The Island and the Great Smoky Mountain Wheel

If you are here after dark, you cannot miss it, a wheel of light turning against the mountains. The Great Smoky Mountain Wheel stands two hundred feet tall, and it began turning in the early twenty tens. Its forty-two enclosed glass gondolas carry riders up for a view that stretches across Pigeon Forge to the dark ridgeline of the national park, and after sunset the wheel puts on a light show driven by tens of thousands of programmable lights.

The wheel anchors an entertainment complex called The Island, a walkable village of dozens of shops, restaurants, and rides built around dancing fountains, opened in the early twenty tens as the strip kept reinventing itself. It captures something essential about how Pigeon Forge works. This was a town with one real asset, the mountains at its back, and over a few decades it learned to wrap that scenery in every kind of manufactured wonder, from a steam train to a moonshine still to a Titanic to a giant wheel.

Ride to the top and you can see it all at once, the neon of the parkway below you and, beyond it, the ancient blue Smokies that were here before the forge, before the pigeons, before any of it, and that will still be here long after the lights go dark.