Winter Time Best time for House Mountain Hike!

With clear blue skies and fall leaves gone, the views are spectacular along the trails at House Mountain State Park.  Located out off Rutledge Pike (past East Knox Elem) this unusual outcropping offers a challenging hike but in three miles you can enjoy a lot of great views.   Some of my regular hike buds (Sharon Spezia, Carl Loy, Jerry Owens) joined some of the Biggest Winner team, my sister Tina and Gracie B my 11 year old.  This trail is also a popular for dogs and we had two along, Billy a standard poodle and my 5 pd yorkie named Rocky.  We headed up the west end trail which proves to have a half mile of real steep climbing but we took our time and enjoyed the short rest on top of the west overlook.  You can see back towards Knoxville.  Then you get to hike north/east along a relatively level part of the trail.  You see an old fire ranger station shed on top of the mountain off to the left of the trail then come to the Y where to take a right you head back down to parking lot but we kept going out to two big rocky overlooks.  The second one has a flag pole and old American flag.  The views are amazing as you can see for miles out over millertown pike area and on past that across Corryton, Oaks Farm etc.  Past this area the trail gets more narrow and there is a smaller outcrop area for views towards the east.  

Coming down the windy trail back to the parking lot, is steep and we took our time and saw many other families with kids and dogs along the route.  Even though we only did 3 1/2 to 4 miles we covered over 11,000 steps on my pedometer and had a great workout.  Kudos to our Three Biggest Winner team hikers. This was Amanda's first hike up to House Mountain, Melody has been working overtime (nurse) but still had no problem with this hike and Lee Ann had done part of this hike once and swore it was way to hard. But now after working out for 6 weeks and dropping some wt and gaining strength she was smiling at the top and LOVED the hike.  My 11 year old Gracie thought this was a "terrible idea" to hike on her break but was skipping, singing and having fun with the gang and the two dogs.  My sister was glad I "convinced" her to join us too.