We hiked Fiery Gizzard. Then I checked 31 lodging websites around it.

We went in November and camped at the park's campground near Foster Falls with our camper.

One morning we drove up to the north trailhead in Grundy Forest, just outside Tracy City. It was 43 degrees and sunny. We did the loop clockwise. From the parking lot we went left and followed the creek downstream into the gorge. About half a mile in, we stopped at one of the small falls along the creek, a rock ledge pouring into a clear green pool. Along the way the trail also passes the Blue Hole, Black Canyon, where two creeks come together, and Chimney Rock.

Then we crossed the creek and took the short spur out to Sycamore Falls. It's only 12 feet tall, but the pool at the bottom is the kind of spot you don't want to leave. We doubled back, crossed the creek again and finished the loop, following the other creek back upstream to the parking lot.

Distance

3.4 miDistance

Time

1:56Time

Climbing

499 ftClimbing

And sunny

43°And sunny

Back at camp, Foster Falls was a short walk from our site, but not an easy one. The trail drops down a steep switchback of dirt and stone steps, then crosses a suspension bridge over the creek to the base of the falls. At 60 feet, it's the tallest waterfall in the park. Then you turn around, cross the bridge again and climb all the way back up.

We camped in the park, so I didn't book any of the places in this study myself. I looked at them the way a guest planning a trip would, on a phone.

Fiery Gizzard is one of Tennessee's newest state parks, though the trail has been around a lot longer. It used to be part of South Cumberland State Park, one big park spread across the Cumberland Plateau. After the park nearly doubled in size, the state split it into three: Savage Gulf, Head of the Crow and Fiery Gizzard. The Fiery Gizzard Trail, Foster Falls and Grundy Forest kept the name everyone already knew them by.

It's exactly the kind of place I built Firsthand Stays for. Small towns, a big outdoor draw, and lots of cabins, campgrounds and small inns.

This is a small study, 31 places, so I'm giving counts instead of percentages. But the picture is clear. These are small businesses in a beautiful spot, and their websites are working against them. Slow on a phone, heavy, and on a quarter of the homepages with Book links, at least one button that doesn't book anything.

The median phone score was 53, and the best was 70. Most sites landed between 50 and 69, in Google's “needs work” range. 7 of 26 scored under 50, and none reached 90.

The main content was slow to show up, too. Google wants it on screen within 2.5 seconds. None of the 26 got under 4. The median was 11.7 seconds, and 15 sites took more than 10.

The median homepage weighed 5.3 MB. 6 weighed more than 10 MB, and the heaviest was 27.6 MB. Only 4 came in at 2 MB or less.

It's easy to see why. These places sell the view, the waterfall and the woods, so the homepage is full of big photos and video. That's the right instinct. They just need to be sized for a phone. My note on why a vacation rental website loads slow shows how.

Of the 20 homepages where the check found Book links, 13 sent every one to a real booking page. But 5 had at least one link that just reloaded the same page. On 3 of those 5, the other Book buttons worked. It only takes one dead one for a guest to give up, though. One more homepage sent guests to Airbnb.

On 6 homepages, the check didn't find a Book link at all. Some use buttons built with a script the quick check can't see, so that number may be high.

The check could tell which booking engine was in use on 7 sites, and no two matched. Inns used ThinkReservations and ResNexus. The cabins and glamping sites used Cloudbeds and Hostaway. One campground used Campspot, another used FareHarbor, and one more sent guests to a booking page at direct-book.com. On every dead link I found, the booking engine wasn't the problem. The button on the website was.

Most set a page title and description, which is what shows in Google results. After that it drops off. 15 of 26 had a tap-to-call phone number, 12 had an email link, and 8 had neither, so a guest on a phone had no one-tap way to reach them. Only 4 had all three of a phone link, an email link and lodging details.

Just 8 of 26 included lodging details in the page code, the small piece of structured data that tells Google and AI tools what kind of place this is. The split was lopsided. All 3 glamping sites had it. Only 1 of the 14 cabin and vacation rental sites did.

This is the second study in a series. The first one, 97 Hill Country lodging websites, found the same slow, heavy homepages. Speed and weight here were in the same range, a little worse if anything.

The big difference was the Book buttons. In the Hill Country, about 1 in 20 homepages with Book links had a broken or dead one. Here it was 1 in 4. My guess is smaller places, fewer hands on the website, and nobody tapping through it on a phone.

If you run a cabin, campground or small inn near a park like this one, start here:

1. Tap every Book button on your phone. Every one, top to bottom. This is the cheapest fix there is, and it's the most common problem I found here.
2. Size your photos for a phone. Keep the big views. Just make them lighter, and start with any background video.
3. Add a tap-to-call number and an email link. Guests planning a trip like this have questions. Make it one tap to ask.
4. Add lodging details to your page code. Most cabin sites here skip it, so it's an easy way to stand out to Google and AI tools.

Which properties. I started with the lodging list on the region's tourism site, Mountains of Adventure, Marion County's visitor site and Sewanee's list of places to stay. Then I ran 26 Google searches for cabins, B&Bs, campgrounds, RV parks, glamping and treehouses in Tracy City, Monteagle, Sewanee, Beersheba Springs, Altamont, Coalmont, Sequatchie, Jasper, Whitwell, South Pittsburg, Cowan, Winchester and around Tims Ford Lake, plus searches like cabins near Fiery Gizzard State Park. I kept independent properties with their own website within about 25 miles of the park. I left out state park campgrounds, booking sites like Airbnb, directories, chains, group camps and retreat centers, a hostel, a university-owned inn, a lodging brand with properties in several states, an events venue and a lake resort community. That gave 31 properties: 17 cabins and vacation rentals, 7 campgrounds and RV parks, 4 inns and B&Bs, and 3 glamping sites.

What I checked. Each homepage went through the Firsthand Stays website check, in October 2026. It runs Google PageSpeed Insights on a simulated phone, then reads the homepage like a phone browser would, and follows each Book, Reserve and Availability link to see where it leads. When Google's speed test timed out, I ran it once more.

The limits. It's a small sample, so a few sites can move the numbers. Scores also move a few points between runs. Google couldn't finish the speed test on 5 sites, and 5 homepages couldn't be read because the site blocked automated visitors, didn't respond or couldn't be checked, so totals use 26 sites. It only looks at the homepage. As in the first study, I didn't count llms.txt files, because many website builders now add one automatically.