In Search of Redemption on the Benton MacKaye Trail, part two:  this land was made for you and me

Day 05:  03 April, 15.9 miles today, 66.6 miles total, Double Hogpen Gap, somewhere in northern GA

Number of people seen on trail:  8

I hadn’t been sleeping well.  My master plan for fixing this had amounted to “sleep in a hotel bed,” but the room had swung violently all night between unbearably stuffy and unreasonably cold, depending where in its auto-cycle the AC unit had been.  But the trail waits for no one, as somebody has probably said at some point, and anyway I’d arranged a ride with the husband of the woman I’d met toward the end of the third day.  I made a point of being outside the hotel with all my gear well before the agreed-upon time, but he was already waiting for me in the parking lot.  He was chatty and friendly, and spent most of the ride talking about bikepacking trips he’d made out west as a younger man.  He said that he’d never been much for hiking, due to his flat feet, but he knew exactly where the BMT crossed the highway, when I didn’t see it coming at all.  If it were a snake it woulda bit me.

The trail climbed almost immediately into a bizarre subdivision, a sort of suburb of expensive “rustic” cabins that stretched on for miles.  The community has a reputation on the BMT as being generally friendly toward hikers, though the thing that really stands out when you’re actually on the trail is the wall of “no trespassing” signs installed, presumably, by those neighbors less friendly to sharing the woods with the occasional thru-hiker.  I thought of Woody Guthrie’s great anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” always butchered in public renderings down its two least controversial verses, the actual message of the song castrated like a savage mule.  In particular, this verse was front of mind most of the morning:

I’d been resisting framing this hike as a radical act.  You see that sort of thing a lot in protest culture, people talking about the things they wanted to do anyway as some sort of radical resistance.  One thing I was definitely not doing by walking across a slab of the southeast was starting a revolution—but maybe the act had a button of defiance to it nonetheless.  To use the American wilderness for spiritual restoration instead of exploiting it for profit, to eschew the trappings of success to live on the land like some wandering mendicant, to rely on the kindness of others instead of what you can simply buy from them.  These seeds will not topple the fascists from their plinth, but over time new sproutings could start to crack and erode the base.

I met several section hikers today.  The first came running from one of the private cabins when he saw me going by.  He’d SOBO’d the BMT last fall, had just finished the Pinhoti Trail, and was staying with a friend he’d made in that weird gated community for a few days before getting back on trail and hiking north to Fontana.  He told me of another hiker heading north, who had stayed at a shelter just outside of town.  That guy, when I caught up to him taking a rest under a tree after an arduous 4 miles uphill road walk, greeted me with the sort of complete lack of surprise you’d expect from a popular trail like the AT during peak season.  I believe his exact words, when he first saw me, were, “oh, hey.”

Unsurprised Guy was only hiking as far as the border to Great Smoky Mountain National Park, since he didn’t fancy the park’s policy of not letting you sleep wherever you damn well please.  He’d forgotten the charging cable for his phone, and was in any case relying on the same paper guidebook I’d largely ignored when planning this hike as it was already several years out of date.  I was a little worried that he kept referring to it as his “map,” when all it is is an elevation profile.  Still, this was not his first time on the BMT—which was also, at least so far, incredibly well marked.  Maybe he’d be fine.  He was able to catch me literally every time I stopped, despite all the fuss he had made about his slow and broken hiking pace.

There was also a woman who had just finished the Pinhoti and was excited to hike the BMT south to Springer to a degree that I will call concerning, and a pair of weekenders already posted up at the camp site where Unsurprised Guy and I eventually ended our day, but you probably don’t need to know anything more about them.

Day 06:  04 April, 18.1 miles today, 84.7 miles total, Big Frog Mountain, Big Frog Wilderness, Cherokee National Forest, TN

Number of people seen on trail:  10

I’d hope to go farther the day before, but utter fatigue had driven me to stop just shy of 16 miles—and probably made me seem even less friendly than I naturally am to the two weekenders who were already sprawled across the camp site.  Once inside my tent and comfortably burritoed into my quilt, I fell immediately into a dead sleep, and didn’t stir at all until an hour or so before sunrise, when I noticed the telltale plick of fat drops of water hitting my tent.  I roused myself enough to see that the forest had been swallowed up by a dense fog, and what I was hearing wasn’t rain, but condensation gathered on the tree boughs above gathering into swollen beads and occasionally succumbing to gravity.  It wasn’t until after sunrise, when I started packing up, that it began raining for real.  Just in time to soak my tent.

I was heating a bit of water for coffee when I saw two tall shadows stalking down the trail.  The dog was so thick I couldn’t make out the details until they were right on top of me—two men in head to toe camo, sauntering through the rain with shotguns held lazily over their shoulders.  We nodded hello as I remembered oh yeah, turkey season is sometime in the spring.  As they vanished into the mist, I could only hope they wouldn’t plug any hikers shooting at game in nil visibility.  It wasn’t duck or deer seasons, so nobody out on the trail was wearing blaze orange—except me.  I’d gotten my fancy new rain jacket at a significant discount just because the color had been so unpopular.

I ran into Unsurprised Guy as soon as I started hiking.  He’d camped nearby, but tucked behind a thicket, and had started shortly before me.  We chatted briefly and then resumed our separate paces—I assumed we’d see each other later on in the day, but we never did.  People on trail come and go in ways that are impossible to predict.  So do things.  I realized after an after that the bladder I’d left next to my tent with a liter of unfiltered water was still on the rock where I’d set it.  I thought about going back for it—it was a very nice bladder—but that would cost me time.  Oh well, I shrugged, those weekenders just inherited one of the best bladders on the market.  Meanwhile, I’d just have to go back to the system I’d used for the entire Appalachian Trail with two one-liter bottles and one screw-on filter.  It was less bourgeois but just as effective, anyway.

That morning I saw two backpackers, both polite enough, but clearly not interested in conversation—at least not while hiking uphill in the rain—who I assumed had come from the junction with the Pinhoti Trail,* which was just up ahead.  There was also a family of five out with no packs or gear of any kind—including rain gear—though I couldn’t figure out where in the world they could have come from.  After that, I didn’t see a soul the rest of the day.

In the late afternoon I came into a gorgeous forest of tall, sweeping pines.  The whole area was hidden from the western wind that had been picking up all day, and the thick canopy above promised protection from any storms that might come in the night.  Right on the Tennessee state line, in the midst of this paradise, was the camp site Unsurprised Guy had said he was aiming for.  It looked perfect, flat and sheltered and boasting two springs for gathering water.  But it was still over three hours to sunset, far too early to stop.  The rain had quit for a least a while, so I figured I should make the most of the decent weather while it held and make the brutal, straight-up climb up Big Frog Mountain.  I got to the top, panting and sweating, only to discover that the only water source was dry, even after a a day of rain.  The liter I held in reserve would have to tide me over well into the next morning.  I found a campsite at the northern end of the ridge and pitched my tent, which aired out while I ate a dry dinner.  By the time my food bag was hung, my shelter was dry enough to be comfortable, and I was ready for bed.

*A long-distance trail the wends its way west from the Appalachian foothills in Alabama

Day 07:  05 April, 18.0 miles today, 102.7 miles total, middle of nowhere, Cherokee National Forest, TN

Number of people seen on trail:  2

The rain came in waves.  Starting shortly before midnight as a trickle, then a periodic flood.  Sometimes the wind screamed through the bare birch branches above my head with the fury of a wounded airplane, and I’d start awake, ready for the next gust to collapse my tent, or send a dismembered branch through its roof—both of which had happened during other storms on other trails—but this night the only catastrophe was that I slept like shit.

Daybreak brought steady rain.  It was forecast to last all morning, so there was no point in waiting for it to ease up.  I rolled my tent into a sodden, dripping mass and strapped it to the outside of my pack, at a joyless protein bar breakfast and walked into the tree-littered gray nothingness.  The hood to my rain jacket was up and cinched around my head, so all I could hear was the constant tickticktickticktick of raindrops against goretex.  There were no views and there was bad footing.  Everything was wet.  Everything was cold.

That didn’t much change even as the rain thinned and eventually stopped altogether.  If anything, it seemed to get colder, and I stopped to dig another layer of clothing from my pack and have a quick snack of sodden crackers.  I’d been walking for hours without a break—why stop just to get wetter and colder?—but I knew the trail was coming up to an established campground in a couple of miles. It’s hard to explain the unimaginable luxury of a simple picnic table for someone who has been sitting and eating on the ground, but the prospect of cooking a hot lunch on one was all I’d able to think about all morning.  So I quickly shouldered my pack and pushed on.

Thunder Rock Campground appeared before me like a vision of heaven on earth, as the clouds started to break open and many of the empty sites were bathed in sunlight.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  I set my pack down at the first one, right at the very edge of the BMT, and spread my tent out to dry in the sun, along with a few other soaked essentials.  I made a quick cup of ramen, and had just finished cleaning up when I saw the caretaker heading over in his telltale Forest Service golf cart.  He clocked at once that I was a thru-hiker.  I explained that I just hope to dry my gear out a little before heading on. “Sure, sure, take all the time you need.”  He offered me a ride to heated, plumbed bathroom on the other side of campground.  On the way, he tried to convince me to stay, offering me free site near the entrance and the password to his wifi.  I demurred, I had miles to make, after all, and he seemed disappointed.  While I was using the bathroom, he returned with a towel and encouraged me to take a hot shower before getting back to the trail.  It was a thoughtful gesture, much appreciated, but I wasn’t carrying soap, and the thought of toweling off wet grime didn’t much appeal to me.  So I once again had to decline his hospitality.

When I got back to the site I’d momentarily taken over, nothing I’d spread out was quite dry, but everything was good enough to be getting on with.  I packed back up and headed out of the campground, past a small hydroelectric plant tucked into the hillside, and across the wide and low Ocoee River.  On the far side, I stripped down to my t shirt, marveling at how drastically the weather had changed from the endless gray of the morning.  As I climbed into the Little Frog Wilderness, I was treated to expansive views of all the surrounding peaks and ridges.  All morning I’d wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere warm and dry, but now this peaceful, beautiful, sunny trail was the only place I wanted to be.

I’d seen one other hiker in the rain, and didn’t see a single other person on trail until I came to the site where I’d planned to camp at the end of the day.  I could see the tent well before I arrived from the ridge above, and it worried me, as the guide had noted that there wasn’t much room for camping down below.  Sure enough, when I finally made it down, I could see that this person had pitched his tent in such a way as to take up the entire pad, when it otherwise could easily have accommodated us both.  He shouted a greeting as I passed, and I returned it as I paused to gather water from the stream, but it was rushed, perfunctory.  I was now in a race against the lowering sun to find another suitable place, and wouldn’t have had time to hang out and chat even if I hadn’t been annoyed.  I pushed on until I came to a small open field, painted in oranges and golds by the last rays of sunlight.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was flat, and for tonight, it would be home.

Day 08:  06 April, 19.2 miles today, 121.9 miles total, Coker Creek, Cherokee National Forest, TN

Number of people seen on trail:  1

I awoke a few hours before dawn shivering.  The temperature had dropped substantially while the still-fat waning moon had passed across the sky.  Quickly as I could manage in the thin light I pulled on my hooded wool hiking sweater and cinched my quilt around me until I was closed in completely.  As I warmed, I started drifting off to sleep, when a sound broke through the slow-flowing mud of my consciousness.  Shuff shuff shuff shuff.  That was something walking.  Through the woods.  Something large.  Shuff shuff shuff SHUFF SHUFF SHUFF.  That was something large, walking through the woods, straight toward my camp—and suddenly I snapped fully awake, with a pretty good idea what that something probably was.  “GOOD MORNING!” I yelled through the dyneema walls.  There was a strained pause, both within the tent and without.  “AND HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY?!” I continued, and got the response I was hoping for:  SHUFFSHUFFSHUFFshuffshuffshuffshuff, the sound of a big, lumbering creature—almost certainly a bear—running into the woods and far away from me.

When I later trekked into that same woods to dig a cathole, I noticed some recent turmoil in the fallen leaves coating the floor at the edge of the clearing where I’d been camped.  This was probably where the animal had been when I’d spooked it away, maybe 50’ from my tent.

I was sitting on a log in my rain jacket, with a pair of long johns pulled over my hiking shorts, heating up water for coffee when a man came along up the trail.  This could only be the guy who’d been camped at the stream in the valley below, but he must have gotten up an hour before the sun to be walking in on me eating breakfast.  He looked around the clearing.  “Turned out to be a pretty nice site, eh?” he said.  So he knew he’d driven off my original plan for the evening.  But no matter.  Bear or no bear, this had probably been a drier site, condensation-wise, than the marshy rhododendron thicket he’d been in—and I’d been able to hear the frogs in that place from up here, a mile away.

He had the clean-shaven look of a banker, thoroughly respectable, thoroughly middle-aged, and thoroughly upper middle class.  He asked if I was “doing the whole thing.”  “Trying to,” I said.  “So am I.”  He explained that he was going to spend the night in Reliance, a tiny blip of a town I wasn’t aware even offered accommodation.  “I haven’t been able to figure out if any of the businesses there are open yet.  I think most are closed until Memorial Day,” I said.  “Most are, but Reliance Fly and Tackle is open.  I called them just the other day.”  This was valuable information, since cell service in this part of the state was uncommon, and the Fly and Tackle shop was 0.7 miles off trail.  He bid me a good hike and disappeared down the trail.  A half hour later I started down myself.

The trail followed a series of abandoned and long overgrown dirt roads, with clear views of the local mountains under a flawless blue sky.  After a few chilly, blissful miles, it dropped down into a canyon and followed beside Big Lost Creek for a few miles more as it cascaded over boulders and tumbled excitedly through stone channels.  Once, lost in thought, I almost stepped on a very damp and very dead raccoon, before stumbling to the side an audible “HUCK!” of disgust and surprise.  I hadn’t smelled the thing beforehand, but definitely noticed the odor trailing after it as I walked away.  A turkey on the trail was startled by my antics and took flight, and for a moment I was only relived that it hadn’t tried to fight me the way the one on the Foothills Trail had.  Then,

noting its enormous wing span, I simply marveled at how impossibly large those birds really are.

Reliance is probably exactly what you’d picture at the phrase Tennessee mountain town.  The river outfitter, with its litter of re-appropriated school buses, was still closed for the season, but the Texaco, which seemed to serve as the only local grocery, was open.  I wasn’t after groceries, however, so I continued on, crossing the bridge that spanned the broad Hiawasee River.  There had once been a burger stand at the far side, but that had been closed for a several years by now, so my goal was the deli counter at the Fly and Tackle shop.  I got there shortly after noon and ordered a burger with cheese, fried onions, pulled pork, and a sauce the cook refused to describe.  When she handed me the finished product, the wax paper it was wrapped in had already turned clear, and the package left a large grease spot on the counter.  I carried this monstrosity out into the deck and proceeded to have a religious experience with one of the best-tasting and most unhealthy food objects I have ever encountered.

When it was done, and I’d had time to let the thing digest for a while, I got my pack on my back and was making my way toward the street when the cook came outside with her vape.  “What did you think?”  “I gotta tell you, that was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.”  She laughed.  “Yeah,” she said, “we get that a lot.”  She wished me well on my hike, telling me repeatedly to be safe before letting me go.  I realized I could take a different road reconnect with the trail up ahead instead of doubling back, so I powered over a high canyon wall, dropping down eventually right onto the trail as it followed alongside the river.

There are river hikes like that morning’s along Big Lost Creek, beautiful, serene, a pleasant stroll over flat, open trail; and then there’s shit like the hike beside the Hiawasee, rooty, muddy, and uneven, peppered constantly by blowdowns, thorn bushes, insects, and snakes, and repeated threaded over obstacles like giant fucking cliffs via thin and treacherous trails with overhanging rocks and trees on one side and a steep, long drop on the other.  I was so frustrated by this slog that when I got to the beautiful campsite at which I’d originally planned at stopping, I pushed on without even slowing down—just so I could put the Hiawasee and all its terrible trail behind me once and for all.

I was rewarded with the highest, narrowest climb up the giantest fucking cliff of the whole day, growing increasingly salty about the whole thing as I sweated my way up.  And then, at the top, a short, sketch side trail let to a rock outcropping, and a little voice in the back of my mind nudged me to ignore the instinct to barrel on past and head down the far side.  I stepped out from a crop of small scrub pines and onto a sort of granite balcony, with the seeming whole of the Hiawasee valley before me, a glistening emerald jewel glowing in the golden light of late afternoon.  Maybe the last seven miles had been a grind, but they had lead me here, to this exalted perch, where I could finally see what a gift each step up had been.

Day 09:  07 April, 4.2 miles today, 126.1 miles total, Tellico Plains, TN

Number of people seen on trail:  1

It was a cold and damp morning at Coker Creek, nestled in the narrow cleavage between two high, unnamed hills.  Cold air flows to the low places, and sheds its moisture as it cools.  I knew this, and was still unprepared for how wet everything in the valley was.  It looked like it had rained—poured, even—but I’d been tracking the moon well enough through a night of broken sleep to know there hadn’t even been a cloud in the sky.

I packed up my soaking wet tent and layered up, ready for a cold hike to the highway, but within ten minutes of leaving camp I had climbed a rise into the sun and I was already overheating.  Once I’d stripped down to a manageable amount of outerwear, it turned out to be a stunning morning to be out hiking in the Tennessee mountains—if you could cope with the thousands of spider webs strung across the trail, of course.  The morning light caught a great deal of them, turning each strand into an exquisite glowing line of golden fire that was quite easy to swat into darkness with a simple swing of a trekking pole.

I met a SOBO thru-hiker maybe a mile from the road, a highly excitable guy in his fifties of the aging Appalachian hippie archetype I seem to remember meeting constantly in my twenties.  I was able to give him solid into w/r/t which business in Reliance were actually open and which weren’t, and he, in turn, told me that the road I was already planning to hitch from was probably my best bet for a ride—but at least he tried.  He wanted a selfie before we parted ways, and it said something to me about the relative solitude of this trail that this was literally the first time this had ever happened to me.

I didn’t have to wait nearly as long as I was expecting for a ride into Tellico Plains, some 27 miles north along a state highway from the place the BMT crosses it.  It was only 20 minutes before a man with an extremely ill-tempered pit bull offered me a ride in the bed of his pickup.  “I’d say you could ride up here with me,” he shouted over the dog’s mad barking, “but the dog…he’s aggressive.”  Yeah, no shit, I thought, as the beast snarled and drooled and barked and barked and barked behind the thin window, but the guy was doing me a huge favor, so I didn’t complain as I wedged myself next his overturned wheelbarrow and on top of a random cinder block.  It was a small truck, and once it started rolling it occurred to me that I was kind of riding more on top of it than in any serious way inside it.  The feeling only got worse as the truck picked up speed and began flying through the countryside.  27 miles is a long way to go when the only things keeping you from bouncing off of your ride and onto the winding mountain highway flying around you are your grip on a well-used wheelbarrow, and hope.

Plus, it was fucking freezing back there.

Tellico Plains is a farm town, open rolling countryside that runs slap into the side of the Appalachian Mountains.  While there is a push to market its proximity to the mountains to the traveling public, it’s clearly struggling to make the transition into tourist mecca.*  What this means for the thru-hiking visitor is that there are not many places to stay once you make the harrowing journey to get there, and even the cheapest option will be obscenely priced.  For me, the cheapest option was a ridiculously high priced air bnb that was, in fact, an antique mid-century single-wide trailer.**  This was owned by a kind but kind of spaced-out woman in her sixties, who, like everyone else in Tellico Plains, had never heard of the BMT—but who wanted me to tell her all about it while her litter of pushy schnauzers yipped ear-splittingly all around us.  But it was a bed, and a shower, and all the electricity I could pump into my little gadgets, and for one night, anyway, it was home.

*This is possibly due, in part, to this town of fewer than 800 souls being home to the Patriot Front, noted in the article I read as being “perhaps the most active white supremacist group in the nation.”  I did not, unfortunately, learn this bone-chilling fact until I was already holed up in town for the night.  

But at least the local Mexican restaurant was pretty good.

**Which does sound kind of charming, until you actually stop to think about it.  Also until you go to turn in and find mouse turds on the bed.