Tunnel and Forney Ridges, off-trail

 Despite what they say in Townsend, North Carolina is really the quiet side of the Smokies. There are far fewer tourists there, and no need to deal with the horror show of driving through Gatlinburg or the Parkway. Jean and I enjoy the quieter, less crowded trails on the NC side, but it is not always easy to make the longer drive over the mountains. 

When we visit, Bryson City is one of our favorite stops. It’s a pretty little town with a nice hotel and a couple interesting places to eat. With this trip in the era of COVID-19 we weren’t looking to eat out or visit shops, and just appreciated its proximity to the trailheads on the Road to Nowhere and Deep Creek. We planned trail hikes for our inbound and outbound days (Noland Creek in the rain, and the White Oak Loop) and saved our middle day for the real adventure of the trip, an off-trail hike on Tunnel and Forney  ridges.

Clyde and I had recently led a Smoky Mountains Hiking Club trip that included Tunnel Ridge, and Jean’s idea was to also revisit the route of our original 2009 trip with Clyde and Nan on the adjacent Forney Ridge Manway. Since the Tunnel Ridge manway had proved so open on our previous trip, we expected that the travel and navigation for this route would be straightforward. But we had also seen just how much a route could become overgrown on another recent bushwhacking trip up nearby Laurel Branch.

For Tunnel and Forney ridges we had our prior GPS tracks, and the Forney Ridge Manway is well marked on the 1949 park map. We would start on the Lakeshore Trail at the tunnel, follow it to the south end of the Forney Ridge Manway and follow the manway to its end at the intersection with Springhouse Branch Trail. Our return route would descend Forney Ridge, but then diverge onto Tunnel Ridge and follow it over the tunnel to the Tunnel Bypass Trail, and then back to the parking area. The Forney Ridge Manway is an old trail probably built by the CCC. The Tunnel Ridge Manway was also probably built as a trail, but I have not seen it on any park maps.

Tunnel at the end of the Road to Nowhere.

We started at the tunnel on beautiful, clear cold (31F) morning at about 8:15. By this late in the fall all the leaves were off the trees. Regrettably, there’s much new graffiti spray painted inside of and on the face of the tunnel. The barely risen sun shone through almost the entire length of the tunnel and we wondered if there was some sort of Stonehenge effect here. Would the sun shine through the entire length of the tunnel once a year to mark some special day?

Some recent redigging of the trail bed made for nice walking as we headed past the junctions with the Tunnel Bypass and Gold Mine Loop trails to the first small ridge crest on the Lakeshore Trail. Approaching the small ridge, I could not recall if in 2009 we had been able to follow the end of Forney Ridge Manway exactly to the trail junction, or if we had simply picked the easiest way through the open forest to descend. Just before we reached the ridge, we spotted what looked like an old manway and proceeded up it. The tread soon gave out but the forest above us was open and rhodo free, so we decided just to bushwhack to the crest and pick up the manway there. Along the way we paid our dues in a ten minute section of unwelcoming greenbrier entwined with laurel, but otherwise reached the ridge unscathed. On the climb we saw the first of several deer and many of their beds.

Forney Ridge

Deer are relatively rare in the deep forests of the Smokies and we wondered if there was a relation between these browsers and the open woods they live in. Was it the deer who were keeping these magnificent woods so open, or was the lack of underbrush natural, and the deer just take advantage of it?

Forney Ridge.

The junction of Tunnel and Forney ridges can be a tricky spot, but we hit it on target and rejoined the manway again. Besides the open forest, the other remarkable thing about these ridges is how flat they are. The open forest, gentle terrain, abundant sunshine, and leaf-free views accentuate the beauty of these ridges. We followed the ridge to the northeast towards its only steep pitch, near where we’d briefly gotten off route on our club hike coming up from Laurel Branch. Our 2009 notes indicated that the manway would be visible all the way ahead, but that it was easier just to follow the open crest of the ridge.

We hadn’t committed to going beyond a survey point at 3670’ and ended up stopping there for lunch., but could not find the survey marker. Jean asked how much further it might be to the trail and when I told her, I was surprised that she wanted to continue. I guess the temptation of so much open easy ridge was too much to resist. The next knob to the north had a small stone siting on edge at its very top, so we dubbed it Tombstone Peak. The ridge did indeed continue open and sunny all the way to the Springhouse Branch junction which we reached at 11:45. In fact, we overshot the junction and walked a bit of the trail.

Springhouse Branch Junction in 2009

 

Tombstone Rock

The return hike was an easy repeat of the manway this time down to the spilt between Forney and Tunnel Ridges. The Forney Ridge manway may split off the ridge a little north of this spot, but the area is so open that it would matter little to the hiker following along it. While Forney is the dominant ridge, the better manway heads southeast down Tunnel. We descended gradually along the Tunnel Ridge manway eventually reaching a low saddle in the ridge. The manway then passes above the tunnel and encounters a few areas where it is overgrown. But as it makes its way towards the Tunnel Bypass Trail the ridge opens back up again.

We were able to follow the manway past a fallen 4x4 post, all the way to the Tunnel Bypass Trail junction, enjoying  awesome views down into the valleys of Forney and Noland creeks. Then it’s a left turn for a brief hike back to the tunnel trailhead, which we reached about 2:30PM after 8.2 miles. Though we had seen no hikers all day long, the tunnel in the afternoon proved to be a popular spot for visitors looking for a short quiet walk. 

The Tunnel in 2009.

2020 11-12, Cumberlands, NCWMA, Mill Creek and Flower Mountain Run

I got the idea for this run after plotting the results of my  mountain bike ride on the NCWMA “Four Lane” two weeks ago (Here), and from my Brimstone Road mountain bike recon trip in 2014 (Here). Based on what we’d seen on the Four Lane.

it looked like there would be along skinny loop out of Lone Mountain Church at the south end of the Brimstone Road. Both trails 39 (Flower Mountain) and 33 (Mill Creek) show as roads rather than ATV trails, so they should be mountain bikable at best, and runnable at worst. There were three options to connect the two, trail 79 at the shortest and the Gobey Crest Road at the longest. I targeted the middle route, a blue “foot trail” along the 2600’ bench for our route as it would give us a nice long middle third of new trail to explore. My initial estimate for the route length was 13.1 miles.

The drive in the trailhead may have been the toughest part of the trip. Leonard and I met in Oak Ridge, and the drive to the trailhead via Highway 27 took about 1:15.  I didn’t remember that we needed to climb a small hill to reach the Lone Mountain Church, but luckily Leonard had spotted it from the bridge below. We elected to park at the Church, figuring it would not be busy on a weekday.

The start of the trails.

The start of roads 39 and 31 was not marked at the intersection with the Brimstone Road, but we found it by walking just 100 feet or so back down the road from the church. Almost immediately the road forked at signs for TWRA and CNX Gas. We took the left fork to do the loop clockwise and begin along Mill Creek. The day before had seen an inch of rain in Knoxville and there had apparently been much more here. Mill Creek was full, almost bursting its banks.

Wet weather falls on Mill Creek.

The trail took us by some old trailers in a field in the east end of the meadows below the church. As is often the case we found that there were many more intersections with ATV tracks than our maps showed. 

Crossing a side branch of Mill Creek.

There are no gas wells along the first few miles of Trail 31. We saw the Trail 77 junction and worked to keep our feet dry at the crossing of several side creeks that are likely normally dry. The surface here was gently graded well packed gravel that would have made for nice biking. The trail hugged the creek until it approached its headwaters near the junction with Trail 79. As the trail pulled above and east of the main branch, we could see a concrete block building below us along a side trail. But, since we had a long loop ahead of us, on almost completely unexplored trail, we didn’t check out the structure more closely.

Old building along Mill Creek.

Beyond the structure and the Trail 79 junction, Trail 31 climbed steeply as a rocky and eroded ATV route. We began to parallel a utility line and also saw the remains of an old 4” pipeline partly excavated in the road. The pipeline could have been buried in the road from the start, and just not exposed by erosion, but we weren’t sure where the start of the utility line was. Both lines probably once fed the old coal plant that was sited above us on the north side of the east end of Sandy Gap Mountain.

Leonard along Mill Creek.

Near the top of the climb, we made our only navigation error of the day. We spotted the start of foot trail that we thought we be our connector, and did the smart thing by continuing a short distance up the road to the junction with the Four Lane to get our bearings. Then we went back down to our foot trail and followed it a short way before it began to fade away as it approached an old mine site. We quickly realized that this was not our trail, and went back up the junction with the Four Lane and found our trail leading out of the back of a gas well site. More careful reading of the map would have told me that hiking to the Four Lane level was needed here. The confusion added maybe 0.5 to 0.7 mile tour route.

Don't turn here (photo by Leonard).

Our “foot trail” was obviously well used by ATVs, but at least it was open. However, the “trail” followed an old coal mining bench at 2600’, so it was essentially too flat to drain. After our efforts along Mill Creek to keep our feet dry, we were soon plunging through one nasty mud puddle after another. It was a slow slog through a pretty area. At one point I noticed a 6” diameter hole in the middle of the bench, too deep (>3’) for me to reach the bottom with a stick. I wasn’t sure if this was an old blasthole that was just never fired, or if it was an exploration hole drilled to examine the coal seams below.

Following the old coal bench (Photo by Leonard).

The west end of the bench had seen some recent scraping with a bulldozer, as did the first bit of Trail 39 that we turned onto leading up to the junction with the west end of Trail 79 on Fork Ridge. The mile of trail around the east side of High Knob was one of the two sections of trail that I’d done previously, and I didn’t remember this dozer work from my visit earlier in the year. The trail was faint past the last gas well, and I wondered if Trail 39 was really the better used road on the west side of High Knob.

Once around to the north side of High Knob we were on the home stretch. There was some recent intense logging on the west side of Flower Mountain around the head of Indian Creek, near our south end. The split left to Gosnell Mountain was faint, but I think there was no logging north of there. We cruised along another well-kept gravel road, ignoring the splits that led to gas wells or unmapped ATV trails. Here we passed our only person of the day, a lone ATV rider who told us we were on the correct road (!) and that he also had parked at Lone Mountain Church.

Leonard along Trail 39.

The last three miles of the loop were downhill, and the tread mostly good enough to be bikable, so we did our only running of the day here. Back at the church we found that our ATV rider worked for the gas company, so we can hope that some modest maintenance gets done on the existing TWRA roads. 

2020, 11-2 Joyce Kilmer, Slickrock-Hangover Hike

Mark had been talking for a while about wanting to try a hike in Joyce Kilmer and finally we found a good weekday to go. With a lot of recent rain and overnight lows forecasted at freezing, we decided to try a loop from Big Fat Gap with the Slickrock and Hangover Lead South trails, rather than the more ambitious Slickrock Creek hike that Mark had originally proposed.

Big Fat Gap Trailhead.

I’d hiked frequently in the combined wildernesses from 1994 to 2007, mostly on backpacking trips, and many of those with Jean. Jean and I had even completed our “Map” of all the trails in 2005 covering the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Creek Wilderness, mostly in NC’s Nantahala NF, and the Citico Creek Wilderness mostly in TN’s Cherokee National Forest (Link).

But in 2008 the state of Tennessee completed their “Connecting the Cumberlands” project which included the addition of the Emory Tract addition to Frozen Head State Park and the Emory Lease property just to the north of the park. With so much new land to explore closer by and less crowded the Emory Area became our prime target for exploring new areas and visits to Joyce Kilmer became less frequent. This hike would prove to be my first trip to the area in eight years.

We met at 6:30 at Kroger Northshore and were on the trail by 8:15. Mark drove. US 129 (aka the dragon) wasn’t crowded, I took a Dramamine to prevent motion sickness on the curvy road. We saw bear hunter vehicles from Foothills Parkway continuing thru the lower part of the BFG Road. BFG Road is well maintained no potholes or washboards, and would have been easy for 2WD sedan. I used both Garmin and Maprika GPS and my phone camera.

Mark wanted to try descent via Windy Gap, which is also part of the Benton MacKaye Trail. It starts as old logging road to small gap west of Cold Spring Knob. The trail was well maintained and easy to follow. No blazes, but most trail junctions were signed. I forgot to GPS the upper Nichols Cove junction. I  GPS’ed the lower Nichols Cove/Big Fat and Slickrock Creek junctions in campsites at Big Fat Branch. The junction is south of the Big Fat crossing, not north as map shows. The Joyce Kilmer trails are notorious for being hard to follow, so we were taking no chances.

The first part of the hike is easy down to Slickrock Creek is easy, but getting out is a different story. There things turn rough and the place names sound like a bachelor party gone wrong; Slickrock, Ballbuster, Naked Ground, Haoe, and the Hangover.

Mark along Slickrock Creek.

It was easy going to a trail sign near crossing of Hangover Creek. The trail is old railroad bed here. We then got sidetracked by a side spur to a campsite, and walked a small loop, then found a switchback to the left. Next we followed the old RR grade south along Slickrock Creek until we realized that our maps showed this as part of the abandoned Slickrock Spur Trail. We turned back just short of another sharp switchback left on a RR grade and returned to the last sign, not seeing any sign of the main trail. We returned to the sharp switchback and realized that it was indeed the main trail, however its location was mismapped. We spotted a cairn at the elbow of the switchback, which, had we walked just a few feet further the first time, would have clued us in.

The trail then swung around into Hangover Creek. I changed batteries on my Garmin at the base of the ballbuster climb, not remembering that my ancient Garmin generally didn’t acquire satellites the same day after a battery change. I still had Maprika running, so the rest of the route is sketched in on my map.

The crux of the Ballbuster is 1400’ of climbing, alternating between ridiculously steep, eroded pitches alternating with gentle traverses that somehow always seemed to give up some of your recently hard earned elevation. Much of the climb was through thick rhodo. Mark pulled ahead, but I’d had enough Barkley training to make good progress. We ate lunch at Naked Ground enjoying some great views. Then it’s a quick mile past several inviting campsites to the top of the Haoe, where Jenkins Ridge Trail comes in. We saw two hunting dogs just off the trail near Naked Ground, otherwise we saw no signs of hunting during the hike.

Curiously, the Trails Illustrated map omits the crucial short section of trail through Saddle Tree Gap. We took the side trail to the top of the Hangover. Again, what the map shows as a 4-way junction is actually offset, with the Deep Creek Trail ending in a T-junction with the Hangover Spur. With a cold clear day, the views were crystal clear including all the sub peaks of LeConte. Hangover must have one of the best mountain views in the southeast, the entire southwest side of the Smokies is visible.

View from the Hangover.

On our return we noticed that the first mile of Hangover Lead is also mismapped. The trail swings much further west before rejoining the crest of the ridge. Tim Homan’s guidebook mentions that this change was done to improve the route, but the “new” trail is still extremely rough, and has the same super steep-flat traverse pattern of the Ballbuster. Finally, in one last jab at the map makers, there is no sign of the trail 400 that is shown on the TI Map.

There was much more traffic coming back on the Dragon, mostly sports cars, but none of the racing, corner cutting that we used to see.

With the exception of part of the climb up the Ballbuster we didn’t see much of the thick rhodo that plagues the Smokies. It would be fun to do more hiking here, especially on the NC side, and maybe try some off trail hiking. 

Trip Stats: 13.3 miles, 3500’ climb, 7 hours