Lift-house wall · Three generations

Three generations off the Parkway

My name is Bobby Ogle. I was born in 1971 in Sevier County, three blocks east of the Gatlinburg Parkway. I never moved more than four miles from the house I grew up in.

Granddaddy — his name was Earl — ran a small motor lodge down on the Parkway when the strip was mostly cedar cabins and gravel pullouts. Eight rooms with window units. He kept it going from 1952 until he sold it in 1979 to a developer who put a souvenir shop up where the office used to stand. There's a Dollywood-themed t-shirt store on that lot now. Earl would have found that funny.

Daddy — Henry Ogle — came up on that lot. He worked construction in his twenties and then took a job on the original Gatlinburg chairlift when it was still the only ride up this ridge. He spent thirty-one years there, mostly as the morning run-up mechanic. He retired in 2003. He died in 2019. He is buried over at the little Baptist cemetery south of town, and I bring him coffee most Sunday mornings.

I apprenticed under the old mechanic — a man named Darrell Reagan — in 1990, straight out of high school. I did the brake pack and the gearbox inspections for ten years before I moved up to the main-shift mechanic role in 2004. When they rebuilt the lift for the current bridge installation, I was on the crew. I know every tower on this ridge. I know which one gets ice first in a cold snap (tower six, because of how the ridge wind curves). I know which bearings on the bull-wheel need extra grease in July heat.

I'm not a writer by trade. I started this little site because I kept having the same conversations in the lift-house break room with visitors who had been misled by brochures. A cousin of mine in Knoxville set it up for me on his computer, and I write the pages between shifts.

I don't work for SkyPark's main office. I don't speak for them. I don't take tickets, I don't take payments, and I don't have a horse in whether you buy an all-day pass or a round-trip. If the official site says one thing and I say another about pricing or hours, their numbers are the current ones — I write when I can, not every day.

My wife Lorene teaches fourth grade in Pigeon Forge. We have one grown daughter in Johnson City. The dog is a sixteen-pound mutt named Dolly. I don't have a Twitter account, and I never will. The contact page has the one email that comes to a real inbox I read.