This one was nearby, up against the big cliff covered with poison ivy:

I am presuming this is the same species. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

just barely fits inside her web with her legs holding the web taut in 8 places. Do bugs fly up and get trapped in the lampshade? The lampshades didn't face vertically down. We found this one on a slightly pitched forward rock wall supporting a bridge over a stream. We saw others on a cliff face a hundred feet or more from a river. And then we saw some on the sides of boulders right along another stream. We weren't fortunate enough to see anything get caught though.

Lucy Lowe from Haywood Community Coll was on the trip and very interested in spiders and mentioned one of the species that was very common, but we forgot to write it down. Maybe she will see this post and comment, or one of the other participants may post one of their images with an ID. We were just too distracted by the spiders and their webs!

lampshades are cribellate webs, and I'm guessing flying insects are the primary prey.

Thorelli is also in the Smoky's, but I don't think it makes it to Sevier.

Even though I autosubscribe, I don't recieve email notifications anymore...
Otherwise I would have replied sooner.

Have you changed your email address from the one you put on your contributor page? Or maybe somehow your email service now blocks BugGuide thinking that it is Junkmail? Meant to ask you what you thought of ? That was a strange one!

checked my spam filter, and BG is not in it. I'll try a new email.
That other spider is neat. Left a comment on one of the images.