Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (11 page)

Park officials set out to remedy their blunder by hunting the wild boar population in the southern Appalachians to extinction. However, they quickly realized the enormity of the original error. Wild boars are the most prolific mammal in North America. They start breeding at seven or eight months and often have litters of four or five.
Park officials now estimate that they have to kill half the existing population annually in order to just maintain a stable boar population
. One ranger told us he goes out several nights a week hunting wild boars, and that a group of bears often follows him to feast on his kills.

Meanwhile, in the 1990s Smoky Mountain National Park introduced the red wolf to the region to try to counter the overpopulation of deer, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, mice, etc. The locals in the surrounding valleys were extremely skittish about this idea. But so far, the results have been encouraging. The wolves have preferred feasting on medium-sized animals with little damage to livestock in the pastures below. Better yet, wolves, the very best hunters in the entire animal kingdom, have shown no interest whatsoever in smelly hikers!

About midday the sky surprisingly started to darken again, but I counseled calm, to myself, as well as to Sal Paradise and Scavenger. “Don’t worry; they’re probably just localized clouds,” I said. “I saw the weather forecast last thing before leaving Fontana Dam yesterday and it’s supposed to be perfect today.” The wind then picked up, it got colder and started to sleet.

“Skywalker,” Scavenger said. “Let us know about any other pearls of wisdom, okay?”

“Welcome to the Smokies, boys,” Sal said. “Everybody who came through last year put up with the same crap.”

Despite it being late April, most of the trees were bare due to the high elevations. In fact it still looked like the dead of winter.

I arrived at Derrick Knob Shelter at 1:30 in a grim mood, as the sleet was now coming down steadily. The speed team of the two Irishmen, O’Connor, and Thumper were eating lunch. Are ya’ll planning on going on?” I asked. “You know the next shelter at Siler’s Bald is at 5,500 feet.”

Soon most of the others from the previous night’s shelter arrived, and it became clear that everybody was stalled out. For the second straight afternoon we were all stuck in a shelter having hiked an unsatisfying 11.7 miles. I was fatigued by the cold and my poor night’s sleep. I was going to be miserable and unable to relax.

Misery loves company, of course, and I found some grim satisfaction that Sal Paradise and Scavenger seemed humbled by the elements as well. A month earlier park rangers had airlifted four college students by helicopter out of this exact shelter due to hypothermia. It was almost twenty miles to the lone road crossing in the Smokies. Between here and there lay Clingman’s Dome, the highest point on the entire Appalachian Trail. Thus, it was quite probable that the same joyless scene was going to be repeated at some shelter the next evening, only the elevation would be even greater and the weather even colder. But then I had an idea.

“Hey, I’ve got it,” I said to Sal and Scavenger. “The guidebook says there’s an observatory for sightseeing at Clingman’s Dome.”

“So,” Scavenger replied.

“Well, according to this, a half-mile down a side trail from the observatory is a public bathroom.”

“And…” Scavenger said, slightly annoyed.

“We can hike ten miles to there tomorrow,” I replied, “and spend the night in the bathroom. It might even be heated. Anything will be better than freezing our asses off another night in a crowded shelter.”

Sal had a Ward Cleaver-like reasonable-man persona. But as he considered the idea a smile began to purse his lips. “I’m sick of this whole scene,” he said to Scavenger. Looking outside at the diabolical weather he added, “And the bathroom back at Fontana Dam wasn’t that bad.”

Looking skeptically through his wire-rimmed glasses Scavenger intoned, “It’s a totally fucked-up idea. But given the alternatives it has some logic. What’s it going to smell like in there?”

“A lot like us,” Sal replied.

Looking around at everybody crammed into this shelter I excitedly whispered, “Hey, there is sure as hell not room for everybody else in here to do it also unless people are sleeping on top of toilets. Let’s keep it to ourselves.”

My morale had been given a sharp boost by the prospect of being out of this cold within the next twenty four hours. Better yet, I,
Mr. Incompetent and Helpless in the Woods
, had hatched this brilliant plot all by myself. A flourish of pride swept over me.

Scavenger still seemed dubious about the whole enterprise and a little later in the maelstrom of the shelter I heard him calmly tell the person to his left, “We’re going to spend the night in a bathroom tomorrow night and take shits all night.”

As the seemingly interminable afternoon and evening wore on, the same group of five that had seemed so cliquish the previous evening was continually howling with laughter among themselves. But the worst part was they were making jokes about sleeping in the bathroom.

“Skywalker,” Sal asked me. “Do we have a claim on the bathroom if it was our idea first?”

“At that altitude I’m not being denied,” I declared.

Stories abounded on the trail of shelters so densely packed that everybody has to sleep sideways. When somebody needs to shift sides, there is a countdown, one-two-three, and all twenty or thirty bodies shift in unison. I never got in one that completely crowded, but this evening was the closest thing to it. We looked like circus clowns we were so packed in, with the hoods of our sleeping bags cinched in the cold.

Derrick Knob Shelter—mile 191

4-28-05
: Muslims kneel with their heads on the ground pointed towards Mecca. We hikers should do the same for several hours per day, but with our heads aimed at Mount Katahdin.—
SkyWalker

Again, I was up at first light. But there was more company this morning because with the higher elevation it had been even colder than the previous evening. And unlike the previous day, this day didn’t even start out nice as the wind, fog, and periodic sleet predominated.

The worrisome thing was that the group that had been joking about sleeping in the bathroom was preparing to leave with uncharacteristic dispatch. When they filed out of the shelter and disappeared into the fog Sal, Scavenger, and I looked at each other thinking the same thing.

“Bastards,” Scavenger yelled in their direction.

The trail was a quagmire from the steady precipitation and heavy use. Whereas I had only fallen once in the first two hundred miles, my legs came out from under me several times in the next ten miles. Inevitably, many hikers, including me, tried walking off to the side of the trail or even to straddle it.

When Sal, Scavenger, and I got to Siler’s Bald Shelter at 5,460 feet the drizzle had turned into a steady rain and the visibility was now reduced to about fifty feet. We were getting ready to head up to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point on the AT, where things could only be worse.

Renewing my concerns about hypothermia, I was reduced to muttering, “God, all that physical conditioning and weight-gaining I did for months to get ready for the AT and it all goes out the window in nineteen days. I can feel myself hemorrhaging weight. And that makes you more vulnerable to hypothermia. I’m back to pissing a lot. It all weakens you.”

“Skywalker, you exaggerate,” Scavenger jumped in, protesting. “We’re all in the same damn situation; cold as shit. You don’t look like you’re about to die and you’re keeping up with us.”

Scavenger was iconoclastic, but not egocentric. So despite the irony of a nineteen-year old lecturing a forty-four-year-old, I said, “I apologize. And you can bet your bottom dollar when the weather finally turns warm, you won’t hear a single word of bitching out of me.” It was a promise I was to keep.

I pulled out my sleeping bag and lay inside it to retain body heat, with my backpack as a pillow. An air of indecisiveness pervaded the shelter. Finally, Sal Paradise got up very purposefully, strapped on his backpack, said, “Love it or leave it,” and disappeared up the mountain and into the fog. I got up and followed him by a few minutes.

I continued trying to straddle and walk to the side of the trail in order to avoid wallowing or falling in the mud. Sal and I were turning one corner and I took an especially wide turn away from the muddy trail when I heard somebody screaming at me from the opposite direction. “You’re not hiking on the Appalachian Trail,” the voice berated me. “I don’t know what trail it is, but it’s not the Appalachian Trail.”

A late twenty-ish fellow with a patch on his jacket that said “Ridge Runner” came right up to me and yelled, “Why are you off the trail?” I filibustered a bit that I was falling a lot and the trail was dysfunctional. Sal looked on amused. He had been doing the same thing, if not in the serial fashion I was. But a tongue lashing was the least of my concerns; being cold was the foremost.

“Is there a public bathroom at Clingman’s Dome?” I asked him.

“Yes, but don’t sleep in there,” he immediately shot back. “A group ahead of you just asked me the same thing.” Sal and I looked knowingly at each other (“
those slimebags
.”)

When I started to head off he renewed his magisterial tone, “Now let me see you stay on the trail.”

“But look at the damn trail,” I said, exasperated.

“That’s what you bought those expensive boots for,” he answered with certainty. “Plant them in the mud and put one foot after another. That way you will avoid a two-hudred-dollar citation.”

The part about one foot in front of another proved prophetic. The trail soon turned up a narrow ledge that didn’t allow any more lateral dodges. Two guys who had been at the shelter the previous evening came up and I ended up between them, silently marching one foot after another in the mountain’s deep mud. I felt like a pack mule.

We were nearing the highest point on the AT, as evidenced by the falling temperature. The high altitude and Fraser fir trees lent the area an alpine setting belying its comparatively southern geographical location. It was a pristine setting and gave impetus for a tired person to keep on humping.

Finally, the sign appeared pointing to Clingman’s Dome Observatory Tower. Sal was waiting there, and Scavenger soon arrived from behind. We were now at the highest point on the entire Appalachian Trail and very close to the highest point in the eastern United States.

A U.S. Senator from Tennessee, named Clingman, had maintained a long-running dispute with a professor from North Carolina, named Mitchell, over which state had the highest peak. Finally, both mountains were surveyed and the mountain in North Carolina was forty feet higher than Clingman’s Dome. So Professor Mitchell had won, but, lo and behold, fell to his death from a cliff on the mountain bearing his name.