Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  I put on every ounce of clothing I had, which was six layers in all, including two sets of long johns. Over the next couple hours I tried every position I knew to get warm, but nothing succeeded. Compounding my misery were the menacing creatures I imagined in every shadow and sound in the black as pitch night. My food bag was in my backpack, right next to my legs, which could be inviting to a bear. Then there was my new bogeyman to worry about, wild boars. What in the hell am I doing out here?

  I finally remembered that in my backpack was an item I picked up as an afterthought at REI. It was an emergency space blanket that weighs only four ounces. The package showed a shivering, desperate-looking man out in the woods with this blanket wrapped around him. It had seemed like a pretty good bet for four ounces. Lyle Wilson, the outfitter back at Neel’s Gap, had urged me to throw it out, but I uncharacteristically asserted that I would keep it as an ace-in-the hole for the worst conditions. So, here deep in the mountains, in a state of great distress, I finally pulled it out of the box and slipped between the aluminum foil layers. The idea is that the aluminum foil traps the body heat, and indeed it seemed to be working. It helped turn a disastrous night into merely a bad one as I was able to relax my muscles and even sleep some.

  A sign on the bulletin board read:

  CAREFUL!

  BLACK BEAR SEEN BETWEEN HERE

  AND SILER BALD SHELTER

  STOLE A HIKER’S BACKPACK

  SHOWS NO SIGN OF FEAR OF HUMANS

  As I started the climb out of the gap and up Indian Mountain along came Seth from behind after another early start. “Really comforting sign back there, huh” he said, “and we have to worry about that bear for the next twenty-six miles until Siler’s Bald.”

  I climbed to the top of Indian Mountain and saw an overall-clad sixty-ish fellow, called Billy Goat. Listless from such a poor night’s sleep and overwhelmed by the nighttime cold in the mountains, I sat there in the shelter sullenly chatting with this stranger. Morale was running dangerously low. My fitness for the entire enterprise was being called into question. Soon, it became clear that it was time for a bowel movement. This was one of the few shelters on the trail without a privy—the small outhouses built by the local trail clubs. After fumbling through my backpack I pulled out some “Wipes” and asked Billy Goat if he was familiar with them.

  Sensing that I was a bit uneasy with the task ahead he lit up and said, “Yes, they’re great.” I nodded dutifully, when he added, “You can wash your face, your hands, and your rear end with one wipe. The order is what’s important.”

  Never was any advice more appreciated.

  After sixteen miles for the day I arrived at USFS 67 and looked around for the trail. It appeared that it might go up the dirt forest road when I spotted a blaze on the steep embankment in front of me. This was Albert Mountain. In a preview of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, I started scrambling up the boulders using all fours. Lucky breaks have a way of evening out; this could have been outright dangerous on a bad-weather day. In fact there had to be hikers who flat out wouldn’t be able to make it up this single section.

  Soon I was at Big Spring Shelter, and was reunited with several friendly faces, including Scottie Too Lite. After being deep in the dumps so early on in the day, my spirits immediately soared. I was even considering trying to sleep in the shelter for the first time, despite ample warnings about mice. “What’s the status on these shelters?” I asked.

  “Expect something between a Swiss chalet and an outhouse,” Scottie Too Lite replied.

  The AT shelters are decidedly rough-hewn, three-sided structures that are open on the front side. Their wooden sleeping platforms sleep anywhere from four to twenty-five, and availability is on a first-come basis. They are quite popular, especially with thru-hikers, despite the hazard of serial mice-infestation. They run on average about every ten miles. Many hikers religiously planned their hiking schedules to arrive at a shelter late in the day, and the spirit of camaraderie tended to be high as everybody recounted their day’s toils.

  “This is the area where Eric Rudolph hid from police for years after bombing the Atlanta Olympics,” Pockets said. “He was even on the Appalachian Trail some of the time.”

  “How the hell could you ever catch somebody in mountains like this, anyway?” I remarked.

  “But remember the main reason they couldn’t find him,” Scottie Too Lite interjected. “He was a hero to all the hillfolk around here. Everybody helped him hide.”

  “Hey now, we’ve come a ways since John Wilkes Booth was given safe harbor after shooting Lincoln,” I protested.

  “We’re sure glad to finally hear it,” Scottie smiled. Fortunately, the stereotype of the backwoods, armed, militia-prone crackpot was not in much evidence on the AT.

  Sure enough, when darkness fell I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet seemingly doing gymnastics all over the rafters and under the sleeping platform. However, none of the creepy scenarios of mice on the forehead, or even worse, materialized. The shelter kept me shielded from the wind despite being open on one side, and I resolved to sleep in them more often.

  At Winding Stair Gap a mother and father were having an emotional farewell with their daughter, Tigress. They had planned to try to thru-hike with her, but the mother had been shocked by the mountainous terrain and dropped off after thirty-one miles at Neel’s Gap. Tigress had continued on with some others until meeting up with her family here at Winding Stair Gap on U.S. 64. Her mother was now making a final plea for her daughter to get off the trail, but her daughter was determined to continue. Tigress was a brown-haired, freckled, young woman in her mid-twenties with a distinctively innocent look about her. After chatting with them a bit she said emphatically, “Skywalker, will you please tell my parents I’ll be okay?”

  “She looks like a lot safer bet than me,” I said. “Have you hiked much, Tigress?”

  “Yes,” she emphasized. “I’m a wilderness therapist. I lead groups of recovering drug addicts on outdoor trips.” Her mother didn’t look convinced, but they had a tearful departure and Tigress headed off north alone.

  I ran into Tigress again a night later at Cold Spring Shelter after trooping all day alone. Far from looking threatened or out of sorts, Tigress seemed to be having the time of her life in the company of her all-male retinue.

  A jolly, confident, healthy-looking fella’ in his mid-twenties from Montana named Rooney was entertaining everyone at the shelter with his stories about his thru-hike the previous year.

  “Skywalker, the shelter only holds six,” Rooney said when he saw me looking around for an open spot to put my sleeping bag. “You can have my spot.”

  “That’s all right,” I responded, “I’ll just sleep at a right angle to all of you at the entrance to the shelter.” This was a group of folks I liked.

  The humor took a turn to the bawdy side. I told an obligatory southern incest joke, and there was demand for more. The entertainer in me won out. What the hell. We were in the middle of nowhere, and they seemed to love them.

  Captain Hook asked, “Is it really true, Skywalker, that they eat their young in the South?”

  “Only when we run out of possum pie and squirrel innards,” I responded.

  Then, out of nowhere, Rooney lit up with a spate of racist jokes. It came as a surprise to everyone; he seemed to be too upbeat and bright to wallow in such filth.

  “You can’t really be a racist, Rooney,” Tigress protested. “You have a full set of teeth.”

  It was a three thousand-foot, sharp drop-off from Wesser Bald to the Nantahala River. Even traversing the switchbacks, it was a rugged descent. Fortunately, I was part of a big group traveling down together. Hiking was often fulfilling, but a big, chatty group like this also made it fun.

  Scottie Too Lite and I shared a cabin at the Nantahala Outdoor Club and allowed Captain Hook to sleep in the loft. Hook was an eighteenyear-old, just out of high school who had been accepted to Harvard, but was delaying it for a semester to thru-hi
ke the AT.

  “How in the world could you pass up Harvard for the AT?” Scottie Too Lite wanted to know.

  “Everybody said I would learn more on the AT than in my first semester of college,” Captain Hook replied.

  Scottie Too Lite wowed several of us at dinner with details of his meticulous planning for the AT. He was optimistic at all times and equally voluble. One female hiker named Scholar claimed that one day she had been listening to him talk non-stop about every bit of trail minutiae to the point that she couldn’t take it anymore. She began to run from him. She swore that as she fled he ran after her talking nonstop.

  Scottie went to the pay phone at about nine o’clock to call his wife. Forty-five minutes later he came back ashen-faced.

  “Hey man,” Captain Hook said, “what happened?”

  Uncharacteristically terse, Scottie said, “My daughter in France.”

  “Oh no,” I said alarmed.

  “Well, she’s okay right this minute,” he said, “but I have to get off the trail.”

  Scottie was kept off the trail for more than a month, but didn’t give up. He got back on the trail and began racing all-out every day. But, on October 7 torrential rains made the trail impassable in Massachusetts and he spent several days waiting to cross a swollen, impassable stream. Finally, he had no choice but to give up on his dream. He’s now back in the computer business and wondering if he will ever get another shot at a thru-hike.

  We had been warned that the pull out of Nantahala would be the most difficult thus far. That alert, combined with a dire weather forecast, had me tense. Unfortunately, most of the group I had traveled with the previous day had dispersed.

  The first eight miles up to Cheoah Bald offered a net ascent of 3,300 feet. Almost immediately upon embarking, thunder began rattling in the distance and my gut tightened. The tendency in such situations is to hurry, which I tried to resist. Attempting to sprint up a mountain that long and steep was a hopeless enterprise.

  Big, cold rain drops began to pelt me, and the sky became a veritable pyrotechnics show. The conditions steadily worsened with the elevation. I saw a tarp set up very low to the ground, right in the middle of the trail. Squatting down I yelled inside, “Hello, dry person.”

  “Skywalker, is that you?” Seth’s voice came from parallel to the ground. “With your height you might want to look for somewhere to hide,” he yelled out.

  “I’ll see you at the shelter,” I said and hurried off.

  I had never thought my height made me much more vulnerable to lightning, despite many jokes over the years. But someone at the Appalachian Trail headquarters had told me that lightning (which travels at a decidedly brisk two hundred seventy thousand miles per hour and has the width of a pencil) was an underrated source of danger. I would later meet a hiker named Lightning Rod, who had twice been indirectly struck by lightning in previous years on the AT.

  But the one thing my height did make me vulnerable to was getting “clothes-lined.” In the rain I would wear my baseball cap with the bill pulled low and the hood of the marmot jacket pulled to my eyebrows. This reduced my line of vision to just a few feet. Many times in the rain I would be walking along, only to have my head ram into some low-lying limb. Every time it rained I worked on my technique to avoid such headers, but never completely solved the problem.

  As for trying to stay dry—forget it. All that expensive equipment we had purchased, with expert advice about how this or that piece would keep you from getting wet, ran into overwhelming reality on days like this. A hiker just had to become resigned to listening to the staccato patter of rain drops bouncing off synthetic equipment as your backpack, clothing, and persona became ever more water-logged.

  A couple hundred yards farther up the mountain someone called out, “Skywalker.”

  It was Tigress, hiding under some thick rhododendron bushes that lined the trail. Joining her, I asked “Do you think we should head back down the mountain? We’re heading to exposed areas.”

  “No, that’s not a good idea,” she said calmly. The minute there was a letup in the intensity of the rain we hightailed it to the Sassafras Gap Shelter and settled in for what would be a long, miserable afternoon.

  As the afternoon progressed, the shelter filled up, and the conversation was lively. One couple, Greenpeace and Greenleaf, were doing their doctoral theses in environmental science and couldn’t wait to get to the Smokies to view all the rare plant species there. Indeed, the southern Appalachians in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee are said to boast greater biodiversity than any deciduous forests in the world.

  “We’re from Asheville,” Greenpeace said. “It’s the San Francisco of the South.” The counterculture element on the trail was strong.

  Normally quite social, I sat curled up in the corner of the shelter, in a sullen mood. I have always been cold-natured, due to my tall, thin frame. Nonetheless, I had lived through ten Chicago winters. But the stark difference was that on frigid days there I always went inside at the end of the day. Out here I was stuck outside with neither the prospect of warmth, nor a good night’s sleep.

  As things stood I had only done 5.9 miles for the day, which was not a pace that would get me to Maine before winter.

  The next day was to be the coldest single day I experienced on the AT. It was a sharp climb to Cheoah Bald, and the visibility steadily worsened. The one thing I could see was a tarp set up right at the top of the bald, just ten feet from a steep dropoff! Is this person crazy or am I just a wimp?

  I practically ran to get off the exposed bald, but then it began to sleet. This brought out my worst phobias, and I hurried to catch up with Seth. Not having expected weather quite this bad, I had taken off my long johns before hiking, and didn’t want to slow down to put them on. This was a mistake; the same one I had made on Blue Mountain in Georgia.

  “The nice thing about sleet,” Seth said, “is that you don’t get wet.” The guidebook was wrong. The topography in this section was ferocious and made all the more difficult by the high winds buffeting us. Once again I was urinating every fifteen minutes. “Looks like you’re hypothermic again,” Seth noted in half droll, half-serious fashion.

  We finally descended steeply into Steccoah Gap. But the powerful wind howling through the gap made it impossible to take the usual break before beginning the climb out of the gap.

  The ATC guidebook didn’t even mention a climb out of Steccoah Gap, which was a grievous oversight. Had I known what lay immediately ahead I might have tried to hitchhike somewhere on the highway that runs through the gap. The trail ran straight up the mountain, with the wind tearing at me from the west. It was impossible to keep up with Seth as he galloped ahead. That was a bad sign for the simple reason that I had usually outpaced him during the first couple weeks on the trail.

  On the steep ascent I ran into Ken and Ruth, a middle-aged couple from Michigan. Ruth was reed-thin and diminutive, while Ken had a strong, ruddy complexion and a powerful gait. As I passed by he was cheerleading her with the likes of, “Yes, honey. You’re the one. This is your trail.” Ruth, meanwhile, had a stricken, exasperated look. She also appeared to be the only person on the trail colder than I was.

  Coming the opposite direction, down the mountain, I made out the face of Uncle Charlie. He had passed by the shelter the previous day and then announced in his salt-and-vinegar style that he was going to continue despite the weather.

  “Uncle Charlie,” I called out as he approached, “looks like you’ve found the best direction to hike this bloody mountain.”

  After letting out a blue streak of expletives, he said defiantly, “Fuck this. I’m going back to Florida.”

  As he quickly disappeared into the fog I began to wonder if I shouldn’t at least follow him down to the road. Instead, I stopped to quickly eat a Pop Tart. Ken and Ruth trudged past, and I handed them each a piece as they grunted thanks between gasps of breath.

  After nine miles I finally arrived at Brown Fork Gap Shelter, which had be
en my intended destination the previous day. It was sleeting again and Seth was lying there in his sleeping bag. I quickly pulled mine out and jumped in to preserve my body temperature, but the shelter was exposed to the cutting wind. It was useless. The discussion all around was whether to risk going, but staying there in that kind of cold also seemed like a risk to me. I was seriously considering retracing the 2.5 miles I had just climbed to get back to the road.

  Ken was urging Ruth to continue. She looked as enthusiastic about heading out as she would have over the prospect of contracting leprosy. Her hands were so cold, even wearing mittens, that Ken had to buckle up her backpack. “We’ll be okay, honey,” he said as he literally physically aided her forward progress back to the trail. (Their game effort lasted another 150 miles).

  One way or another I had to get out of there as well. Bidding Seth goodbye, I retraced the side trail on which the shelter lay to get back to the AT. Up to within five feet of arriving at the AT I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to take a left to go back down the mountain I had just climbed or take a right and go forward.

  I turned right and continued north, but once again I wondered if my life was at risk from exposure. It’s unnatural to do any strenuous physical activity without breathing through your mouth. However, the one useful thing I had taken away from two years as a feckless kung-fu student back in Chicago was how much energy a person can save by breathing through the nose. It helps relax the muscles and regulates the energy flow. As I bore into the howling winds and sleet, focusing on this efficient breathing technique helped relieve my anxiety, despite the trail being abandoned. After several miles of roller-coaster terrain I was elated to come across Yellow Creek Mountain Road.