Foothills Trail, Day 1: 19 May, 19.8 miles today, 19.8 miles total, Medlin Mountain, Sumter National Forest
By the time I returned home to the Carolinas, the Foothills Trail was burning.
I had been watching from a distance as the area Sean Meadow and I had taken to calling our home had been decimated by Hurricane Helene, following its partial recovery in the months after. Some places were able to bounce fairly quickly, while others would be permanently scarred if they ever once again became accessible at all. Many of the trails we had hoped to explore after coming back would not be passable for years into the foreseeable future, but the Foothills Trail reopened with a modest bit of fanfare—and a sort of blustery cheerful admonition to all prospective hikers to take the remaining devastation in stride.
Then, as I was on the verge of North Carolina’s warm, if moist, embrace, a group of teenagers* wandering the same trail system I’d soon hoped to walk had tossed a smoldering cigarette butt into the brush at the side of the trail. The region, having been drowned in a sudden excess of water back in September, had lately fallen into a drought, and all the downed foliage made for fantastic kindling, helping to spread a series of fires across the mountains. It was only after a wave of late spring storms battered the area that the fires were extinguished,
The Foothills Trail is a 76-mile amble from South Carolina’s Oconee State Park on its westernmost edge to Table Rock State Park on its east. Though the trail wanders across the border between North and South Carolina several times—while the rolling countryside of north Georgia sits just across the Chatooga River to the west—it starts and ends in the lower state, making both South Carolina’s most prominent footpath and the only trail (so far as I’m aware) that finds its home in both of these divided twins. The FHT is situated in its entirety within the Appalachian Mountains, but only barely. While the walk itself has no shortage of ups and downs, the mountains it traverses are babies even by East Coast standards. This fact is starkly visible from the peak of Sassafras Mountain, the trail’s high point and the only point along its length with a 360° view. To the northwest, the Blue Ridge Mountains rise tall and proud in all their ancient grandeur, as the foothills in your midst diminish into the plains of central South Cackalacky. At this point, I can’t quite remember how I first leaned about this trail, but ever since I had I’d been determined to hike the entire thing. And though May is typically late to be backpacking anywhere that far South, this would be my last best chance.
I had arranged a shuttle a few weeks before with a trail angel named for a particular Looney Tunes character. I would meet him at the Table Rock end of the trail, where I would leave my car. He’d drive me to the Oconee trailhead and leave me to walk back to my ride. Even if he hadn’t been friendly, and standing next to a pickup truck with a couple of backpacks already in the bed, T’s vehicle and body were covered in representations of his namesake. He wore a Looney Tunes tie over his sleeveless tee, which showed off a prominent cartoon tattoo on his left bicep. He spoke in the measured way of old timers across the southeast US, his gravelly voice giving him the sound of an articulate Sling Blade as he played tour guide, stopping an pointing out whenever the trail crossed whichever road we were on. I liked him quite a bit, but was largely content to listen as he and the three other passengers discussed the sights along the way.
I didn’t have much of a plan in mind for the day—or really the hike in general. I was just going to walk until I stopped, until I was too tired to want to keep going or the sun had started to set. I sat at a picnic table at the trailhead, eating snacks until a sudden burst of rain drove me to shoulder my pack and head for the cover of the trees. The trail meandered through lush forest, the backdrop of lurid green interrupted regularly by the muted lavender of mountain laurel and the ghostly pale pink of rhododendron blooms. The rain let up shortly after I’d started moving, and I tromped happily through the woods, my full pack a comforting weight on my back.
I stopped for lunch at a clearing by a paved road—one of the crossings T had pointed out in the morning—and no sooner had I exploded my food bag across the log I was using for a bench than the rain came flooding back. I ate in a rush, hoping to keep my open pantry at least kind of dry, and packed back up in a hurry. As before, the rain stopped almost as soon as I was back among the trees.
The trail dipped down into a valley, where it followed the roaring Chattooga River** for several miles. It was, I thought, just the sort of picture-perfect waterway that inspires people to put up with all the discomfort and bother of hiking. I was miles from anything, no sound above the rushing water but the choir of birdsong echoing through the forest. It would probably only be a matter of time before somebody paved a road to this shore and spoiled the whole damn thing, but for now, at least, I had the place to myself, pristine and untamed. I sat on the bank to filter some water, and had just started eating a few crackers when the rain returned.
This time it stayed with me for good while, continuing to fall even as the sun broke through the clouds and fell in high-contrast patches through the canopy—but when it cleared this time it stayed gone. As I climbed up and away from the river, I was really starting to feel the miles in my feet, and consulted my map for anyplace in the next few miles that might be good to camp. The first I came to was less than ideal, so I pushed on. It was still too early to settle, I figured, and besides the next likely site was just up ahead. Except it wasn’t. The trail steepened, and the terrain became precipitous and unwelcoming. I took another look at the map and realized my mistake—the last campsite was the only one for at least a few more miles. I would have to press on, racing the dusk to find a flat stretch of ground before the darkness now threatening along the eastern horizon fell.
*All three of whom were later charged by police, though I’d assume only one of them was responsible for the single cigarette at the heart of the Table Rock conflagration.
**Labeled on my USGS map as the CHATTOOGA WILD AND SCENIC RIVER
Foothills Trail, Day 2: 20 May, 22.7 miles today, 42.5 miles total, Bear Creek, Nantahala National Forest
I awoke in the middle of the night to find what I at first took to be a single glowing eye staring through the mesh door of my tent from only an inch or two away. Working to logic the sudden bolt of panic away, I reasoned OK, first of all, eyes don’t glow. They can reflect light in super creepy ways sometimes but that doesn’t matter right now because there is no other source of light. Whatever that is, it’s not the eye of some natural horror trying to find a way into the tent. As the this train of thought pulled into the station, the bright green eye floated eerily a couple of feet to one side and slid finally into focus. It was only a lightning bug—and yet I lay on my sleeping pad for a long while before I was able to get back to sleep.
I was making much faster progress along the FHT than I’d anticipated. I flattered myself that I had proven to be in much better trail shape than I reckoned before setting out, but the truth was that the terrain had proven to be much more forgiving than I’d assumed. A little before midday I reached the food cache I’d left the morning before, which is planned to recover on the morning of the third day. I hadn’t initially considered splitting my provisions like this, but T had offered to provide an old olive-drab ammo box and stop at a suitable road crossing to stash it. As the other riders and I set our boxes by “the only rhododendron on this here knoll,” T insisted we bury them under leaf litter and twigs. This had seemed excessive to me at the time—the boxes themselves would have been impossible to find if someone wasn’t looking for them—and now I was back, just a bit more than 24 hours later.
As I ate an early lunch, I scouted ahead on the map for a likely place to aim for by the end of the day. I found a campsite by a creek with a bear cable, which would save me the trouble of running a line. I might have to stop a bit early, but so what? Maybe I could catch up on a little sleep. The cache had been right at the North/South Carolina border, and as I left the smooth, rolling trails of the Sumter National Forest for the Nantahala, I knew little of what lay ahead—only that I had committed myself mentally to this one particular place to rest.
The border between Sumter and Nantahala is a straight line, which always suggests that it follows a line of latitude and not a natural break in the terrain. But the change was immediate: the flat, even, gently sloped footpath was gone. The trail in its place was jagged, rocky, and steep. Instead of gently undulating hills, the trail shot up ragged escarpments, with precipitous drops on the other side, every inch not covered with rock a root-snarled mess. There were stairs. And then there were more stairs. And then there were more stairs still—often no more than decaying blocks held in place on the ground by a couple of pieces of rebar.
Maybe, in the end, the campsite wasn’t worth it, but I pushed hard all throughout the afternoon, stopping only briefly at the roaring Whitewater River to restock my water and cool my feverish head in its flow. I walked until I felt like my knees and feet had been battered into mush, dripping sweat from every inch of skin. Once again, I was racing the sun, trying to make it to camp before dark. With just a few hundred more feet to go, I found a three foot rat snake laying parallel to the trail and froze. Rat snakes aren’t venomous, snakes in general won’t bite unless they feel threatened,* and most go out of their way to avoid close encounters. But, if you do come too close, many snakes will strike, and no animal bite is exactly safe. The way this one was stretched out, I’d have to pass practically on top of it, or else encourage it to move. I hit it with a stick and it did nothing—so it had just fed. Snakes don’t usually tolerate people nearly this much, but the torpor of a full belly seems to leave them almost insensate to the world around them. This one might not even know I was there. I passed quickly by and strolled on into camp.
I hadn’t seen another person in the woods all day, so was surprised to find a pair of hikers already set up as I lumbered in. They clearly hadn’t expected to see anyone else, either—the campsite was spacious, with two cold fire rings that each had two benches on either side, all four of which were draped with clothes the two ladies had set out to dry overnight. They were friendly enough, though I didn’t get that impression at first, when the woman nearest me introduced herself simply by saying, “there are a lot of bees here,” and walking away. She was right, of course, and as I ate a hurried dinner and chatted with the strangers (we never even exchanged names) about various other trails we had hiked, I kept on an eye on the venomous little fuckers as they buzzed over my food bag. I had never heard of a snake attacking a human without provocation, but I carried an epipen because of a anaphylactic reaction I’d had on the PCT after I’d been stung for absolutely no reason by a bee that had come flying out of a nearby meadow apparently just to fuck with me. They may be essential to the ecosystem, but I’d learned never to trust those honey-loving bastards.
*My favorite piece of Truthful Reality About Snakes and Humans, or TRASHTM, is that the vast majority of snakebite victims are struck on the face and/or hands/forearms. What this means is that by far the most effective way to avoid injury is: do not pick up snakes. I have almost always found this incredibly easy to do.
Foothills Trail, Day 3: 21 May, 20.5 miles today, 63.0 miles total, Chimneytop Mountain, Sumter National Forest
The gentle pik pik pik pik of a light rain falling against my tent roused me in the middle of the night, at least enough to move my shoes inside the vestibule. I thought briefly of the things I’d left outside to air dry, the shirt and underpants I’d set on a bench 40’ away, but mentally shrugged my shoulders as I turned onto my side—they’d been wet with sweat when I’d taken them off, and they’d be wet with water when I put them on in the morning. It was, at least, still an improvement.
It couldn’t have been much later that the low rumbling of distant thunder penetrated my sleeping mind and brought me once again back to my tent. The rain had picked up, punctuated every now and then by a flash that lit up the sky through the shelter’s translucent fabric. I started counting one mississippi two mississppi three mississippi four mississippi five—and a long rolling BOOOOOOOM echoed off the mountains. Whatever was coming was already close.
The tent’s manufacturer had been adamant that the lower vestibule doors could be kept open for airflow in all but the most horrendous rain, but already a sprinkle was wetting the floor as the falling drops exploded upon contact with the wet ground. I zipped the outer doors shut and lay back down, staring up at the ceiling as the lighting came closer and faster. The ring of sky visible through the trees had become a strobe light, bolt after bolt coming on top of each other, as the distance between sight and sound shrank to almost nothing. There was sharp bright blast followed immediately by a sharp, angry CRACK! that hit me like a slap, and then the rain was falling so hard I couldn’t even hear the thunder over the roaring TATATATATATATATA that enveloped the tent.
The campsite wasn’t in a terrible place, lightning-safety-wise, the trees around me were tall but generally uniform—though that still didn’t rule out the possibility of lighting striking any of them. Lightning exploded constantly and the rain fell like artillery, but there really wasn’t anything to do but wait for the storm to pass. I shifted position on my sleeping pad and felt my body rise and fall, almost as if I were floating in a stream. I found my headlamp and switched it on, training the beam into the vestibule, where an inch of water was flowing rapidly from on end to other. Same on the other side. I was staked down in the middle of a small but raging current, kept miraculously dry by the waterproof floor of my tent.
I anxiously watched the storm from my pad until it finally started to slacken, the rain diminishing from mortars to machine guns until it was no more than a fistful of bbs thrown again the wall. The lightning had become sporadic, the thunder a muted echo across the hills. I closed my eyes in relief, and when I opened them again the sun had risen. The rain had clearly stopped hours before, and as I changed into my wet hiking clothes I noted that the bees were back. They took a keen interest in pack, looking for god knows what as I tried to put everything in its proper place.
It was another day of sharp climbs and sudden descents. Twice I was lead through an overgrown valley choked with fallen trees and thick, low-hanging foliage. Braided streams, swollen from last night’s deluge, licked over the earth and turned all of it to mud. I passed through a leafy, green tunnel, an endless low hallway that forced me to stoop as I ducked drooping branches and clambered over fallen trees. Every few seconds I walked through another strand of spider silk, so that I was constantly wiping webbing from my arms and face—the couple of times I got hit directly in the eye were especially gross and upsetting. It was a testament to how lightly traveled the Foothills Trail actually was that I’d never in all my miles of hiking been this continuously assailed by silk strewn across the trail. The untrod forests of Appalachia are, essentially, one gigantic spider web.
Another novel experience I found hiking the wooded hills on the border between the Carolinas: at no point in my life had I ever expected to be attacked by a full-grown turkey. This, I guess, gave her the upper hand, at least at first. I assume that as I followed a relatively wide stretch of trail along a burbling creek I was getting too close to her nest, but my first indication that anything might be amiss was this massive bird’s unholy, gobbling shriek as she brought herself up to her fullest height and spread her wings. It was clearly a display meant to intimate, and I had barely enough time to think holy shit, is that a turkey? before she lowered her head and charged straight for me. Reflexively, I kept my trekking poles in an X between us, keeping her back as I tried to get past. I lunged at her, forcing her back just enough to run past her, but she gave chase, ducking through the underbrush just off trail. She was fast on her feet, her body becoming sleek as she bobbed her head to weave through the shrubs and vines. She tore through the tangled greenery on her powerful legs, moving like one of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, flanking me just to pop out on trail a bit ahead of my position, where she once again charged directly toward me, gobbling furiously all the while. We had to do this strange dance three times before she finally let me go on my way.
Foothills Trail, Day 4: 22 May, 13.2 miles today, 76.2 miles total, Table Rock State Park, South Carolina
I was all alone at camp. This was a mixed blessing—the storm the night before had left me a little spooked, but also the two other hikers had slept with their food in their tents, and the site I had stumbled into in the thinning light of the evening had a reputation for being popular with bears. The solitude also let me perform a pretty thorough tick check without having to hide in my tent. Once zipped up in my shelter for the night, I fell asleep in short order. I woke up once in the middle of the night, cursing the thinness of my sleeping pad. My shoulder was sore and raw, almost like there was nothing under it at all. It was only when the light of day filtered through the canopy above that I realized I’d rolled off the pad entirely.
The morning was perfect: cool without being cold, a light breeze adding a rush of leaves to the burbling of the nearby stream. The forest here was old. The tall, thickly-branched trees were widely spaced and gave enough shade to the floor to keep the undergrowth to a minimum. I started the day with a steady climb up Sassafras Mountain, the high point of the FHT, and what would be the first real view of the surrounding countryside since I’d entered the woods in Oconee. I’d been prepared for a slog, but I was rested (for once), and the tread was good, and before I knew it, I’d popped out of the trees and into a clear cut on the mountain’s summit. There was brick viewing platform with a wheelchair-accessible ramp and a handrail, along with a paved walkway to a parking lot a quarter mile down the far side of the peak—none of which I had expected to be there. It was still early, so I had the place to myself. I stood on the platform and took in the view, layer upon layer of lush green mountains. I saw the peaks and valleys I’d clambered through in the past few days stretching out to the west, as the Blue Ridge Mountains, and my small home among them, loomed in the distance to the north. It was the sort of view that dissolves into the blood like oxygen as you breathe it in, gorgeous and pristine, but that never looks like anything more than a handful of indistinguishable green bumps when you try to take a picture of it.
Shortly after I started down, I found a water cache left by T, my shuttle driver and the Foothills Trail’s most dedicated trail angel. I filled up what I figured ought to be enough to get me to the end of the trail and started down. It wasn’t long before I hit what was very obviously a fire break from the burn that swept the area only six weeks before. A wide, shallow rut carved through the earth by a small dozer divided the healthy green forest I was leaving from the charred and tangled ruin I was walking into. In the plus column, the denuded mountainsides offered more (and more prominent) views of the great granite face of the famed Table Rock, a squat pile of a mountain with a bald rock face on the southern slope—but, generally speaking, walking through a recent burn is never fun. The late May sun had risen high into a cloudless sky, and it worked relentlessly to bake a landscape that had now been stripped of shelter. Burned soil is more like sand than dirt, and the footing was shifty and uneven. Many of the burned remains of the trees had fallen across the trail, either before or after they’d caught fire, and as I clambered over (and often through) them, I became covered in a thick residue of coal-black soot. These last few miles were to have been the victory lap, the icing on the cake, a nice cruise into one of the most scenic stretches of the entire trail, but they’d been turned by the last few calamitous months into a grim march. Still, Table Rock was cool.
It was a relief to hit the paved trail that lead the last half-mile or so to the parking lot. The forest by the park’s nature center had been untouched by the fire, and the last few steps of the hike were blessedly shaded and cool. The trail hugged the bank of a rocky stream, and couples of all ages meandered the grounds laughing and holding hands. Stiff with heat and aching joints I hobbled gratefully up to the water fountain—the water supply I’d refilled atop Sassafras long since exhausted in the sun-baked acres between. I drank deeply and headed across the parking lot to my waiting car.
Art Loeb Trail, Day 1: 24 May, 13.4 miles today, 13.4 miles total, Shuck Ridge, Pisgah National Forest
The Art Loeb Trail is 31-mile path with a large public Forest Service campground just outside Brevard, North Carolina at one end, and a spooky, private camp owned by the Boy Scouts* at the other. It isn’t really fair to compare the Foothills Trail with the Art Loeb Trail, and ultimately the only reason I’d chosen to tag-team the two hikes was that they were both within easy driving distance of my home. The FHT is a pleasant enough stroll through, well, the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, whereas the ALT contains some of the most popular hiking in Western North Carolina’s slice of the Blue Ridge. And with good reason, though the full trail is widely understood by locals to be one of the most arduous outings in the area. While it begins and ends beside two heavily forested rivers, as it sends its way through the mountains the Art Loeb traverses a series of balds, round-topped peaks carpeted in alpine meadows, with no trees to block the view. It’s the sort of sweeping, picturesque vista that would make for a real unforgettable wedding, if you were the sort of person who would drag your long-suffering family up a windswept mountaintop just to witness your ceremony.
Even so, the ALT had been kind of a plan B for me. I’d already hiked the most spectacular section of the trail the year before, when I’d pieced together a little loop out of several neighboring trails to amuse myself while Sean Meadow had been out of town. Once again on my own in North Carolina, I was playing around with various possible itineraries when I learned that my first choice of local expedition, the Black Mountain Crest Trail, had been so devastated by Hurricane Helene that every trail within that mountain range was closed to hikers indefinitely. That left the Art Loeb, which, despite several alarming signs posted along the route, had been spared the worst. I just had to figure out how to stash my car at one end of the trail and get myself to the other.
As it turned out, friends of mine from the Appalachian Trail, P & C, would be spending memorial day weekend in Brevard, one of the area’s quaint, postcard-worthy mountain towns. The ALT’s southern trailhead is just 10 minutes away from downtown, and they generously offered to drive me the hour or so up the Blue Ridge Parkway it would take to deliver me to the trail’s other side. C and I had basically lived together in the woods for several months, and aside from a chance encounter on the PCT a year later, when I was stumbling back to that trail from a ski lodge that turned a brisk business in the summer months luring in thru-hikers with free 40oz’s, I hadn’t seen either of them in person since. I’m always nervous when I meet up with people I haven’t seen in a long time, worried that my socially awkward nature will stand out in starker relief against a new background than it must have in the original context of our friendship. Even if that is the case, though, it’s never as insurmountable an obstacle in real life as I’ve built it up to be in my head—though of the course it is the nature of anxiety to be able to see the truth of this while being completely unable to accept it. The moment we sat down and ordered our coffees it was like we had just left the AT, and we fell into an easy patter that carried us through breakfast and all the way to the Daniel Boone Boy Scout Camp, where the Art Loeb begins its course through the Shining Rock Wilderness and beyond.
I left P & C and their darling puffball of a puppy S at the trailhead and began the long climb up to the spine of the Shining Rock Ledge, which would offer sweeping views of the Blue Ridge Mountains once I finally made it up the forested slopes. This was true Appalachian hiking, rocky and steep and challenging in way that I haven’t seen much of outside this long, ancient range. The Foothills Trail had had plenty of ups and downs, much of which had included climbs on literal stairs, but to hike the Appalachians proper is to work out a constantly unfolding puzzle in space and time—you have to figure out where you’re trying to go, where each step leads, and what combinations connect the two. It’s very rare that the path between the rock you’re standing on and the rock you’re trying to get to is a straight line. Solving the puzzle is exhausting work, but it’s also part of the fun, and being back in that element always feels like home.
As the ALT rides the crest of the mountains southward through Shining Rock, the forest thins from tall, lanky pines to tunnels of rhododendron, before giving way entirely to a thick blanket of meadow. What begin as occasional overlooks become grand vistas within a few miles, and along with them come the clusters of tents pitched by backpackers naïve enough to think that any view can be worth the wind that invariably scours the naked peaks. As I came up to Black Balsam Knob—one of the more easily accessible balds along the route, with a paved road nearby offering relatively easy access—I saw more and more knots of people winding their way along the various trails in the area. Backpackers, day hikers, and even a traditional wedding party, though this had clearly been pared down to the friends and relations who had been physically able to make the climb. Some of the other hikers stood back, not wanting to interfere with the ceremony in progress, but it was late in the afternoon and the wind had already picked up a sharp, cold edge I didn’t much like. I wanted to make it well into the forest below before the overcast sky brought on an early night, so I walked quietly past the proceedings as a country preacher in a shiny suit intoned about the binding properties of the couple’s golden rings. In a few more miles, I’d be several hundred feet down the ridge, shielded from the wind, and hidden from the forecasted rain by the protecting arms of the trees.
*The Daniel Boone Boy Scout Camp looks like something out of the set of M*A*S*H, with identical olive-drab canvas tents pitched in rows. When I’d passed it by the year before on a backpacking loop I’d cobbled together through the Shining Rock Wilderness, I was struck by the distinct military vibe that seemed to infuse the camp and all its residents—this in contrast to the one outing I’d attended during my month-long stint in the BSA, when several hapless Scouts had watched as their tent blew down the abandoned soybean field in which we were camping and into the murky lake at the bottom in which we were not permitted to swim, fed, as it no doubt was, by farm runoff.
Art Loeb Trail, Day 2: 25 May, 16.7 miles today, 30.1 miles total, Davidson River Campground, Pisgah National Forest
I try to be tolerant about the failures in etiquette common on more populated trails. These attractions bring out people who often don’t spend a lot of time outdoors and probably don’t know, for example, that hikers moving down a slope are expected to yield a narrow trail to those hiking up. It gets tiresome when it happens over and over in a single day, but it’s still not really helpful to hold a grudge against folks who just don’t know any better. Some lapses, however, are unforgivable. It must truly be blissful to so absolutely unaware of your surroundings as to think that blasting your shitty music from a bluetooth speaker while backpacking in the wilderness could ever be acceptable, but it kind of sucks for the rest of us. Even long after the tinny, intrusive melodies have passed, their effects reverberate through the forest. After passing a foursome of college-aged kids, a group honestly young enough to know better, I was forced for a long time afterwards to confront the question in this day and age, does anybody really need to actually listen to the song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” ever, ever again?*
A light but steady rain had started falling sometime in the middle of the night, and persisted off and on throughout the morning, and from time to time thick curtains of mist would swallow the mountains around me, foreshortening the world as I passed through it. The Art Loeb Trail, like the Foothills Trail and Appalachian Trail, is blazed with white, vertical rectangles—though on the ALT these are often quite old and faded, and can be quite easy to miss. They were the only dependable means I had of staying on route, however, as I’d learned late the previous day that the map I’d been following was perhaps out of date, but was in any case definitely unreliable. It would nonetheless have been worth a second look as I passed the Belly Gap shelter, one of two freshly rebuilt three-sided cabins on the trail. Instead, I waved at the trio of heavily muscled young men eating lunch under the unpainted roof and took a hard left to follow what looked to me to be the most obvious trail.
There’s a kind of doubling down that I think is common before you can admit to yourself that you’ve made a mistake bad enough that you have go all the way back to the beginning to fix it. I told myself as the trail became fainter and harder to follow that the blazes on this part of the trail had simply become too faint to see, but as I splashed through streams and over downed trees it became increasing obvious that I was the first person to tread this particular path in quite some time. Also, however skewed my official Pisgah Map Company map may have been, I was pretty sure it wasn’t lying that the Art Loeb did not, in fact, climb the mountain whose peak I was now scaling toward. I stopped and looked around. I had gone the better part of a mile in the wrong direction, and was faced with a solid wall of leaning granite boulders and thick temperate rainforest down the slope to wherever the actual ALT was. I’d have to retrace my steps to the shelter and find the proper trail. It’s always surprising when re-covering ground how far you’ve traveled, but eventually I was, once again, walking in front of the three jacked bros. I waved to them, once again, and finally headed off in the right direction.
Despite getting lost and having to double back, I was in a good mood. Not even the weather could dampen my spirits. I even stopped and smiled to myself as my right foot slammed against a gnarled, protruding root hidden under a clump of fallen leaves and I staggered forward several feet before I could regain my balance—but my smile faltered when the same thing happened again maybe ten minutes later. Something similar had happened halfway through my PCT hike some seven years earlier, when I had been gliding quickly and smoothly through the forests of northern California one sunny morning. I had tripped over two rocks within a few minutes of one another, bouncing quickly back from the first, but wincing sharply when I hit the second. I assumed that the surge of pain that had washed over the top of my foot would work itself out as I walked, but it only steadily got worse, and had plagued me every step of the following 1,800 miles. My pace slowed, and my disposition became semi-permanently strained. Taking my shoes off and putting them back on became an absolute misery. It wasn’t until I stopped walking all day, every day that the pain finally started to ease.
I hadn’t thought much that injury since it had healed—I’d walked, run, and biked thousands of miles since then without incident. But this day on the ALT, it all came back, the memory of each of those hundreds of thousands of agonized steps whispering in the back of my mind as I continued over the steep drops and sharp climbs of this Appalachian playground. Maybe I should have called it a day, pitched my tent, and whiled the afternoon away watching the pine boughs and rhododendron blooms dance in the breeze, but at some point in the day I had made up my mind to walk all the way to my car no matter how late it got, and I guess I’m stubborn. I plodded on, my foot barking in protest every time I forced it bear weight. The last few miles, the easiest and gentlest of the entire trail, I walked at a crawl, my gait thrown off-rhythm by a slight but undeniable limp. I’d reinjured the same foot I’d hurt on the PCT, though I could only hope not nearly as badly. The next morning I would hobble around the apartment as I set about cleaning, drying, and stowing my gear, pausing every now and then to marvel at the contrast between my whole and healthy left foot, braided across the top with thick, ropy veins, and my right, swollen to the point where all definition had been polished smooth. I was leaving North Carolina in just over three weeks for Vermont, to hike the notoriously difficult Long Trail. The plans had been in the works for some time, and whether or not I was going was already a settled question—but now whether or not I’d actually be up to it was not.
*No