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.
