A busy year for our most popular national park

 The Great Smoky Mountains National Park set a record for the number of visitors with 12.55 million in 2019, according to the National Park Service. That's up by 1.13 million since 2018. Much of the increase is attributed to the long-awaited opening of the "Missing Link" on the Foothills Parkway. 
 Among the 62 national parks, the Great Smokies led the Grand Canyon (5.97 million, down 0.41), Rocky Mountain (4.67, up 0.08), Zion (4.48, up 0.16), Yellowstone (4.02, down 0.09), Yosemite (4.42, up 0.41), Acadia (3.44, down 0.10), Grand Teton (3.41, down 0.08), and Olympic (3.24, up 0.14).
 If you include national monuments, parkways, and all 418 units in the National Park system, the most popular in 2019 were the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (15.00 million, down 0.22 from 2018), the Blue Ridge Parkway (14.97, up 0.28), the Great Smokies (12.55), the St. Louis Gateway Arch (9.40, up 0.16), the Lincoln Memorial (7.81, up 0.01), and Lake Mead/Hoover Dam (7.5 million, down 0.08). The Blue Ridge Parkway holds the all-time record with 21.54 million visits in 2002.
 The report includes a category for Concessioner Lodging, which in the Smokies represents the number of overnight guests at LeConte Lodge. That total for 2019 was 10,955, down 208 from 2018. Compare that to the 12 million who visited the Smokies, and those of us who stayed at the Lodge are one in a thousand.

Le Stonehenge: The dawn of 2020

The dawn of 2020, as photographed from Myrtle Point by Chris Maulden. In a Stonehenge alignment, the sun rose in the notch of Deep Gap south of Cold Mountain, 37 miles east/southeast. That's Cold Mountain just to the left of the sun, and the horizon to the right includes Shining Rock, Black Balsam, Richland Balsam, and Waterrock Knob. The silhouetted ridge just below the sunrise is the Jumpoff and Mount Kephart.