
Sevier
Sevier County holds Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Sevierville; the park's creation ended its logging industry in the 1930s and turned it into one of the busiest tourist areas in the country instead.
Q 27Which theme park in Pigeon Forge, near the north entrance to the Smokies, is Tennessee's biggest ticketed attraction?
Dollywood
Dollywood opened in 1961 as Rebel Railroad, a small Civil War-themed attraction, and traded as Silver Dollar City Tennessee for a decade before taking its present name in 1986.
Q 28How did the Eastern Band of Cherokee come to hold the Qualla Boundary beside the Smokies?
They bought the land
They bought the land: the trader William Holland Thomas, an adopted Cherokee, purchased it in his own name on their behalf, so it is not a reservation created by the government.
Q 29What was the only known permanent Cherokee village inside what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park?
Oconaluftee
Oconaluftee gave its name to the Oconaluftee Cherokees, a small group who won permission to stay in North Carolina when the rest of the nation was forced west in 1838.
Q 30In the Civil War, Confederate troops occupied Gatlinburg to guard mines of what at Alum Cave?
Saltpeter
Saltpeter from Alum Cave went into Confederate gunpowder, so a company of Thomas' Legion held Gatlinburg, a mostly pro-Union town, until Federal troops marched in from Knoxville.