Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  I walked three miles down it without seeing a soul, until the well-known Hike Inn came into view. Jeff and Nancy Hoch offered me a room and a ride into town to resupply.

  Out in the parking lot to my surprise were Tigress, Greenpeace, and Greenleaf. They had gotten off back at Steccoah Gap and hitchhiked here. That was ironic considering that I had been treated at the shelter the previous evening as some sort of hypothermic freak show, but lasted longer in the diabolical weather today than they had. That evening I savored one glass of ice water after another without ever urinating—a sure sign of deep dehydration.

  I awoke buoyant at the Hike Inn, after my first good night’s sleep on the trail. Yesterday’s gruesome-but-successful march in adverse conditions seemed like a big step forward mentally. Jeff drove me back to the trailhead to hike the remaining seven miles to Fontana Dam.

  I came upon Seth and Rooney in the Cable Gap Shelter after less than a mile. Both had the grizzled look of having been in the woods; they were poorly fed, cold, wet, and were moaning about everything. I, on the other hand, was clean, well-shaven, well-fed, warm, and upbeat. The tables had been turned on them, and in unison they exclaimed, “Asshole,” when I walked up. We started hiking, and I noticed I had regained my speed.

  At the top of the mountain Fontana Dam came into full focus. Built by the TVA during the Depression, it is the largest dam east of the Mississippi, and the view is spectacular.

  When we got to the dam there was a booth set up to get a free permit to enter Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

  Chapter 5

  Smoky Mountain National Park, which is spaced out on both sides of the North Carolina-Tennessee border, is the most visited national park (ten million annual visitors) in the United States. The Smokies are labeled the second wettest place in America, and are especially renowned among AT thru-hikers because this is where the trail passes through its very highest elevations. Due to the sudden upward thrust in elevation out of the Tennessee Valley the weather here in April is utterly unpredictable—in the spring it rains twenty out of thirty days in these parts. Many experts suggest hikers carefully plan their entrance into the Smokies—the same advice given for the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

  Sal Paradise and Scavenger arrived at the Fontana Dam Shelter—affectionately known as the Fontana Hilton—and immediately began marveling at this piece of trail handiwork which includes a heated shower among its amenities. Sal, a lanky 6’5” Wisconsinite, was making his second attempt at a thru-hike after being injured in Virginia the previous year. He was being sponsored on the trail by his hometown Lutheran Church. We wandered down to the Fontana Dam Visitor’s Center, where a bulletin board had the weather forecast.

  “Rain,” Sal said calmly upon returning. “I’m taking today off.”

  “I’ll second that,” his hiking partner, Scavenger, replied.

  “I’ll never make it to Maine at this rate,” I said in anguish.

  “Don’t worry about miles at this stage,” Sal intervened. “Virginia’s a twenty-mile superhighway.” I was modestly assuaged, although it was worth noting the irony that he had dropped off in Virginia the previous year.

  At 11:30 that morning Sal and I went up to the bridge of Fontana Dam, which the trail runs right over. I spent the next two hours in Hamlet mode over whether to head into the Smokies.

  I still didn’t think I was going to head in this afternoon, until Sal noted an area of blue sky poking through the clouds. This was like a shot of adrenaline, and I jumped up to go retrieve my backpack. “Come on, Sal,” I said with sudden urgency. “We can make Mollie’s Ridge Shelter before dark.”

  But Sal replied, “You never know if it’s one of those sucker blue spots. I’m waiting for tomorrow.”

  So off I went, alone and uncertain, into the Smokies.

  It was a three thousand-foot climb and 12.4 miles to Mollie’s Ridge Shelter. My work was cut out for me.

  Further, to be perfectly honest, I was worried about bears. Except for a brief respite in southern Pennsylvania the possibility of bear encounters extends throughout the entire AT. But Smoky Mountain National Park, along with Shenandoah National Park and New Jersey, is one of three places on the AT with the highest concentration of bears. Practically everybody who has ever hiked in the Smokies seemed to have some story of a bear encounter to relate. I had discreetly questioned everyone I could about bears and the responses ran the gamut from “Don’t worry. All you will ever see is the back of them as they are running away,” to “You just don’t really know what the hell a bear is gonna do.”

  On the way up Shuckstack Mountain I heard thunder, and immediately the old phobias surfaced again. Then, it began to drizzle. Rain changes everything, especially at high elevations. I could have been back at Fontana Dam, warm and dry, waiting for tomorrow, when the weather report looked much more favorable. Instead, I was unnecessarily headed out into cold, rain, and misery. Such are the maudlin sentiments of the novice hiker.

  The rain worsened. As I stopped to add another layer of clothing before summitting Shuckstack Mountain, a couple middle-aged section hikers passed headed toward Fontana Dam. “How far away is the top of Shuckstack?” I asked.

  “It’s only about a mile, but pretty steep,” he half-shouted through the wind and rain. Then, he added, “The weather is kinda’ nasty up there.”

  “I believe it,” I replied. “You’ve got a solid-downhill cakewalk back to Fontana Dam.”

  “Music to our ears,” one replied, and they hustled on eagerly. I looked back at them enviously and started to trudge on. Then, reasoning that the absolutely single biggest problem I had faced thus far was clearing mountaintops in heavy wind and rain, I made a split-second decision to cut my losses. Hurrying back down the mountain I caught up with the trailing hiker. After a bit of chatter I asked if they could give me a ride into Fontana Village when they reached the bottom of the mountain. They readily agreed, and as we continued down the mountain I tallied my losses. I had climbed about four miles, and thus was going to have walked eight miles at the end of the day with no forward progress to show for it. My equipment and clothes would be soaked, and it was another blow to my confidence.

  They dropped me off in Fontana Village, which was a summer resort with a deep discount on off-season rooms. After a warm shower I entered the dining room and saw Sal Paradise and Scavenger enjoying a buffet dinner. “Have you decided to turn around and hike back home to Georgia?” Sal asked incredulously

  The nice thing about having come to long-distance hiking so late in life is that I had no hiker ego. So I proceeded to describe my latest mishap.

  “Skywalker, just stay with us; we’ll get you through the Smokies in one piece” Scavenger said with a confidence belying his mere nineteen years.

  “And the weather is supposed to be good the next few days,” Sal added.

  So off I went the next day into the Great Smoky Mountains for a second time—and alone again because Sal Paradise and Scavenger had evacuated the Fontana Hilton when I passed by. The weather was pretty good at the outset, but, once again, the higher I went the worse it looked. The trail climbed steadily for miles to reach Doe Knob and the crest of the Smokies. At this point the AT maintains high elevations for the next sixty miles. And this was where the wind picked up and sleet began pelting me. I had turned around the previous day hoping for good weather this day. More regrets.

  When I finally arrived at Mollies Ridge Shelter on my second attempt to reach it, Sal Paradise, Scavenger, and others were starting a fire, even though it was only about two in the afternoon. “Sal, it doesn’t appear that you have a career as a weather forecaster,” I needled him.

  Scavenger, jumping into the fray, retorted, “You could have turned around and gone back to Fontana Dam again.” TouchŽ for Scavenger.

  “Ya’ll aren’t stopping here, are ya’?” I asked.

  “No,” Sal assured me. “We’re just warming up.”

  But an hour later the wind and sleet had become pr
edominant, and there was no sign of progress on anybody’s part. The shelter was beginning to fill up, and it seemed prudent to claim a spot. Because of heavy use the shelters in the Smokies are made of concrete, rather than the typical rickety wooden structures. This shelter had an upper and lower deck and given my longstanding habit of nocturnal urinations, the lower deck seemed a better choice. But even that would be problematic because the upper deck is only about three feet above the lower-deck floor.

  Once again, the biggest problem would be staying warm. Scavenger, appropriately, was in charge of scavenging for wood to build a fire. The bigger logs were wet, rendering them useless unless someone could break them apart. “Hey, SkyWalker,” somebody called out. “This shouldn’t be any problem for you with that wide arc.”

  I put on my mittens and started heaving wet logs away against a stump.

  “Skywalker is from the South,” someone commented. “Surely he’s lifted many a bale of cotton.”

  “Then why aren’t those logs cracking apart crisply,” Scavenger asked skeptically.

  Right then a rambunctious thru-hiking foursome arrived at the shelter and immediately one of the two males ran over and started flailing logs wildly at the stump. Everybody was shouting, “Come on, Joe, you’re the man.” Finally, he achieved a breakthrough, to great applause.

  Joe was from Ireland, and he was hiking with another Irishman, Guiness. Two girls were with them. One was O’Connor, a short, leggy speedster and former New York state junior tennis champion who had her head shaved like the singer Sinead O’Connor. The other was Thumper, a muscular New Hampshirite who had worked as a cook at the international station in Antarctica the previous year.

  I gloomily sat in the corner, munching on cold bagels and peanut butter as everybody else enthusiastically went about cooking with their stoves. Once again it seemed I had on more clothes than anybody, but was colder than everybody. It was beginning to dawn on me just what a long, difficult slog the Smokies were going to be.

  By nightfall the shelter, with a capacity of sixteen, held at least twenty. Items from backpacks to wet clothes were hung out to dry all over the shelter. A quiet-spoken couple on their honeymoon broke an impasse over the last couple possible spots by volunteering to camp outside.

  My sleeping bag and pad were sandwiched between Sal Paradise and the wall, and I warned him I wouldn’t be able to sleep through the night in this cold weather.

  “What’s your sleeping bag rated?” Sal wanted to know.

  “Fifteen degrees,” I answered. Everybody was constantly touting their sleeping bag ratings. But after shivering through so many nights I had come to the conclusion that the rating is the temperature up to which the bag will keep you alive, not the temperature at which you can sleep.

  With six layers up top and two sets of long-johns for my lower body, I was warm in my down sleeping bag. But when I woke up to visit the bushes the wind was howling overwhelmingly through the mountain passes. The power of nature both awed and terrified me. Even though the shelter was frigid at least it provided protection from the wind, and I honestly wondered if I could make it through a night like this without a spot in there.

  I was damn glad to see the first shade of light and quickly packed up and headed out on the trail. The sun was beginning to appear over the horizon, so it looked like a chance to make a lot of miles after the previous day’s weather-shortened hike. Russell Field Shelter was only a few miles up the trail. When I arrived a couple of the inhabitants from the previous evening were still there.

  “Hey,” I said. “Did ya’ll have a full house last night?”

  “No,” one hiker wearily replied. “But that didn’t keep a black bear standing on her hind legs from clawing at the grilled fence during the night.” It occurred to me, not for the first or last time, that I could have run into either this or some other bear during a midnight urination.

  Animal life in the Smokies is a rich topic. After being almost exterminated early in the last century bears have made a stunning comeback. It’s estimated that more than a thousand bears currently live and eat in the park. They are so numerous that park officials have constructed grilled fences on the shelters to keep them out.

  Unlike the bear population, the wolf population in the park was completely exterminated by hunters early last century. With this top predator eliminated, small and medium-sized animals, ranging from deer to raccoon to mice, now saturate the park.

  Another shock to the ecosystem occurred in the 1920s, when hunting clubs released Russian wild boars, weighing up to four hundred pounds, into the southern Appalachians. This was the sport of European royalty and attracted throngs of hunters from across the Atlantic.

  But soon after the hunting clubs introduced the boars, the National Park Service realized they had badly miscalculated. Boars feed voraciously on the native vegetation, and most of their diet consists of things they have to dig up. They use their enormous power to rototill the forest floor, thus wreaking havoc on the food supply of other animals.

  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 go
t 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.