Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (14 page)

“Yes, yes, just go up to the bridge. It’s another mile or so.” Finally, after hiking uphill another mile, a bridge came into view. I had been walking straight up this highway for about four miles. At the bridge I finally saw a painted white blaze. My attitude was that whatever the hell had happened, and I honestly didn’t know, I was at least on the trail now and had a long hike ahead.

I greatly preferred company on the trail, but didn’t have any today. I walked all the way up to the Rich Mountain Fire Tower before noticing there weren’t any blazes, and had to worriedly retrace my steps back down to find where I had missed a turn. At Allen Gap, the fifteen-mile mark for the day, I finally saw another hiker and began chatting with him. He told me about a hostel on a dirt road about one and a half miles up the trail. This lifted my somewhat fragile morale, and I bounded on, planning to stay there. After about a mile I began looking; after one and a half miles I became worried; and after two miles I assumed I had missed it. This kind of thing was disheartening and it contributed to my lingering concerns that I was still somewhat illegitimate as a hiker, with little orientation toward critical aspects of the outdoor lifestyle. But the one thing I did pretty well was walk, and the Little Laurel Shelter finally came into view, 19.6 miles from where I had started.

Gus, a nice fellow with a handlebar mustache, was there. I had last seen him three nights before at the Roaring Fork Shelter when he offered me some noodles, and he did so again.

“Boy, Hot Springs is a fabulous trail town, isn’t it?” I remarked.

“I don’t like towns,” he responded to my surprise. “I stopped at the grocery store passing through town and headed on.”

“You’re a real hiker, Gus,” I responded. “The rest of us are just pretenders.”

But actually, my true feelings were different. The AT is well developed at this point, with hiker hostels, re-supply points, and hiker-friendly rural towns, all of which facilitated making friends and finding hiking partners. It is now normal to start off alone with the idea of meeting people along the way. And I knew very few hikers who didn’t look forward—sometimes to the point of craving—to arriving in one of these backwater trail towns after several days out in the wilderness. The current balance seems just right.

G.I. Joe rolled in at dusk. He, of course, had been an early contender in the Tanya sweepstakes before mysteriously disappearing, either from discouragement or good judgment. “You were wise to cut your losses with that girl the other day,” I ventured. “She ended up being a bad bet.”

“Oh, I never had the least interest in her,” he said reflexively.

I didn’t know him well enough to kid him (and he was kind of big), but it sure hadn’t looked that way at the time.

“Did you go to Iraq?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just got back,” he replied. “I’m out here getting back on my feet.”

“By the way,” I said chattily, “the first few miles up that highway today were a nightmare. I didn’t think the AT had any three- or four-mile roadwalks.”

“What are you talking about?” G.I. Joe asked. “You didn’t walk for miles straight up the highway to get to that bridge?” I asked.

“No way,” he said. “The trail turned right on the outskirts of Hot Springs and followed the ridgeline for five miles.” Then in disbelief he asked, “You walked up the road?”

I defensively recounted what had happened.

“That’s an amazing story,” he said.

I sat there, glumly trying to decide if this blunder marred my whole dream of being a thru-hiker. However, I had made good mileage that day in spite of getting lost and, for once, didn’t lie shivering throughout the night. I even got something approaching a real night’s sleep.

It was a good thing I did because the next day I hiked alone from dawn until dusk. The trail ran for a half mile over Blackstack Cliffs, a jagged boulder field along a ridgeline. It was the first “rock scrambling” (having to move on all fours) for a prolonged period of time. All day I had debated whether I could make it to Hogback Ridge Shelter—a hike that included a two thousand-foot climb late in the day. Needless to say, I was elated when the shelter finally came into view. It was a twenty-one and three-tenths-mile day, the longest yet.

G.I. Joe had arrived there ahead of me and was reunited with three of the people who had tried to purloin our bathroom plan back in the Smokies. On the face of it the four of them were polite, but their body language told a different story. “Well, Skywalker,” G.I. Joe wanted to know, “did you find any more roads to take today.” The others laughed knowingly; it was quite clear the group had been fully briefed on my previous day’s mishap.

Then more pointedly he asked, “What did you think of Blackstack Cliffs?” His tone was subtly insinuating, and it occurred to me that maybe he had been telling the others that I had “blue-blazed.” Blue-blazing refers to someone who took a blue-blazed side trail around a difficult part. Indeed, Blackstack Cliffs has a bad weather trail to avoid having to scramble over the exposed rocks in high winds and rain. But, I hadn’t taken it, and it bothered me not a little that he might have told the others I had. That might sound like false pride, but it struck straight at the heart of what being a thru-hiker is all about. I resolved then and there that if I managed to make it all the way to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine I would go back to Hot Springs and walk that five-mile section I had inadvertently missed yesterday.

I was determined to make the paces with this group the next day to show I wasn’t a fraud. It again entailed a dawn-to-dusk hike, and the trail went over Big Bald Mountain at 5,500 feet. The weather was gorgeous for the third straight day, but I was to see this can be a two-edged sword. For the first time on the AT water became an issue. As important as food is to a hiker, water is even more important.

Everybody was asking about water on this hot, sunny day. But there weren’t any springs or high-altitude sources of water which thru-hikers often drink straight up. We were forced to draw from the least desirable source of water—streams running at the bottom of mountains in the “gaps” or “notches.” This water can be contaminated by either human activity or animal feces. Unlucky users can contract giardia, an intestinal infection that is the bane of long-distance hikers. Stories abounded of hikers sidelined by this malady.

At the last minute, before beginning in April, I had cast aside my newly purchased filter, which is considered the safest option, in favor of chemical tablets. It saved me one pound. Again, the Warren Doyle influence was at work. Warren, after all, doesn’t use tablets or a filter. But in his class he admitted that he had once contracted giardia, and it had taken him
seven years
to get rid of it!

The rule of thumb was that a hiker should leave a water source with two full liters, and to be on high alert anytime you fall below one liter. For the first time since that godawful fourth day on the trail I fell below one liter. I was hot and thirsty, and water dominated my thoughts. I kept crossing dried up streams that showed up in the data book as a water source.

I passed a man and woman of approximately sixty-five and thirty-five years old, respectively. He had an erect, martial bearing, and trim physique, while she was rather scantily clad. “Have you seen any water?” she gasped.

“Not hardly,” I said dispirited. “And I’ve been looking.”

She quickly turned away in disgust before I could elaborate, while the man stood by stoically. I soon learned the man was Seiko, and this was his new girlfriend. Seiko was known for having hiked anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 miles on the AT, depending on who you talked to. Some even said he lived on the trail.

“I passed by you at two o’clock asleep in the shelter last night,” he said to my surprise.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said incredulously. “How did you decide to do that?”

“With the heat and lack of water yesterday night-hiking was a no-brainer,” he responded.

It was no surprise that somebody with twenty thousand miles under his belt had a few arrows in his quiver the rest of us didn’t have. It also was worth noting his graceful, confident stride despite his relatively advanced age.

Finally, the trail dropped down steeply to Spivey Gap, which U.S. Highway 19W ran through. A stream flowed, albeit slowly. I gulped down the remaining half-liter of the water I previously had, and scooped two cloudy liters of water out of this stream. If nothing else appeared I would have to treat this water with chemicals and drink it. But sure enough, up the next mountain was a stream with white rapids tumbling over rocks. I poured out the two cloudy liters and filled up with this presumably higher-quality water.

The miles weren’t coming easily on this day, and I was tired. On a good day I would stop once every three miles, but on a day like this I found myself stopping every mile for a quick swallow of water and a handful of GORP. Finally, I came up on No Business Knob Shelter which made 61.5 miles in three days.
I’m doing better
.

An attractive blondish, reed-thin woman in her late forties was there setting up camp. “Hey, I’m Wrongway Grace,” she said. “I’m directionally challenged.”

“What is directionally challenged?” I wondered.

“I have a history of hiking the wrong way,” she said plainly. Her self-deprecating tone made for delightful company, especially after feeling like the odd man out in the previous night’s shelter. Wrongway Grace was about ten years into what was shaping up to be a twenty-year AT section hike. She would have nothing to do with shelters because of an abhorrence of mice and other rodents, and dutifully set up her tent each night. This was in spite of her section hike the previous year when, in Shenandoah National Park, a bear had entered the far end of her tent and snatched her food bag out her backpack. “It was scary,” she said.

“No kidding,” I replied.

Minnie, a nurse from Michigan who had been with the group the previous evening, arrived soon after I did. “Those three guys are such wimps,” she said scornfully. “They didn’t want to do this last climb and are going to sleep down by the road.”

“Without you around, Minnie,” I said delightedly, “who can police them so they don’t blue blaze or yellow blaze (take the highway).”

The strings—with cans halfway down—hanging from the shelter roofs are supposed to keep mice from crawling into your food bag. As Minnie and I lay in our sleeping bags she said, “Hey, what’s that?”

Jumping up, I yelled “How the hell did that mouse get to my food bag?” The mouse’s head was burrowing into the food bag. I grabbed my hiking pole and swatted the back end of the mouse a good fifteen feet in the air. I often heard stories of hikers killing mice and even rattlesnakes and copperheads with their hiking sticks, but this was my best effort. Minnie laughed hysterically. I was in a light mood as well, and would look back on this rugged three-day, sixty-one-mile hike as the turning point for me.

Chapter 8

T
he fifty-mile stretch from the gorge of the Nolichucky River through the mountains in northwestern North Carolina and northeastern Tennesee is probably the class of the trail before New Hampshire and Maine. It is gorgeous and very difficult. The trail climbs three thousand feet to a big, grassy area aptly known as Beauty Spot. Springtime’s blushing beauty was at last revealing itself at these higher elevations. WrongWay Grace only slightly diminished the grandeur of it all by remarking, “If only my boyfriend were here.”

When we descended to Beauty Spot Gap where several people were camping for the evening, including sixty-eight-year-old Steady Eddy from Minnesota, Grace said, “This looks like a nice spot for the evening.” I looked over and saw what appeared to be the rare perfect spot in a grassy meadow between two trees the right distance apart for a tarp. But it was only five thirty.