Tennessee provides access to many great hiking trails including the Appalachian Trail (or the ‘AT’). I will share a few of the best elements from the best hikes. On the map, the green hiking icon shows some of the hikes that I completed with my hiking partner, Kevin.

One of the first hikes we did together was to the Honey Creek Trail. This is a circular trail that follows the local geography to loop around one side and then loosely follows a river on the return route.

The rest of our hikes all involved the AT either in full, or in part. The AT runs from Georgia to Maine and covers more than 2000 miles. In Tennessee, it can be accessed from a variety of points.

Much of the trail runs along ridges which provide some spectacular views of the local areas.

However, even more of the trail and the access and spur trails are embedded deep in the forest and so the expansive views are surprisingly few and far between. While you are not always able to enjoy the broad panoramas, there are still lots of great sights within the Tennessee forests.

And then, of course, there is the forest itself…

The park system is quite extensive and offers many shelters along the AT. These can be booked, generally for free or a very small fee, but are often booked well in advance

Some of these hikes were quite arduous. One in particular was 18KM and had almost 950M of vertical climbing over its length. We started ‘at the bottom’, and hiked up to the AT, and then along a spur trail on a ridge to the next peak.

There are some great selfie photo-ops.

It was summer after all, and we did some of the hikes in very hot weather. This required some cooling off.