2002, 6-22 Mt LeConte Via Lowes Creek, Off-trail

 Looking back, I thought there was more time between when Jean and I finished hiking all the trails in the Smokies and when we started to do serious off trail hikes. However, though we didn’t become regular off trailers for while, it was only a week after finishing the Smokies 900 miles that I tried my first off trail route on LeConte.

The LeConte off trail hikes had always intimidated me. I imagined that they were done only by the toughest, fittest, and most experienced hikers in the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club. Even though I’d done a lot of hiking, backpacking, and trail running I wasn’t sure that I’d be up to the task. Lowes Creek is also one of the toughest of the LeConte routes. All the major drainages on the east side of LeConte are serious undertakings with 4-5 miles of hard core bushwhacking, about 4,000 feet of climb, plus a ten mile hike back to the car at the end of the day.

This SMHC trip was led by Mike Harrington and Mark Shipley. My notes say there were 13 people on the trip, but I remember much more. The group left Porters Creek TH at 8:30, and hiked up the trail to the first bridge over Porters Creek. We then rock hopped 30 minutes up Porters to the mouth of Lowes Creek. It was slow going on slippery boulders as we all tried to keep our feet dry. We struggled with blowdowns and rhodo going up the creek. One person turned around before reaching Lowes, and another really struggled in the creek. I thought the leaders might turn that person around, but they did not. Lunch was at 12:30, and we were still below 3,000’ and only a mile up Lowes Creek. Mike had told us we would be eating dinner on top of LeConte, but I hadn’t believed him. Now it looked like that was an optimistic guess on his part.

I don’t have many notes on the route finding, Basically, it was just a relentless journey further up the creek. At one point we followed the right bank for 30-45 minutes, then went back into the creek. It was actually a relief when the grade steepened, at least that meant we were making some progress. Next, we all struggled up a series of cascades. Having long ago gotten soaking wet. I took a small fall and hurt my thumb. We all had cuts and bruises, and one woman severely bruised her shin on a fall that could have broken her leg.

The route keeps right at all the major forks on Lowes, until about 5,000’, where it branches left. The altimeter is the only useful navigation tool here, no one used GPS in those days. Near the top, we left the creek on the right and climbed to the base of the talus slope below the exposed part of the Boulevard Trail below Myrtle Point. The last scramble up a landslide scar was steep, loose, and a bit spooky. This was probably debris slide LW1 of Feldkamp (1984) which was dated to 1970 mostly based on estimates from the LeConte Lodge Crew. I was one of the first up the scar hoping to make the scramble before all the holds were scrapped away, and reached the trail about 6PM. The group was very spread out at this point. We ate dinner at Myrtle Point and took a water break at the lodge (I’d already drank 4 quarts by then).

With dinner eaten and clear trail ahead, we all felt much better on the descent. We turned on the headlamps near the Trillium/Brushy trail junction. We reached the cars about 12:30 and I got home around 2 AM.

This was one of the longest day hikes I’d ever done; I don’t recall any other 2AM finishes. Mike and Mark did a great job leading. I’d managed to call Jean from the Myrtle Point on Cindy’s phone, so the late return home wasn’t an issue. Cindy had to deliver her daughter to the airport early the next AM, and she did it on about an hour’s sleep. 

In some ways this hike was also the end of an era for the hiking club. Club trips were often “led” by the fittest hikers who kept their own pace while it was up to the group to keep up. On this hike there was a very large group, and many were not fit enough or really understood what they were getting into. Soon after the SMHC went through a period where leaders for difficult off trail hikes became very hard to find. It turns out an important reason was their reluctance to “have to take along anyone who showed up.” The club board then started a policy to allow leaders to screen hikers either by limiting the size of the group and/or not publishing the hike meeting place in order to allow the leaders to talk to any unknown hikers and make sure they were likely to be able to complete the hike.

This trip also marked a major change in my usual group of hiking partners. The trip leaders were Mike Harrington and Mark Shipley. Mike’s been a great partner on many hikes through the years, and I’ve learned a lot about off trail hiking from him. I didn’t know Mark before the trip, but spent a lot of the hike with him as he swept. We both had an interest in adventure racing, and were able to eventually plan to team with Steven Miller in a couple of the full day races sponsored by RiverSports. This led to some great trail running, off trail hiking, and mountain biking adventures as Mark developed into a close friend and most reliable partner for tough days in the mountains.

2002 6-8 Smokies 900 Milers Complete, Again!

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has almost 900 miles of hiking trails and for many hikers walking every step of those trails is their holy grail. The challenge of hiking every mile is difficult, both physically and logistically. The goal requires long drives to out of the way trailheads, slogs down eroded and fouled horse trails, long trips deep into the wilderness, and no matter how good your route planning, well over 900 miles of hiking. And, no matter where you live, half the park is on the other side of the mountain.

Since moving to Tennessee in 1993, I’d been marking a map of the Smokies showing which trails I’d hiked. For the first few years of our hiking together, Jean had shown little interest in the map marking. But after I had finished hiking all the trails on the TN side of the park by hiking Greenbrier Ridge Trail in May, 1997, I knew that I would soon feel the pull of the complete 900. I then made another map showing all the trails that she and I had walked together. At that point we had enough of the of the trails complete to captivate Jean, and she immediately started planning the hikes we would need to finish our map.

Fortunately, Jean and I never got quite as compulsive about our goal as some hikers. We continued with our explorations of other local areas, and made visits to the bigger, more open terrain of the west, but gradually the map continued to get filled in. The lure of finishing a map is something like approaching a black hole. When you’re far away, you feel its pull as only a small tingling, but as you come closer it’s gravity is more noticeable, until finally it is the only thing you can concentrate on.

Once the spring of 2002 arrived, we were getting close. A trip to Bryson City and a long hike down and up Welch Ridge put us in range for our last few hikes. Over Memorial Day weekend we finished off the Beech Fork trails on the NC side of the park. We hiked 30 miles over two days. Day 1 was the Hyatt Ridge-Beech Gap Loop, plus the Flat Creek Trail, with a stay at CS 42 at Spruce Mountain, one of the park’s most lightly used backcountry sites. For Day 2 we parked at Pin Oak Gap then hiked up to Balsam Corner, where I saw the first bear I’d seen in several years. I took a solo side trip to bushwhack climb Big Cataloochee for the Southern Sixers (nice to be able to combine obsessions!), then we hiked back to Beech Gap. Our final leg was the Balsam Mountain Trail back to Balsam Gap, then five miles of road walking back to the car.

Beech Fork was the final trip for my personal Smokies map, but we had committed to finishing the trails together, allowing no miles for a trail one of us had hiked without the other.

Our last hike for the “us map” was to be the upper part of the Hazel Creek Trail, starting at Clingmans Dome and hiking all the way down to Fontana Lake. I had done that section on a SMHC trip, but Jean had not. Part of the reason this would be our last hike was the difficulty in arranging the transportation. We would need both a boat shuttle from Hazel Creek to the Fontana Marina, and a driving shuttle from the marina back to Clingmans Dome. To take advantage of  the logistics we added our SMHC hiking friends Guy Griffin and John Roberts to the crew. Guy was working on at least his second map by this time.

We got up at 4 AM, and met John and Guy at 6:30 at Clingman’s Dome. We started with cool, pleasant hiking on the AT, Jean and I had located an old plane wreck site on our Welch Ridge hike and were eager to show it to Guy and John, but ended up unable to find it in the fog. Flowers were sparse this late in spring, but we still passed a few patches of bluets. We took our second break of the day by the uppermost hard crossing of Hazel Creek, near where we found a weather radio and two rolls of film dropped out of some unfortunate hiker’s pack. I’d remembered upper Hazel as being very steep, and was grateful that it seemed much less so this trip.

Jean and I both wore running shoes, wading through the Hazel Creek crossings that were knee high at best, then changing socks when the crossings were over. We ate lunch at the first BC site #82 at Calhoun, then strolled the short distance down to the junction with Cold Springs Gap Trail, our last new sections of Smokies trail was complete! Guy took some photos for us (sorry we only have slides), but it was a bittersweet moment. We were proud to reach the goal we’d pursued for so long, but we both enjoy hiking new trails, and knowing this was the last one in the Smokies was tough.

We took our next break on the Bone Valley Bridge by the Lakeshore Trail junction. Our first bad news was a sign indicating that the NPS had relocated the Lakeshore and Jenkins Ridge trails, so we still had a piece of new trail to do. We had a debate concerning the need to do trails that were added to maps after we starting marking them, and concluded that we should count today’s hike as completing our map, but that we also needed to come back and hike this new section.

Then, while sitting on the bridge I was stung on the left ear lobe, probably by a wasp. The sting hurt enough for me to drop my cookie. We left there fast, but I soon started a series of reactions. I itched badly nearly everywhere I have hair, plus just below my neck. My breathing was OK, but I had a knot in my gut like I had swallowed wrong. My hearing was gone, but I assumed that was because I had been stung in the ear. When we got to Proctor five miles later, I noticed that my crotch under my shorts was beet red and I had blotches and blisters in spots on my leg. It was 5PM and our shuttle was not due until 6:30.

Jean went to the NPS cabin. Two guys were just leaving by boat and they offered to try and speed up the shuttle for us. But luckily there was a 5:30 shuttle, and we were able to tag along with them. Back at Fontana Marina, my symptoms were getting no worse, and we knew if they did, I was at least now in range of help. It turns out that the location where I was stung is probably as remote as any in the Smokies. Our vehicle shuttle back to the Dome wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 7, so we still had some waiting. Fortunately, my symptoms never got any worse.  It took 90 minutes to return to the Dome and another two hours to drive home via Townsend. We arrived home at 11PM completely spent.

For the next two days I was still visibly swollen on my neck. I later went to my allergist who put me on a regime of shots that still continues. I still carry an epipen in all but the dead of winter. Since the Hazel Creek trip, I’ve since been stung by yellow jackets, but without any reaction, but never again by wasps.

Dutifully, the next weekend Jean and I drove over to the Fontana and we hiked the new Possum Hollow segment of the Lakeshore Trail between Hazel and Eagle creeks. Basically, an old section of the Lakeshore Trail up Pinnacle Creek to Jenkins Ridge had been replaced with a more direct route from Horseshoe Bend on Eagle Creek to Proctor on Hazel Creek. We eschewed any logistical complications and simply drove to Fontana for an out and back hike. We zipped along the first leg of the Lakeshore Trail to the mouth of Eagle Creek and found the new trail starting east from the first crossing. It looked like it had been finished with a small dozer and was already quite trampled by horses. At the divide it intersected the trace of an old road. Descending into Hazel Creek we spotted at least three old chimneys and other relics of former settlement. By lunch time at Hazel Creek we were done again!

This 21-miler gave us the distinction of completing the 900 milers two weekends in a row and gave me the distinction of three completions in four weeks (counting my solo completion on Beech Fork).

Completing the Smokies 900 left us with a bit of a void. We went on to next complete maps of all the trails in the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Creek-Citico combined wilderness areas in TN and NC, and at Frozen Head State Park. But probably the biggest impact the 900 milers had was in spurring our interest in off trail hiking, which really took off after we finished the later two maps. We began by doing more of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club off trail hikes and then looked to do some of the easier off trail routes on our own. By 2007 we were in full blown exploration mode with enough confidence and (luckily) ability to plan our own new explorations deep in the park.