Standing mid-span · Deck wind 11 mph

What a crossing actually feels like

The span runs about seven hundred feet, give or take. From the top of the lift you walk onto a steel-cable pedestrian bridge, there's a glass-floor stretch somewhere in the middle, and the other end puts you out on a wooden deck looking back over Gatlinburg. That is the technical part. Here is what nobody tells you.

The first ten steps

When you step onto the deck your inner ear notices before your feet do that this surface is not a bridge in the usual sense. It is a suspension deck, and it is designed to move. It gives maybe an inch per side when a group walks on it. On a windy day you feel the whole span lift and settle in a slow rhythm. That is not malfunction. That is the engineer's drawing come to life. The cables are rated for several times the load that could physically fit on the deck.

Most people who turn back do so inside the first ten steps, before the glass. If you can take ten honest steps and keep walking, you will cross.

The glass floor section

Partway across there are glass panels in the deck. You can see straight down to the trees below. The panels are triple-laminated — much thicker than a sidewalk, by the way — and we test them every spring. The scare is in your head, not in the engineering. I've watched grandmothers who said they'd never cross take a slow look down and then decide they wanted a picture.

What I tell folks who are nervous: do not stop on the glass if the span is busy. Walk through it, get to the solid planks on the other side, and if you want to look down then, walk back and do it. Standing still on the glass with a crowd behind you is where people lock up.

The far-side deck

The far end of the span lets you out on a wooden observation platform that juts out off the back of the ridge. There are benches. There is no food. There is a trash can and that is about it. The view faces back over downtown Gatlinburg and the Parkway running south-east into the national park.

In the afternoon the sun hits the platform directly and it gets warm even in cool weather. On a hot August day, bring water with you up the lift — the base lodge sells it, the far-side deck does not.

Walking back

You cross the bridge once in each direction. There is no separate path. People who like heights find it a shorter walk the second time; people who found it hard find it harder because they know what is coming. If somebody in your party wants off the ridge quietly, the chairlift down from the lift-house side is the exit, not back across the bridge.

Hours and prices live on the planning page. If you'd rather read the park's own description of the span, that is on the official site.