Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  “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

  The 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.

  “Grace,” I said, “we can make it up Unaka Mountain to the Cherry Gap Shelter before dark. It’s about five miles.”

  “I’m quite comfortable right here, thank you,” she replied securely.

  She had done eleven miles for the day, mostly uphill, which is quite respectable for a section-hiker. But as a thru-hiker I had to be loyal to my miles more than even an enjoyable hiking partner. Thus, WrongWay Grace, Steady Eddie and I said our goodbyes. I didn’t see her again and missed her company. I also didn’t expect to see Steady Eddie again as he lay there smiling in his sleeping bag after a day of climbing. But that would prove to be a very bad underestimation.

  AT thru-hikers come together suddenly and spontaneously. Hiking groups just form based on necessity. I had to leave behind some people I enjoyed, and others left me behind based on a survival of the fittest mentality—a kind of “enjoyed it, but we aren’t waiting.”

  When the Cherry Gap Shelter came into view at dusk, the shelter was packed and I immediately went to work looking for a place to set up my tarp. I struggled with various formations, but succeeded in none of them. After cursing myself for switching a tent out for this tarp I finally just threw my sleeping bag down on the ground to attempt sleeping “cowboy style.”

  A young couple I hadn’t yet seen was watching me flail around. He looked to be in his early thirties, short and rather stocky. With his square cut jaw and dark, brown beard he even resembled a younger version of Ulysses S. Grant. She appeared a good bit younger, and with her athletic physique and doe eyes, was extremely attractive. “May I assist you with that tarp?” he asked in his soft-spoken, working-man’s style.

  “No,” I answered, slightly embarrassed. “It’s not supposed to rain.”

  He introduced himself as Whitewater (he’s an expert kayaker). The girl, his wife, had the trail name of Nurse Ratchet.

  “Now there was a hell-bent lady named Nurse Ratchet in the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said, “but surely that’s not a proper characterization of you,” I stated.

  “Well, wait til’ you get to know me better,” she replied.

  Indeed I would get to know them quite well, and we would end up hiking together a good part of the next 1,200 miles. And when we did get to know each other better Nurse Ratchet admitted that on this first night when she saw me helplessly attempting to set up my tarp she didn’t give me a snowball’s chance in hell of making it all the way to Maine.

  I slept like crap, and decided in the future I should leave sleeping cowboy style to cowboys. I was up and off at first light. One problem with beating everybody on the trail in the morning is that you get plastered with spider webs, although I had this problem practically every day due to my height. This particular day was to be a tremendous challenge in topography and miles. After 7.6 miles I stopped for a break at the Clyde Smith Shelter. Nickie NOBO (Northbound), foul mouth and all, rolled in with a couple other guys and immediately his testosterone started acting up again.

  “I’m going to beat the bleep out of this Crocker asshole that keeps carving, ‘One step at a time—Crocker,’ in every shelter,” he threatened. Then looking around he raged, “Holy bleep, it’s bleeping hot out here, today. It feels like a bleeping inferno.”

  Mark, a mild-mannered Indiana biologist, whispered, “This guy has a five-word vocabulary and three of the words are fuck.”

  The hot topic along the trail was strategies for dealing with hot weather. The consensus was you needed to take a few hours off in the middle of the day and double or triple your water intake. I noted the irony that now everyone seemed to be obsessing with hot weather the way I had obsessed with cold weather the first month. With that I jumped up and headed off, leaving these “hyperthermia freaks” to vent themselves.

  From here, the trail dropped off one thousand feet to Hughes Gap and then ascended 2,300 feet up Roan Mountain. It was an interesting progression from typical hardwood southern forest up to balsam-fir “Christmas tree” forest, and proved to be an early taste of alpine hiking in New Hampshire and Maine. The climb was steep to the summit, one of the high points in the southern Appalachians. Occasionally, it required moving on all fours, and it was times like this that some hikers, including me on this occasion, question their fitness and capacity for the entire enterprise. But whether it was the Almighty’s intelligent design or prescient planning by the trail designers, the AT often seemed to let up at just the point when it began to feel impossible to continue.

  Finally, the trail topped out at Roan High Bluff, an open, windswept meadow with a Scottish Highlands feel. Then it winds around the shoulder of the mountain and finally comes up on the Roan High Knob Shelter. At six thousand two hundred eighty-five feet it is the most elevated shelter on the entire AT.

  This was my original destination for the evening. But when I opened the door and poked my head in it became clear that at this elevation, even this rare four-sided shelter would be cold. I resolved to move on to a lower elevation.

  I had thought it was straight down to the next shelter, but couldn’t have been more mistaken. The AT crosses five summits greater than fifty-four hundred feet over the next dozen miles. It traverses open, grassy balds offering spectacular views in all directions. Of course, in foul weather it would have been outright treacherous. Damn, North Carolina (and parts of Tennessee) was tough as hell.

  My heart was set on reaching the Yellow OverMountain Shelter, a converted farmhouse. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and I was running on fumes when I finally saw the sign to the OverMountain Shelter, which was three-tenths miles off the trail. It was my single-best effort as a hiker. I had literally hiked the entire day. I wondered if the two-story farmhouse/shelter would be empty. Nobody from the previous night’s shelter was likely to have traveled the 21.1 miles over this steep topography. Upon turning the corner I saw the lone figure of Seth sitting there on the first deck. My mood jumped from good to great.

  “Skywalker,” he said merrily. “I saw Justin today and we wondered whether
you were still out here.”

  “And what was the verdict?” I responded.

  “Well, we didn’t know how far you’d go after the abandoned backpack incident,” he said diplomatically.

  “How is Justin?” I asked.

  “Did you hear he got bluff-charged by a bear?” Seth said.

  “What the hell is a bluff-charge?” I quickly asked.

  “The bear charges you, but pulls up short.”

  “And what are you supposed to do?”

  “Hold your ground,” Seth said smiling.

  “I’m kinda’ disappointed I haven’t seen a bear yet,” Seth added sincerely.

  “That makes one of us,” I retorted.

  The view out into the valley at sunset was gorgeous, and we sat there taking it in. Bill Bryson had written about the low-level ecstasy that hiking the AT affords, but which is so lacking in America’s sensationalistic, hyper-materialistic culture. Indeed, after hiking all day I was in a good mood almost every night, as long as I could get warm. It was that priceless feeling of having done a good day’s work. “Man, this whole AT is great, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Seth sighed. “But I’m actually thinking about getting off in Damascus.”

  “Aw come on, Seth” I responded. “You were the closest thing to a sure bet that I saw in Georgia. And I remember how disappointed you were about not going all the way last year.” “I get bored and depressed out here,” he said quietly. “And wait ’til Virginia. It goes on forever.”

  “I honestly look at it as an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I said. “This is the kind of thing you’ll be reminiscing fondly about when you’re ninety years old in a wheelchair in a nursing home while crapping all over yourself.”

  “Hikers are demanding,” one hostel owner told me. “They have to be taken to the grocery store, the post office, the Laundromat, everywhere. And most of them are half-broke. To top it off they eat like cannibals and smell like rendered cats.”

  The owner of the Mountain View Hostel took me to the grocery store to re-supply. When we returned, Whitewater, Nurse Ratchet, their hiking companion Mark, and Air Puppy were waiting on the front lawn. Air Puppy, an early twenty-ish, innocent-looking hiker from New Hampshire, approached the owner in what I would soon learn was his trademark helpless manner and asked, “Would you mind if I did work for stay?”

  The owner agreed and sent him over to work on trimming the bushes. A few minutes later Air Puppy approached the owner again with a pitiful look on his face and said, “I’m sorry. I’m allergic to poison ivy.” The owner grunted and looked around for something else for Air Puppy to do. But Air Puppy just went inside the hostel and proceeded to take over the sofa, the television, the radio, and just about everything else inside.

  I wandered outside to get away from him when Flying Pig, a burly, soft-spoken math teacher from Pennsylvania, approached me. “I don’t know if you’re aware,” he said in a hushed voice, “but there have been some rumors that this Air Puppy guy might have stolen some things from other hikers. It all came to a head at Miss Janet’s hostel back in Erwin. She actually had to hold some guys off from beating the hell out of him.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that, but didn’t know who it was,” I said alarmed.

  I went to bed that night bothered by Air Puppy and worried about the ski pole (used for balance) I had left in Outrider’s truck. I had chosen a spot up in the loft, in order to maximize the distance between Air Puppy and me. Then, suddenly, I heard some quiet steps coming up the ladder to the second floor loft. “Jesus Christ,” I thought. “Is this guy really that brazen?”

  But it wasn’t Air Puppy. It was Outrider. “Skywalker, you left your ski pole in the back of my trunk,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I responded. “But when did you realize it?”

  “When I got to Damascus and unloaded Seth’s backpack.”

  “Well, for Godsakes, I hope you didn’t come all the way back from Damascus just to deliver this,” I said amazed.

  He mumbled an answer that made me think he had done just that. I went to sleep, swept up with gratitude.

  “Boy, I’ve been waiting for this opportunity,” Mark, a biologist from Indiana who couldn’t stand Air Puppy, said eagerly. “I’ve tried speeding up, slowing down, even taking a day off, and still haven’t been able to shake him. But today I’m gonna’ haul ass and lose him for all time.” We had all been packing up to go back to the trail after a hiker-sized breakfast when the owner had diplomatically asked Air Puppy to stay behind and help clean up.

  So off we galloped, Mark, Nurse Ratchet, Whitewater, and I, all hoping to do big miles and lose Air Puppy. Nurse Ratchet chided her husband, “Adam (Whitewater), you’re the reason he’s still with us. You always fall for his sob story and give him money or food.”

  “Well, gee, when a man has four dollars to his name it’s my custom to try and help him,” Whitewater answered, obviously conflicted. “And to be honest, while he may be a thief, he’s also a nice guy.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not fair to the rest of us for him to be out here with no money,” Mark interjected heatedly. “I’ve been saving up for this thru-hike for three years.”

  Our “escape” plan got more complicated when it began to rain cats and dogs. I was worried about getting a spot in the shelter at Moreland Gap, which was eighteen miles from where we had started the day. If not, I would be forced to try setting up the tarp in the rain. That line of thinking was a sure sign my lightweight tarp strategy had backfired.

  My heart sank upon clearing the final hill and seeing the shelter in the distance. It was surrounded by what appeared to be a big group of Boy Scouts. It was a Saturday, which is when these groups tend to congregate. One veteran hiker had said, “Of all the cruel fates the hiking gods can play on you, a large, boisterous group of Boy Scouts is the worst.”

  But fortunately, the group had set up a big, sprawling tarp for all of them to sleep under.

  The shelter filled up as usual on a rainy night and the Air Puppy jokes were merciless. As we all lay in our sleeping bags, with the rain pelting our shelter, Whitewater remarked, “This is the real sweet spot. You hike hard all day, get to the shelter, eat, arrange everything, and listen to the raindrops tumble down on the shelter roof. It makes it all worth it.”

  “Gee, Adam (Whitewater), I never knew you were such a romantic,” Nurse Ratchet commented.

  “And we’re free of Air Puppy,” Mark added.

  Amid the laughter I heard steps fast approaching the shelter, and a silhouette appeared, followed by the disembodied voice of Air Puppy. “What the hell!” Air Puppy exclaimed. “Did you guys take a shortcut or something? I’ve been almost running all day to catch up with everybody.”

  Mark, lying right next to me whispered, “Am I having a nightmare?”

  “He missed you, Mark,” I consoled him.

  According to the guidebook the Moreland Gap shelter holds eight, which is what we already had in there. But Air Puppy confidently said to two people on the far end, “Ha, just let me slide in there real quick.” Now we had nine, although Mark briefly considered making it eight again.

  As Air Puppy went about the usual campsite duties, he was in a chatty mood. “Did I ever tell you guys about how I hitchhiked all the way across Canada with no money?” He then let loose a veritable Niagara of tales, each one containing the theme of his brilliance and savvy triumphing against all odds, including hunger, sexual predators, and anti-narcotics laws. A common denominator among many thieves is their compulsion to feel they have outsmarted people, and that was evident here.

  He spoke in rhapsodic tones of his lust for weed and other chemicals. “I’ve got two Mountain Houses (an expensive brand of dehydrated food he got from God knows where) in my backpack. I’d give both of ’em up right this minute for a joint.”

  At that, the leader of the group camped out under the tarp next to the shelter rushed in.

  “Hey, man,” he said anxiously. “This is a group of reco
vering drug addicts out here for wilderness therapy. Can’t you find something else to talk about?”

  Air Puppy, feeling himself in a commanding position as he was safely ensconced in a packed shelter, shot back, “I’ll talk about whatever the hell I want. You got a joint, man?”

  “My God,” the wilderness therapist said as he walked out in disgust.

  It was great being with Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet. They seemed to go almost exactly my speed and shared my task-oriented philosophy. This was a once-in-a lifetime chance that needed to be treated like a job much of the time.

  We were deluged with rain again near the top of White Rocks Mountain, and as we started down the mountain I was traversing a big, slanted rock. Just like that my feet went straight out from under me. I hit the rock hard on my left side and my AT dream flashed before my eyes. Whitewater rushed to help me, and I quickly started flexing my left leg to be sure it wasn’t broken. I had already fallen several times, like most hikers, but this was by far the worst. I had a deep bruise for three weeks.

  Falls were one of the more prominent hazards of the trail, and have ruined many a thru-hiker’s dream. They tended to come in three situations:

  When it was wet.

  Late in the day, when you’re tired.

  When you’re in a hurry.

  We ended the day at Watauga Dam Shelter, right by the second largest dam in the east. Pioneers Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket had once lived and hunted in this valley, which is now often flooded by the dam.

  Two days later, I was psyched to make the twenty-five and nine-tenth-smile hike into Damascus, widely advertised as the “friendliest town on the AT.” I got off to an early start and it was the easiest terrain yet on the AT. Two miles before Damascus the trail crossed into Virginia, the fourth state. After eleven hours and 25.9 miles, I descended into Damascus and followed the blazes right through the main street. My mood was ebullient, and not just because of the day’s high mileage. I had always figured that making it to Virginia would mean at least partial success.