page_title: Roaring Fork (Great Smoky Mountains)
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Roaring Fork (Great Smoky Mountains) / Geography
caption_attribution_description: The Jim Bales Place in the Roaring Fork Historic District, GSMNP, in East Tennessee. The corn crib (foreground) and barn are all that remain of the farm of Caleb Bales (1839-1913) and his son, James Wesley Bales (1869-1939).
context_page_description: Roaring Fork is a stream in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, located in the Southeastern United States. Once the site of a small Appalachian community, today the stream's area is home to the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail and the Roaring Fork Historic District.
  Like many mountain streams, Roaring Fork is volatile. While the stream presents as a peaceful trickle on any given day, it quickly becomes a raging whitewater rapid after a mild rain shower. The "roar" of the water is amplified by its echo on surrounding mountain ridges.
context_section_description: The source of Roaring Fork is located nearly 5,000 feet (1,500 m) up along the northern slopes of Mount Le Conte, where several small springs converge.  The highest of these springs, known as Basin Spring, provides the water source for LeConte Lodge.  From its source, Roaring Fork drops 2,500 feet (760 m) over just two miles (3 km), spilling over Grotto Falls and absorbing Surry Creek before steadying in a narrow valley between Mount Winnesoka and Piney Mountain.  The mouth of Roaring Fork is located at the northern end of Gatlinburg, where it empties into the West Fork of the Little Pigeon River.
  The Roaring Fork valley is underlain by Precambrian sandstone of the Ocoee Supergroup, a rock formation formed from ancient ocean sediments nearly a billion years ago.  Roaring Fork Sandstone is found throughout the mid-level elevations of the northern Smokies, and is especially common in Greenbrier to the east and the Sugarlands to the west.  Over thousands of years, erosional forces have carried boulders composed of this sandstone down from boulder fields located higher up along the mountain ridges.  This process has left the streambed of Roaring Fork and the flats in the Roaring Fork valley virtually covered with sandstone rocks of all sizes.  Farmers who lived at Roaring Fork, the Sugarlands, and Greenbrier were continually moving and stacking these rocks, creating the characteristic rock walls that still criss-cross these areas today.
caption: Sandstone rocks litter the ground at the Jim Bales Place
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