Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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