I had seen a report from a recent trip to this area on the old Griztrax website that caught my eye. Griztrax was a private web site run by Dave Landreth who lived in western NC, and did a lot of Smokies off trail hiking. Its primary use was as a message board where people could post trip reports and discuss various hiking related topics. For a while Griztrax was the primary public source for off trail hiking information about the Smokies. But then the work involved in managing the site, especially in blocking bogus posts, became too much and the site was dropped. I don’t remember when this happened, but was told that most of the activity from Griztrax had moved to Facebook, which I was not using. The role of Griztrax was eventually replaced by the Knox News Sentinel GoSmokies site, which was very active up until the early 2020s.
After
reading the Griztrax post I contacted Clyde for more information about the
route. He sent a map of his trip there, and some solid into about the route. He
also mentioned that it was the standard on the Rhodo Rooters Scale for Class 2
(on a 1-4 scale), off trail hiking. This would be considered strenuous, but
still humane. The route would start at Shaw Grave Gap, drop into Maynard Creek,
climb Grassy Flats to Bunker Hill Lead, and return down the old Revenue Road.
Claudia was able to join Jean and I. Jean took pictures and I GPS’ed the route.
Bas Shaw Grave.
We
I had some trouble finding the start, but soon realized that it is at the
second powerline crossing on US 129. The gap is at one of the famous hairpin
turns on US 129 nicknamed the tail of the dragon. There is a good pullout about
100 yards down the highway, and an obvious old road leads another 100 yards to
the Bas Shaw grave site. Shaw was a Union soldier killed by Confederate raiders
near the end of the Civil War. From the grave site we went too far west on the
road, but quickly corrected to go northeast a short way on Revenue Hill. The
toughest part of the hike was the next descent down to Maynard Creek. We were
trying to follow a skinny ridge, but it was super steep, and we found it tough
to get any footing. Once in the valley of Maynard Creek we saw lots of sheets
of dark plastic of unknown origin.
Across Maynard Creek.
Maynard
Creek was an easy rock hop, and the subsequent climb up to Grassy Gap ridge was
steep, but not as bad as our descent. From there we basically followed the
ridge crest northeast. Almost all the ridge was covered in pine, much of it had
been killed by the pine beetle. We often moved to the right side of the ridge
to avoid the worst of the blowdowns. The beetle kill was old, there were lots
of scrub trees with short greenbrier and blueberry bushes. Luckily the
blowdowns never got too thick, and we never had to crawl. Still the dense
vegetation was tedious.
At the fire tower site on Bunker Hill.
The
ridge was a gentle climb to Bunker Hill Lead. The old access road across the
lead to the fire tower site was hard to see where we hit it, just a quarter
mile from the tower. This was quite a change from my previous visit in 1994,
when the access road had looked relatively newly closed, and I’d mountain biked
a half mile of it. (1994 Bunker Hill) We took a side trip
to the tower site to eat lunch. There were old batteries, plus an H-shaped
stand, and some old PVC where the tower and cabin had been.
For
the return route we followed the access road back to the junction with the even
older Revenue Road, which shows as a manway on the park 1949 map. The junction
was clear, but we did not see the hog trap mentioned by Clyde as a marker. On
the descent we could see some recently broken branches, probably made by the same
Griztrax party who had posted about the route. The road was generally worn or
sunken in, but got indistinct in a few places where it was directly on the
crest. There were still blowdowns, but less frequently than on Grassy Flats
Ridge. The underbrush was less thick as well, and there was a lot of trailing
arbutus. Both ridges had a fair amount of bear scat, and there was some hog
damage as well.
Approaching US 129.
Despite
just a 7.0 mile hike, all three of us were worn out by the end of the hike. It
had been warm with temps at 69F, and a clear blue sky at the end. I’d hiked in
a tee shirt all day. We thought the hike could make a good SMHC trip, but that
the Maynard Creek descent was off-putting, and there were not any compelling
features beyond the fire tower site and the Shaw Grave.
