Four people. Seven days. Twenty-five-pound packs. Twenty-nine miles. My first real backpacking adventure just ended, and since I had a notebook with me the entire time and managed to record about 12 pages of stuff, it's time to sort it all out and present it in some coherent fashion for the world to read. As you might guess, there wasn't always time on the trail to set down my complete thoughts on paper, especially with multiple hours each day devoted to nothing but putting one foot in front of the other and thinking, so there are a lot of things not mentioned in my notes. The notebook extracts you see here aren't changed from the original, but in order to fill in some of those details I'll be throwing in additional comments from time to time. A bit of warning: the material from the notebook, written "in the field" as it is, is sometimes rather choppy and not so well constructed. Let's see how it goes.
We left Cleveland on Friday morning and arrived at Ben's house near Columbus in the early afternoon to pick up some gear and eat lunch. We left the city on U.S. Route 23 (no freeways from this point on, we thought) and eventually reached the town of Portsmouth about as far south as you can get in Ohio. We jumped off onto a side road and arrived at Shawnee State Park a bit after 5:00, I think. Staying in the normal campground cost money, so we drove a bit down the road to the state forest next to a Boy Scout camp and spent the night close to the car for free. A good dry run for actual backpacking, since we'd taken our packs in with us. The next day was mainly for driving. After we packed everything back up, we headed back to U.S. 23 to plunge southward through the eastern part of Kentucky, clip the western corner of Virginia, and drive through Tennessee. Paul's logic prevailed upon me, during our stop at a Wal-Mart in Virgina, to buy a pair of sandals with straps for $7.82. He said he was going to use them for wading through streams instead of having to do it in tennis shoes or hiking boots. It made sense, so I grabbed a pair of size 10s.
Back on the road, things were going a bit slower than we'd hoped, so we left Route 23, got onto I-81, and finished the last bit of the trip on the freeways. Getting off the interstate confronted us with an unbelievable amount of commercial tackiness and slow traffic on the road from Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg leading into the park. Think of a non-stop parade of mini golf, go-carts, hotels, restaurants, the "Comedy Barn", and pancake places. The pancake places were especially strange, appearing around every quarter mile and all advertising "PANCAKES" in giant letters like it was a regional delicacy.
My notebook, when I was able to pull it out the next day, picks up the trail from there:
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Notes Sunday, after dinner, 7 p.m.+ Hiking started yesterday from the Clingman's Dome overlook |
The parking lot, actually. The overlook proper is higher up and has a half-mile-long trail leading to it.
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elevation 2025 m, around 7 p.m. We had three miles to go to get to Campsite 68, the closest one and the place where we were spending the night. Down the entire way, lots of rocks and mud. Reached around 8:40. Set up camp away from actual sites — they were in use. Very rocky — tent set up on roots and such, but it turned out to be good. There was a little root just to the left of my head that served as a little anchor to give my left arm a place to go at night. Slept pretty well. Started today at 10:20 — a late start, Ben said. The terrain today was much nicer; still sloping down, but more gently and with fewer rocks. Several streams to cross. The third one ended up being about 40 feet of wading in really cold water. At least it wasn't too deep: about three-fourths of the way to my knee was the worst it got. After the fording we decided to stop for lunch and let our feet dry while we ate. This was around 12:15. I went first when we got going again, and almost immediately we had to cross the same stream. A bit further on we had to do it again, and this time we had to wade again because Ben couldn't find us a good crossing on rocks or anything. I led again for a bit, along the side of the river, and — you guessed it — the trail had us cross the wretched thing a fourth time! Wading again. After that I said someone else should lead, and I think that was the last crossing of the day. Around 3:00 we arrived at Campsite #70, elevation 750 m, distance five miles from the day's starting point. The campsite is adjacent to a bridle trail, and as soon as we arrived it became abundantly clear that, as Erin said, "horses have been here today." Flies everywhere! Paul and Ben did some scouting and found us a place a bit away from the main camping area that's much less infested. We're on the upstream part of a little island in the middle of (I think) the same stream we've been having so much fun with all day. |
Not quite. Walking around the next day gave me a slightly better (though still probably imperfect) idea of the topography. The stream we'd been having so much fun with forked into two branches a bit above the campsite. The camp was between the two branches. The left branch, as you look upstream, is the one that contained our island.
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We're camped among a bunch of giant rhotodendrons perhaps 10 to 20 feet high, with about four to six feet of clearance underneath. The tent especially is in a spot that looks particularly bowery. We all had a chance to read books and eat gorp this afternoon, until we decided to get a campfire (for the bugs) and cooking underway a bit after 5:30. I had a bit of a tramp round the isalnd when we were gathering wood. It's bigger than I first expected — perhaps one-tenth of a mile long, although distances like that are pretyy hard to judge with trees and things in the way. The bulk of our river flows on the right side of the island over a field of round rocks that are covered with moss the color of the grass at Jacobs Field. |
The next page in my notebook is called "Things Learned" and gives a rather sarcastic look at my first full day of backpacking:
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#1.) Hiking with a 25-pound pack on your back is totally different than normal hiking. It's not carrying the weight that's hard: that's practically the only thing you can do. Maneuvering and footing are almost impossible because your overall size and CG are so messed up. I spent a lot of yesterday's hike tripping and stumbling over loose rocks, and generally making my knees hate me, because the extra 25 pounds really changes the amount of landing force on each footsetp. River crossings — stepping stones, balancing on tree branches, etc. — that I would normally do in about five seconds without thinking about them turn into incredibly complex sequences of movements in which each step has to be tested and slowly transitioned to as weight gets shifted between feet. I feel like a decrepit 70-year-old or something as Ben and his 50-pound pack hop across these rivers like a deer while I'm stuck on the other side debating how to take my second step. In the end it's more frustrating than it is difficult. #2.) Never hike on former rail beds. If you do, you'll spend 90 percent of your time looking down and ignoring everything else. Ben's trail guide book said that a lot of the stuff we went over today was a former logging railroad — you could still see the flat road bed and find the occasional piece of metal to prove it, but the worst was that it seemed none of the underlying stones had ever been carted away. Net result: I hiked five miles through a national park and got a great view of my own two feet. We're supposed to be ascending a ridge tomorrow, so hopefully the streams will get smaller again and the rocks will either stay buried or all roll down to the valleys. |
In retrospect, these are more the frustrated outcries of a novice than they are an actual compte rendu of the experience as a whole. I eventually did get better at balancing with a pack on, and there certainly weren't any streams along the top of that ridge. To wit:
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Tuesday morning A good day of hiking yesterday. We left the island of rhotodendrons around 9:30 and started heading up the Jonas Creek trail. Much less rocky and easier to navigate than the Forney Creek had been. Still some stream crossings: three right in a row that required wading, and then three more that had logs and/or rocks nicely placed that didn't. Eventually we got high enough up the mountain that we left the stream behind. Heavy grades in the morning. As we got further and further along we had to stop more and more frequently, which was quite annoying. I'd get a great rhythm going — getting to the point where I could walk a long way and not think about it — and immediately we'd stop again! Lunch break at about 12:30. |
The lunch break was kind of interesting. A few minutes after noon, at another one of our innumerable stops, Ben said we should hike for another 10 minutes and then find a suitable stopping place off the trail. When he said this, we were in what turned out to be the only relatively flat area within the vicinity. We were eventually able to stop at a small outcropping of rocks on the downward side of the trail: two large boulders facing each other with a small plot of dirt in between. As I remarked at the time, the spot was made to be a picnic table.
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Started up again at 1:15, and the grade almost immediately became nicer as we hit the ridge. Good views of the surrounding mountains, including Clingman's Dome, the highest point in Tennessee and our starting point as well. More stops. Lots of trees and grassy areas along the ridge. Cool breezes that turned cold later on. We were the first people to reach the AT shelter a bit past Siler's Bald, where a U.S. Geological Survey rock gives the elevation as 5607 feet "above the sea." |
And promises a $250 fine for "disturbing" the marker. I had fun pretending to wake it up from a nap by stomping on it with my boots.
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Other people started trickling in as we cooked our dinner — I think the total population is now eight or nine. The others are all guys hiking alone. Haven't slept too well the past two nights — lots of moving around as comfortable spots become less so after a few minutes. The shelter has two flat wooden platforms for sleeping on, one above the other like bunk beds, which are nice and flat but also annoyingly hard. My arms took turns falling asleep all night. |
Some more description of an Appalachian Trail shelter (or at least the two we stayed at) in case you haven't seen one: Picture three stone walls with a wooden peaked roof, fourth wall (one of the long ones) open except for chain link fence to keep the bears out and a gate to let the people in. Small fireplace in the side stone wall. The back end, directly opposite the chain-link, contains the two platforms that look a lot like boardwalks. Each level holds six people nicely, but the logbook at Siler's Bald said that they'd once fit 19 people in there by putting nine on each boardwalk and one on the dirt floor.
The top of the ridge line also warrants a bit more detail because it was pretty cool-looking. We start with a base of grassland between six inches and two feet high, add some mid-level pricker bushes, and top off with gnarled trees of a light color. Sprinkle a liberal allotment of fallen trees and serve it forth. It wasn't very dense overall, especially with the ground sloping off on both sides usually about 30 feet apart, which allowed those nice views of the surrounding mountains I mentioned in my notes.
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Tuesday, just after 5 p.m. Colder and quite windy today, with the sky rather overcast except for scattered patches of sun. Paul, Ben, and I left the Siler's Bald shelter at 10:00 for a day hike to a waterfall on the Hazel Creek trail and back. Ben's perusal of the park map led us to believe the fall was only about a mile down the Hazel Creek trail, but it turns out the map rather glossed over the eight switchbacks on the way down; the trail guide book put the distance at 2.3 miles. We started out making over three miles an hour without the pakcs, but after the 1200-foot climb back to the ridge the pace became maddeningly slow again. Finally made it back to the shelter around 1:30 after a total trip of nine miles. Lunch (cold outside in the wind when you're not moving!), packing up, and then on to Double Spring Gap shelter, just two miles down the AT towards Clingman's Dome. Arrived at 3:50. Collected wood for a fire and, since it was still pretty early, decided to spend the time until dinner reading. So far we've been joined by one other person, who said he has a partner coming. So... that takes care of all the factual details of the day. Some additional thoughts: An interesting idea struck me at the beginning of our day hike: Why not set a life-long goal of hiking at least five miles in every state? It would give me a good excuse to get me to go travelling and it doesn't sound like it would be that difficult to do over, say, 40 summers. I've already got Ohio (Burr Oak), Kentucky (Cumberland Falls), and now North Carolina out of the way. |
This fails to consider the possibility of me having a job that doesn't permit random excursions across the country every year. While we were out, actually, we spent some time musing on what sort of job you would have to have in order to go out and hike even 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail over a few weeks. Not to mention the whole thing. The best we could come up with was a career in academia that would give you the summer off.
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Another (horribly nerdy) idea I had was to model the campsites, shelters, and mountain tops around here as nodes in a network and let the distances along the trails between them be edge weights in the network graph. I was going to include trail junctions in the list of nodes as well until I realized that it wouldn't be necessary. |
These are just a tiny fragment of things I could write down about how I kept myself occupied on the trail, but a full transcription would be really really long, mostly boring, and rather frightening, so I think I'll leave it off.
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Wednesday, 2:20 p.m. Very cold and windy yesterday evening; ditto this morning. One of the guys who sayed in the shelter last night had a thermometer and said it was 35.6° some time just before 6 a.m. |
The earliest we'd gotten up to date, as you could have guessed from our previous days' starting times.
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Total population for the night was 11, pus two who stayed outside in a tent. More groups this time, though: the four of us, a group of two New Englanders, two people with extreme Southern accents, and then three more Southerners rounded out the party. They were all getting an early start and talking at full volume by 5:30, so the rest of us soon followed: the entire camp was awake by 6:30. I was first out from the four of us, so I got the hot water going on the stove for tea and oatmeal. After that, packing and then off on the 2.8-mile walk to the top of Clingman's Dome. |
Not quite. We first left a rather humorous entry in the shelter's log book to complement the one we'd previously written at Siler's Bald. Erin has the text of the first one in her notebook — we wrote it out there as a rough draft — and I only have the second, but it's still funny enough to give out in full. In the first, we wrote as rather haughty travellers who'd mistaken the shelter for a resort hotel and presented a number of complaints to the management. These included, as I remember, saying that the hot tub was neither hot nor a tub, that the air conditioning was set too high, and that room service took forever to arrive. More of the same in Part Two:
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Dear Sirs: In addition to the litany of complaints that we had the displeasure of forwarding to your office from Siler's Bald Resort yesterday, we feel compelled to draw your attention to the following additional matters:
However, we are willing to overlook these flaws in our resort experience because of the superiority of the restroom facilities. The presence of the mulch bucket and a seat make up for the egregious lack of a bathroom attendant. We suggest that the bathroom be rated a 3 for Extreme Thrill Ride. |
The real-life roots for all of this are the facts that we had a fire in the shelter's chimney that night, the obvious fact that the floor was made of dirt, and the happiness at finding a wooden latrine parked a short distance into the woods just when Erin and I were resigning ourselves to digging a hole in the ground with the poop spade. Continuing the choronicle —
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Left at 8:00. Cloudy — i.e. we were in a cloud — the whole way; very limited opportunities to look at the views of the mountains. The 360° scenic overlook at the top of Clingman's was thus quite cold and disappointing. Got some pictures between the clouds and then down in the parking lot once it had cleared up a bit. Lunch at an Italian buffet in Sevierville. Just $5.49 plus tax, which in Tennessee made it $6.02. Cleaned up a bit first at the park welcome center so they wouldn't feel so compelled to kick us out. |
I remember remarking to Paul at the time that this super-tax was something like 9.5 percent. Paul said the thought Tennessee didn't have any income tax but had an incredibly high sales tax to make up for it. A good place to live, but not to visit in that case.
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Another 17 miles left in Tennessee now (Mile 144) — goal for tooday is Dog Slaughter Falls in Daniel Boone National Forest, Kentucky, where we spent one night at the end of our canoe trip about this time last year. We'll spend a night there again this year before finishing the drive to Cleveland tomorrow. |
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Later. Camped just off the dirt road where the trail to the falls begins — this time we're at the actual campsite and not directly on the trail! Right now we're all sitting on the bridge over the creek doing various things: Paul knitting, Ben reading, Erin writing out postcards, and me writing this. |
That actually concludes the excerpts I'm going to make from my notes. the next two pages contain things that probably aren't fit for publication just yet: I used them to write a bit about each of the other people on the trip, and I'd not like to post them without permission and a hold-harmless this-isn't-libel agreement. From here I'll have to finish up on my own, then.
The various activities went on forever. No one was ready for dinner after our giant buffet lunch. Erin and Ben especially went on reading and writing for what seemed like a number of years. I'd only brought along with me one book that I'd already read half of and, not expecting much down time, that I'd expected would be enough for the whole trip. Eventually Ben asked if anyone was up for a trip down to the falls and back, and Paul and I volunteered. Dog Slaughter Falls was a mile away by the signpost, and we probably made it in somewhere around 15 minutes or less, with Ben tearing down the trail like a gazelle (walking, mind you!) and Paul and I jogging behind to keep up. Paul had trouble jogging over the various large rocks and boulders that formed part of the trail, so we eventually had to check the madness and slow down a bit.
Falls about the same as they were last year; the water a bit clearer, Ben thought. No swimming this time, though; after a quick visit we reversed gears and came back with Paul leading the way. The pace slowed down to something that would support conversation, which led into a discussion on high school classes, foreign languages, their place in the U.S., etc. Some interesting details from Ben on the way things are in New Zealand.
And then dinner, cleaning up, and off to bed. We were able to stow just about everything we didn't need for the night back up in Paul's car, so there was no business about hanging bear bags and separating out things that smell (including, apparently, camera film). Erin's Ireland tent hadn't been capable of holding all four of us at any point during the trip, but now Erin proclaimed it too smelly for even three if we could avoid it. Ben and I accordingly slept outside — he was going to anyway, and then I decided to join him because it looked like a nice night and it was something I'd never done before. Ben's mummy bag kept me warm, dry, and bug-free for the duration of the night, but there wasn't quite enough clearance overhead to see any stars.
The next day, Thursday, was a driving day. We were all up around 7:00, and to take up the few things we had out, repack the hiking packs, and cram everything into Paul's trunk was pretty quick work. By popular demand breakfast was skipped and replaced with a stop at a gas station just north of Lexington; that also allowed us to change clothes and such. Reached Ben's house near Columbus at European lunch time and Erin's house in Strongsville just before 4:00. I transferred my stuff to my car, which had spent the week there, and drove off home.
An interesting sight presented itself at my house about an hour later: Greg, one, dirty, smelly, unshaven and unshowered for a period of seven days; pack, one, dirty, smelly, filled with all sorts of disorganized odds and ends, and recently purchased from Erin at the end of the trip. It was straight off to the shower for me, and then to sorting out stuff after a bit of dinner.
I do have in my notebook a little précis of the various trails, distances, and elevations we managed to get through during our trip. I'll break them out here by day to make the whole thing a bit clearer after all this muddling text.
| Segment Description | Segment Length | Day Length | Total Length |
| Along the Forney Ridge Trail from Clingman's Dome (6300 ft) to Forney Creek Trail (5750 ft) | 1.1 | ||
| Along the Forney Creek Trail to Campsite #68 (4000 ft) | 2.5 | ||
| Saturday total | 3.6 | 3.6 | |
| Along the Forney Creek Trail to Campsite #70 (2400 ft) | 4.9 | ||
| Sunday total | 4.9 | 8.5 | |
| Along the Jonas Creek Trail from Campsite #70 (2400 ft) to Welch Ridge Trail (4550 ft) | 4.1 | ||
| Along the Welch Ridge Trail to Hazel Creek Trail (4900 ft) | 0.7 | ||
| Along the Welch Ridge Trail to Appalachian Trail (5400 ft) | 1.7 | ||
| Along the Appalachian Trail to Siler's Bald (5600 ft) | 0.2 | ||
| Along the Appalachian Trail to Siler's Bald shelter (5450 ft) | 0.3 | ||
| Monday total | 7.0 | 15.5 | |
| Along the Appalachian Trail from the Siler's Bald shelter (5450 ft) to Siler's Bald (5600 ft) | 0.3 | ||
| Along the Appalachian Trail to Welch Ridge Trail (5400 ft) | 0.2 | ||
| Along the Welch Ridge Trail to Hazel Creek Trail (4900 ft) | 1.7 | ||
| Along the Hazel Creek Trail to a waterfall (3700 ft) | 2.3 | ||
| Reverse path to Siler's Bald shelter (5450 ft) | 4.5 | ||
| Tuesday day hike total | 9.0 | 24.5 | |
| Along the Appalachian Trail from Siler's Bald shelter (5450 ft) to Double Spring Gap shelter (5550 ft) | 1.9 | ||
| Tuesday pack total | 1.9 | 26.4 | |
| Along the Appalachian Trail from Double Spring Gap shelter (5550 ft) to Clingman's Dome overlook (6600 ft) | 2.3 | ||
| Along the Appalachian Trail from Clingman's Dome overlook (6600 ft) to parking lot (6300 ft) | 0.5 | ||
| Wednesday total | 2.8 | 29.2 |