Cicadas in Kodak

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Back in late February and early March while making our travel plans for the year, we had found two spots in the Asheville North Carolina area for two months each. This would cover us for all of June, July, August and September including 4th of July and Labor Day, but Memorial Day was still unplanned. One thing we have come to realize in our travels is, its best to have the major summer holidays planned and booked in advance. With this holiday occurring just before our stop in North Carolina, we wanted a campground that was near our intended route and a reasonable drive to Asheville.

There were lots of possible choices but one town in Tennessee caught our eye. Kodak Tennessee is about 20 miles east of Knoxville and just off I-40. Since we had both worked at Eastman Kodak and met each other there during our co-op years, Kodak holds a special place in our hearts. While maybe an unusual way to select a place to stop, we found a couple of county parks in Kodak next to the Douglas Dam that had decent reviews and availability. We picked a site at Douglas Dam Tailwater campground and booked it for the 4 nights we needed.

It’s only 125 mile drive from London to Kodak and reasonably easy being interstate most of the way. The traffic around Knoxville wasn’t too bad. Even though we were arriving on the Friday of a long holiday weekend, there wasn’t a long line entering the campground either. It was a warm sunny afternoon when we arrived and Chris went in to register. When I came out of the rig to unhitch the Jeep, I heard a strange noise. Since the motorhome was still running, I initially thought it was making the noise and I went back to investigate the engine. But it sounded normal, then I realized the sound I was hearing was from the Brood X cicadas. The nearby trees were full of them and they were causing a racket. We had actually seen a couple cicadas back at Deer Creek State Park in Ohio the morning we were pulling out and had assumed we would find them at our stop in London Kentucky, but had lucked out since they hadn’t emerged there yet. Well I guess our luck had run out.

Cicada Looking for Love

On the Hood of Jeep

Douglas Dam Tailwater campground has 60 sites and is situated on the downstream side of the dam. Many of the sites are waterfront but ours was next to a heavily treed hill. This meant our site wasn’t as level as we would like, but using all of our leveling blocks we managed to get setup. The story of the town of Kodak is interesting. Back in 1892 when this town was being created, the local postmaster heard about the new Kodak camera. He liked the name Kodak and got permission from George Eastman to use Kodak for the town’s name. While not the original post office building, we did stop by to get our souvenir picture. (We went on a Sunday to avoid looks from locals!)

Chris & Jack Come Back to Kodak

There aren’t any trails on the tailwater side of the dam, but we can walk the park roads to get in some dam sightseeing. From the campground level, you can get a good look at the dam. There are a fair number of day use visitors in the park fishing along the outlet. Signs warn about rapidly rising waters when there is a release through the hydroelectric power plant. We would occasionally hear warning sirens but never went over to check out the change in water flow. This would have been much easier if we had a waterfront site.

Douglas Dam from Tailwater

The road out of the campground is a pretty good climb going up 350 feet in the mile it takes to get up the the overlook picnic area. Maybe we should have been like everybody else and drove, but we wanted a bit of exercise. There are lots of information signs that describes the construction and operation of the dam. Douglas Dam is 201 feet high and 1705 feet across. Possibly the more impressive fact about this dam is it was built in just 384 days back in 1942-43. The dam creates Douglas Lake with a shoreline of over 500 miles.

Looking Up at Overlook

Clouds Rolling in at Douglas Dam

Tree Full of Blooms

Down from the overlook is a pedestrian walkway that gets closer views of the dam and the power plant. Unfortunately you’re not permitted to walk across the dam itself to get to the Headwater campground.

Closer View of Douglas Dam

Power Plant at Dam

We spent the next day checking out another of the 29 dams in the Tennessee Valley Authority system. Cherokee Dam is near Jefferson City to the north of us. The drive had a couple goals besides seeing another dam. There is a hiking trail at the dam and by heading this way, would could find geocaches in two additional Tennessee counties. While it wasn’t the nicest of days, there were still plenty of visitors. Probably to be expected for Memorial Day weekend. On one side of the levee is Cherokee Lake. The other side has some of the parkland being used for agriculture with dozens of round bales of hay waiting to be collected. It was a nice walk with some pockets of woods and a few geocaches along the way. The red, white and blue mesh used to create the hay bales was a patriotic touch.

View of Cherokee Lake from Levee

View of Opposite Side

Holston River Flows from Dam

Patriotic Bales

By no means were we “getting used” to the cicadas. Fortunately we had some cool and even wet weather early in the stay so they were less active. They tend to hang out in trees that are in full sun and our site just happened to fit that category. When it was warm and sunny, the noise was obnoxious and they were everywhere around the rig. They seemed to like one of my bright yellow shirts and would swarm me when I was wearing it. Even though they are harmless, when one lands on you and tries to climb up your leg or neck, it is a bit startling. At one point, a cicada landed on my shoulder and started to make its noise. When they are only inches from your ear, the noise is unnerving. We had to be careful to avoid letting them in the motorhome. We would check our persons and the area by the door before coming back in. Let’s just say, I’m glad we weren’t staying here for a couple weeks.

For our last day, we drove over to the other side of the French Broad River to the Headwater Campground. This campground is just a bit larger than ours but much more crowded. Being the holiday weekend, besides campers, there were dozens of trucks with boat trailers parked on just about any grass surface. We had wanted to do a hike in the woods to immerse ourselves in the sound of cicadas. The Trotter Bluff Trail starts near that campground. It’s only a 1 mile loop but for what we intended, it should work fine. At the trailhead near the parking lot was a dead ash tree. Hundreds of cicadas were on its bare branches and more easily spotted than in a live tree with leaves. We watched for a bit and noticed that they tended to all fly from their spot at almost the same time, fly around for a couple seconds and land again. They constantly repeated this activity almost like they were playing some form of musical chairs.

Once on the trail in rather thick woods, the sound of the cicadas was nearly deafening. Maybe not quite as bad as spring peepers when you’re right next to their pond, but still very loud. The interesting thing was once we were on the trail, we saw no cicadas - not even on some of the understory trees. They were all in the upper canopy where the sun was shining at least 50 feet overhead. So we were actually able to enjoy the walk and not needing to constantly swat them away. At one point we sat down on a fallen tree and just listened. There seemed to be two distinct sounds. That of those cicadas in the surrounding canopy just over our heads and the thousands more further away from us. The large body of water near us obviously reduced the numbers. Maybe we should have picked a larger woods for our listening experiment. I put together a short video so you may experience the sights and sounds of the cicadas if they didn’t make it to your part of the world.

Lake and Headwater Campground

Looking Down French Broad River at Tailwater Campground