Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  A half-hour later, as the noise lessened, George and Ray trudged through the mud and dark. They looked inside the shelter, saw it was full, and walked over to a clearing to set up their tent. This prompted a Sleazebag from the far corner of the shelter to remark, “Better put the earplugs in tonight.”

  “Earplugs, my ass,” someone blurted from the middle of the shelter. “Remove butt plugs from backpacks and insert immediately!”

  The shelter was full, as was often the case on rainy nights. Some contact and bumping was probably inevitable, but Hump Master had his legs draped over part of my sleeping bag. I got so distraught I tried switching from head-to-toe in the middle of the evening.

  Overall, the evening was better than the previous evening with the bullfrogs, but not by much. I anxiously packed my bags in the morning and hurried out of there by 7 o’clock before the Sleazebags had even arisen. I didn’t know about Hump Master, but most of them seemed like good guys. It was just too much testosterone gathered in one group for any sort of balance to prevail.

  After thirteen miles I took a steep side trail to a hostel to escape the Sleazebags. I saw Ug there for the first time since Tennessee and with a full-flowing blonde beard and shoulder-length hair he looked like a true mountain man. But with his broad, easy smile he soon became my favorite trail hippie.

  Ug (hippie, not caveman) and I took the big climb back to the trail where we ran into a stray member of the former Gang of 10. After several hundred miles of unity, their solidarity had cracked. “We’ve disbursed, and some have quit,” he reported. “Vogue is in a hurry-up mode and is up ahead.”

  Now that news put a bounce back in my step after some initial apathy. But then I silently chided myself for the hypocrisy of criticizing Hump Master for aggressively pursuing Vogue, and here I was practically “pinkblazing” to catch her. Besides, she had shown no extraordinary interest in me.

  But this wasn’t a bad day to have a spring in one’s step. The trail twice ascended above four thousand feet, including the Priest, which was a quasi-religious experience, with its majestic view of the very blue Blue Ridge Mountains. Then the trail quickly descended thirty-three hundred feet to the Tye River. The parking there in the George Washington National Forest was full on this hot, humid day. I had been thinking all the way down the mountain how heavenly some cold drinks and trail magic would be right here, but it wasn’t to be.

  Instead, another three thousand-foot climb presented itself. Starting up the mountain I ran into Grump, an elderly gentleman I seemingly passed every day. His signature characteristic was the behemoth pack strapped to his hunched back. “Did you hear the big news on the trail today?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  “There is a naked guy hiking around, scaring all the girls.”

  “Well, the way the mosquitoes are swarming, he’s in a helluva’ fix,” I noted. Knowing Vogue was up ahead, and maybe the Sleazebags as well, I began to wonder if it wasn’t Hump Master himself who had become completely unhinged!

  “How do you do it, Grump?” I asked. “I’ve passed you four times. You must night hike every night to keep getting ahead of people.”

  “I hike til’ these here legs won’t go anymore, then I drop anchors,” he said.

  “Where did you sleep last night?” I asked. “It was raining.”

  “Oh, along about midnight,” he replied, “I threw down my sleeping bag under some overhanging rock and passed out.”

  Now honing in on his backpack I said, “Grump, you’re not in the army anymore. You ought to try some of this lightweight equipment.”

  Grump grunted.

  “How much does that damn thing weigh, I’ve got to ask.”

  “Oh, in the neighborhood of seventy-five pounds,” he answered.

  “Jesus, Grump, you’re not going to make it to Maine with that much weight,” I lectured him. “Nobody could.”

  “Now don’t worry about me,” he said, “I’ll be seeing you up there and I’ll have enough stuff for both of us.” I headed on up the mountain, never to see him again.

  At the Harper’s Creek Shelter a chatty middle-age guy exclaimed “A girl with a University of Michigan hat on just came through here. Good gosh, she was unbelievable.” I had been thinking about calling it a day right there because of the big climb immediately ahead, but suddenly I felt a second-wind.

  Harper’s Creek Shelter—mile 816

  6-11-05: The people who said Virginia is flat are about as right as the people who said the earth is flat.—Vogue

  6-11-05: I hike the AT because I can.—Knees

  The sun fell behind the mountains and I was urging myself on when I saw a familiar figure halfway up the mountain. We looked at each other for a second, then the person said, “Skywalker,”

  “Ha, not since Hot Springs, right?” I said to Knees, a brainy twenty-nine-year-old computer consultant from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

  “Yeah,” he said. “but I’ve been reading your journal entries in the registers.” This was a double boost—to have some company to hike this tough section with and to hear that somebody was reading my journal entries.

  Then he gave me a third boost. “Vogue is right ahead,” he reported. “We were at the same shelter last night, but her hiking group is breaking up.” Standard operating procedure was to take a Snickers break halfway up a large climb. But that news had me straining to keep up with Knees without a break. Finally, the sign for the shelter appeared.

  Sitting on the picnic table in front of the shelter was Vogue, with her alluring combination of youth and maturity. She smiled as we walked up and I raised my hand for a high-five. However, she declined to reciprocate, saying, “I’m too tired.”

  “I heard the tragic news,” I strained to gin up the atmosphere.

  “What?” she said, semi-alarmed.

  “That the famous ‘Gang of 10’ has officially disbanded.”

  “Oh, Yeah,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was just being held up too much, and finally had to go ahead.”

  Knees moved off to set up his tent.

  “What a fool you are,” I thought to myself. This girl is very self-possessed and not vulnerable to theatrics. And she had obviously had enough male attention. I even noticed that unlike many females on the trail she didn’t hike sleeveless or wear a halter-top. Rather, she wore a full short-sleeve shirt, probably to minimize gawkings. In a more low-key manner I asked, “The Sleazebags; are they ahead?”

  With a roll of the eyes she pointed over to a group of tents in a clearing.

  “I hiked with ’em a little bit a few days back and they seemed okay,” I said. “All but your man, Hump Master.”

  “My man, Hump Master,” she said disgusted.

  I then pulled out my stove (alarmed at my plummeting weight, I had purchased it in Damascus) to try cooking. Remembering my previous ineptness she said, “Oh, we’re going to try this again, are we?”

  “Don’t sell me short,” I responded.

  “Oh, this is the new and improved Skywalker, huh,” she laughed.

  “Actually, this is the Last Supper because I’m planning to send it home before Shenandoah National Park in order to not attract bears.”

  “Oh come on,” she scoffed.

  Blotter, one of the Sleazebags, came by and said to Vogue, “I’m going down to the stream to get water. Would you like some?”

  “Oh, that would be nice, thanks,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

  Then starting down toward the stream Blotter stopped and said as an afterthought, “Would you like some too, Skywalker?”

  But I quickly declined, realizing he was just trying to save face and not betray too much fondness toward Vogue. I don’t know about all these other animals I was seeing out there in the wilderness, but we humans sure do have our weaknesses.

  Summer was in full swing now, and like it or not, the woods were teeming with wildlife. When Knees, Ug, and I arrived at the Paul Wolf Shelter one hiker had just seen a bear running down the ridge from t
he shelter. And while we sat there eating, a big, black snake came out from under the shelter, showing its full seven-foot length. And Shenandoah National Park, with its famously abundant flora and fauna, lay just ahead.

  We were planning to stay at this shelter, but the long-promised easier part of Virginia seemed to have finally materialized. We decided to hike the remaining five miles to Waynesboro and arrived at dusk.

  When we exited the trail at Rockfish Gap we crossed the street into a big parking lot. A car pulled up with two girls in it. A college-age girl in a bathing suit got out and ran over with three slices of pizza on a small paper plate. “Welcome to Waynesboro,” she said. “We love hikers.”

  “Can we get a ride into town?” I called out.

  “We give out pizza, not rides,” she shouted out the window as they sped off.

  The townspeople in Waynesboro had been instructed to treat hikers well, as we were a source of revenue (which is a pretty fair working definition of a humble town indeed!). Thus, the minute we stuck out our thumbs, a pickup truck pulled over and carried us five miles to the Quality Inn in Waynesboro.

  The Sleazebags were in evidence all over the place, from the swimming pool to the parking lot. Hump Master, in a last-ditch Hail Mary pass, had completely shaved his head. He then approached Vogue and apparently got right to the point. But Vogue responded negatively and brusquely headed to her room. Being an attractive girl on the AT has its advantages, but it apparently also has its disadvantages.

  The next morning after being embroiled in a dispute over having too many people in our room—a common motel complaint against hikers—I called one of the many trail angels listed in the motel. Unfortunately, everybody seemed to have an excuse why they couldn’t hike this day, but the real reason was the hot, humid weather. So a pleasant elderly man chauffeured me back up to the trailhead alone to begin the one hundred-plus-mile trek through Shenandoah National Park.

  Chapter 12

  On May 14, 2000, the remains of Claudia Bradley, a schoolteacher from Cosby, Tennessee, were found in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. She had been eaten by a bear.

  This episode restored to focus a question that scientists, outdoor people, and others have puzzled over through the eons. That is, just why don’t bears eat more humans? After all, they voraciously eat almost everything else, including deer, caribou, salmon, birds, ants, rats, wild berries, nuts, and an infinite variety of plants. Experts have noted significant behavioral differences in bears based on what they eat. Those that dine mostly on meat tend to exhibit significantly more aggressive traits than those whose primary diet is plant-based.

  Of course, there have been other notable incidents. On April 13, 2006, Susan Cankus, from Ohio, and her two children were on a vacation in the Cherokee National Forest near Chattanooga, Tennessee. They were strategically located in a tourist spot below two waterfalls when a bear approached. They started yelling at it and clanking metal items together to scare it away, but the bear grabbed Mrs. Cankus’ two-year-old son in its mouth. Mrs. Cankus frantically attacked the bear with sticks, rocks, and the like. While she ended up with eight puncture wounds in her neck and too many cuts and wounds to count, she successfully dislodged her son. Park rangers, alerted by the pandemonium, arrived and fired two thirty-eight caliber pistol shots into the bear’s dense body. At that point the bear ran away. Unfortunately, Mrs. Cankus’ six-year-old daughter had run into the woods. When the rangers pursued the bear into the woods they came upon the daughter’s lifeless body. She had died from head wounds inflicted by the bear in its flight from camp.

  But the fact remains, compared to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bear-human encounters yearly, the number of bear attacks is small. Do they respect us, do they fear us, or do they consider us irrelevant? Perhaps we humans smell so horrible and taste so bad that only the most decrepit bear, unable to chase down fleeter and tastier prey, would have the least bit of interest.

  Would you believe that cubs only weigh from six to sixteen ounces at birth, and aren’t much larger than your average mouse! It’s conceptually difficult to reconcile with the enormous size and strength they later achieve? But consider just this one story. At a Philadelphia 76ers basketball game in 1979, a 105-pound, one-year-old cub earned a measure of notoriety by eating seventy-seven hot dogs, twenty-one pizzas, and nineteen Cokes just during halftime. Their appetites are truly awesome. Male bears, which are considerably larger than female bears, have even been known to put their lives at risk from irate females by eating their cubs. Bears spend their entire lives hunting for food—they prefer roaming in the daytime, but stories are legion amongst hikers of their moonlighting activities. And they are smart and fast—far faster than any human on the planet (up to thirty mph!), and they are famous for accelerating uphill.

  The black bear was originally considered such a great threat to humans that, according to Charles Konopa, “Some Indians classified the bear with man on the hierarchical list; a few tribes thought it was superior.” Konopa adds, “It was a ferocious brute. Unprovoked sorties against Indians and European settlers were common.”

  “I was wrathy to kill a bear,” wrote Davy Crocket. He and other testosterone-laden woodsmen indiscriminately killed bears on the Appalachian frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Indeed, those legendary folk “heroes” were successful in virtually exterminating the black bear in parts of the American East.

  Black bears survived by adapting to human behavior. After the advent of gunpowder and mechanized weapons, black bears greatly reduced their “unprovoked sorties” against humans. Instead, they became more cagy and calculating. It is now common for people to venture out into the woods unarmed without overwhelming concern about bears.

  But there remain problems. Some, of course, can be chalked up to that old bugaboo—human stupidity. In one notorious case some loving parents poured honey on their young daughter’s finger to feed to a bear. The bear liked it so much it helped itself to half of the girl’s hand, too.

  But another common source of bear-human problems is unavoidable and ultimately more problematic. Stories are legion of hikers ambling along only to see some rambunctious cubs darting around or climbing a tree. Moments later the mother arrives and finds a human with the inside position. There is no simple approach to defusing these potentially very dangerous situations. Ursine protocol calls for the hiker to back up and avoid eye contact with the bear. If the bear moves in your direction you are supposed to throw a stick in its direction. If this doesn’t work you try to nail the bear with a rock, preferably in its very sensitive nose. After that, most guidebooks usually trail off with vague language that the hiker should then consider himself in quite a bit of danger (Gee, thanks for the heads up). Under no circumstances are you supposed to run, which triggers the bear’s instinct to chase prey. Nor should a hiker lie down and play dead.

  For the most part these enormous, furry animals are unchallenged in the wilderness with the exception of armed humans (which, incidentally, don’t have a perfect record against bears). Black bears, ursus Americanus, have made an astounding comeback as hunting laws have become more restrictive. They now dot the Appalachian mountain range virtually from beginning to end, and chances of encountering one is not low at all. I was amazed to see monuments, drawings, and photographs of bears in almost every town along the Appalachian Mountain Range. Ancient cave paintings show the fascination and fear these enormously powerful creatures engendered, and there remains a general fascination here in the twenty-first century. And with human development encroaching on their habitat, the number of attacks is on the rise.

  Shenandoah National Park (“the Shennies” in AT lore), which runs 104 miles from end-to-end, is considered one of the easiest parts of the AT. To be sure there are one thousand-foot climbs, but the trail is well-graded, and the inclines rarely more than ten or twelve degree angles. Indeed, I recommend the park as a good practice place for somebody trying to decide whether to attempt the AT.

  Be
cause it’s a national park, hunting is not permitted. As a result, there’s a prevalence of large animals, notably deer and bears—and they’ve largely lost their fear of humans. By some accounts there is a greater bear density in Shenandoah National Park than anywhere else on earth—more than one per square mile. And unlike in the Smokies, which we traversed at high elevations in the early spring, while the bears were still foraging at lower levels, we would be in “the Shennies” in high summer. Thus, when I entered the park it wasn’t the usual things—weather and difficult terrain—that occupied my attention. It was bears.

  At the seven-mile mark I came across two hikers struggling to extract water from a grudging spring. “Any luck?” I asked, walking up on them.

  “Barely,” the barrel-chested Colonel Mustard replied.

  His diminutive friend Pee Wee added, “There is a creek that runs pretty well a few hundred yards ahead.”

  I bolted ahead, and upon arriving at the creek looked around to make sure I wasn’t invading the drinking space of any large animals. I heard a rustling sound on the other side, but it didn’t distinguish itself from the hundreds of such sounds one hears here throughout the day. It never ceased to amaze me how much noise a mere squirrel could make. I took the bait every time I heard one.

  After drawing some water I climbed out of the creek. Colonel Mustard and Pee Wee were passing by with wide-eyed looks on their faces. “Did you see that cub?” Pee Wee asked.