TENNESSEE

Great Smoky Mountains, America’s most visited national park, can’t find any room for dogs on its 900 miles of trail. So the rest of the Volunteer State has to try that much harder to make up for the oversight. You won’t leave any tour of Tennessee state parks with a best hike unchecked because your dog couldn’t go with you. And dogs are welcome in every campground, even some cabins. Chattanooga has staked a claim as a national outdoors destination, plotting 150 miles of trails in the vicinity - all dog-friendly. The Bluff Trail across Lookout Mountain, the waterfalls of the Grundy Forest, the overlooks of the Tennessee River in Prentice Cooper State Forest are all show-stoppers to enjoy with your best trail buddy. Up to the north the Big South Fork National Recreation Area explores the hollows around Cumberland River where the Twin Arches form the largest sandstone arch complex in the East. Central and Eastern Tennessee are the big dogs of canine hiking trails but on the Mississippi River Reelfoot Lake anchors 15,000 acres and a collection of tail-friendly loop trails. The largest earthquake ever to rattle the United States shook the Mississippi Valley in 1811, jumbling bedrock and backing up the mighty Mississippi long enough to create the lake. Maybe not competing for trail time with 14 million Great Smoky visitors each year isn’t such a bad thing.

The Best Day Hike You Can Take With Your Dog In Tennessee

Hidden Passage Trail
Pickett State Park and Forest • Jamestown

Situated in a remote section of the upper Cumberland Mountains, the 17,000 acres of Pickett State Park and Forest, once owned by the massive Stearns Coal & Lumber Company, became one of Tennessee’s earliest state parks in the 1930s. Here are botanical and geological wonders Seaman will find nowhere else in Tennessee. The Civilian Conservation Corps set up shop in the dark forest during the Great Depression and crafted enough buildings of locally quarried sandstone that the park is listed on the National Register o fHistoric Places.

With 58 miles of hiking trails you could hunker down with Seaman for a week in these hollows but the attraction of Pickett for most canine adventurers is that most of the more accessible trails are short, ranging from a quarter-mile to three miles so you can sample many of them with your dog in a short visit.

The Hidden Passage Trail launches just across the street from the park office but it doesn’t take long to feel as if civilization has been left far behind. The big loop ducks in and out of rock houses and slides past waterfalls in its nearly ten miles. Expect to linger with Seaman at the stunning Thompson Overlook.

Pickett is a wild place and trail maintenance may be spottier than the groomed pathways prized in some parks; also make sure you secure a good map to help with the abundance of spur trails. Don’t count on Seaman to always find the way.

HIKING TIME: 4-5 hours

(from the book 300 Day Hikes To Take With Your Dog Before He Tires You Out: Trails where you won’t be able to wipe the wag off your dog’s tail)