I had stopped for the night outside Gatlinburg, and wonder of wonders it was not raining the next morning. The sun was out, in fact. I was ready to find some salamanders. I had to run the gringo tourista gauntlet that is Gatlinburg to reach the road going through the Smoky Mountains National Park, but it was early on a Thursday morning so the traffic was tolerable.

My first stop was a picnic area off the main park road. The parking lot and trails ran next to a stream swollen by the rains, and I worked the stream banks for several hundred feet. There were big boulders along the banks, and most of them were very slippery, making progress slow. A guy by himself could get in serious trouble back here, I thought; a good place for a busted head if I wasn't careful.

The salamanders weren't long in coming. First up was a new one for me - Plethodon jordani, the Redcheeked Salamander. This critter was crawling out in the open in the gap between two boulders. I was working an area around 10-12 feet from the stream banks, and I kept turning up jordani, one after the other - they were thick here! I saw nearly a dozen in fifteen minutes, of all sizes. Then I turned up a different-looking red-cheeked salamander - a desmognathid, not a plethodontid. Here was Desmognathus imitator, the Imitator Salamander. The body shape on this salamander is quite different from Plethodon jordani, but the red patch on each cheek is there, along with some faint red in the body markings. I had to stop and ponder who was imitating who here? Was there a scientific basis for determining the mimic? Or is it simply that Plethodon jordani was described to science first, leaving the really crappy name to the second place salamander? I still had much to learn about salamanders.

Desmognathus imitator proved to be as common as P. jordani, and they varied somewhat in pattern and coloration, with cheek marks ranging from scarlet to a pale orange. I also found several salamanders with no cheek markings at all. Given their rounded, unkeeled tails, I took them for Ocoee Salamanders, Desmognathus ocoee. The Ocoee Salamander can also have cheek patches that mimic the Redcheeked, but  where D. ocoee and D. imitator are found together, only imitator has red cheeks. So sayeth the literature; perhaps the answer to my question as to who the true imitator was lies in these facts.

Several small D. carolinensis rounded up the tally for this place; I headed back to the vehicle to try another spot just up the road.