by Tim Homan

        In the years 2000 and 2001, when I researched and wrote a hiking guide that included the Southern Nantahala Wilderness, I frequently postponed the real work of writing by studying the wilderness map.  For a relatively small area the two-state wilderness (1) is unusually rich with place names, boundaries, a well-known ridge, a major hydrologic divide, our country’s first long-distance trail, 5,000-foot peaks, even a reference to the prominent honker of a Revolutionary War general: Pickens Nose.  There was much to make a willing mind wander.  Over and over again, I procrastinated by reading the rugged land’s contours, tracing the trails and long ridges, following the blue-line flow of the high headwater rills down to their respective rivers, or fantasizing about bushwhack routes, my imagination eagerly striding the land with no thought of dark green and glossy discouragements of rhododendron.
        This pocket-sized parcel of the Southern Highlands, approximately 23,365 acres and still puny, is steeped in evocative place names reflecting the weave of natural and human history: the rugged Appalachian landforms, the abundant wildlife and the magnificent forests that once animated the mountains, the rough and hard-labor lives of the early European settlers.  A reminder that these ancient and eroded mountains are still a formidable geography, still plenty big and tough going for a person afoot on untrailed slopes.
        Here the Appalachian Trail closely follows the equally famous crest of a multi-state long and winding ridge, the Blue Ridge, as the heavily trod treadway threads its white-blazed way alongside and through the wilderness.  And here in this small protected sanctuary of the Mountain South, where congress has granted the land a provisional deed to its own life, the Blue Ridge serves double duty as the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest.
        A careful scan of the wilderness map leads to another fact: all four of the Southern Nantahala’s highest peaks raise the horizon to over 5,000 feet in North Carolina’s northern and higher-elevation half of the two-state wilderness.  These four mountains-Standing Indian, Big Scaly, Ridgepole Mountain, Little Bald-stand over or close to a mile high as the southernmost 5,000-footers in the Appalachian cordillera, which automatically qualifies them as the southernmost mountains of that height in eastern North America.  Standing Indian, the site of a former firetower, is the tallest of the four; its final touch of sky rears up to 5,499 feet.  The lowest 5k peak by the slim margin of only 10 to 20 feet, Little Bald’s highest thrust of ancient orogeny, approximately 5,045 to 5,050 feet, is just over 0.4 mile above the Georgia border.  The bald’s southernmost 5,000-foot contour line is only 0.25 mile north of the Georgia-Carolina line, giving it clear title to the southernmost terrain over 5,000 feet in height of any mountain, knob, bald, ridgepole, or Standing Indian in eastern North America.
        After all the idle hours of map study, I decided to hike off trail, bushwhack, in the Southern Nantahala Wilderness someday soon before I became too decrepit.  I also decided to climb Little Bald on my first backpack trek.  The other three five-grand peaks all had trails leading right to or closely approaching their highpoints.  Little Bald was the only one that offered the challenge of hard off-trail hiking.
        In the spring of 2005 I asked hiking buddy Roger if he wanted to join the ascent of Little Bald. (Roger is Roger Nielsen, a former, and hopefully future, rambler.) I showed him how our route stepped up in pitched rises of contour lines pinched tight and dark on the wilderness map.  I told him we should work our way up to Dicks Knob-a very high peak for Georgia, one that few people have planted their boots on-along the line of march to Bear Gap and Little Bald.  I guaranteed him strenuous hiking up a wild reach of rough country, wildland walking that would test the want to of our wills.  I also guaranteed wildflowers, total solitude for our group of two, a heightened sense of adventure and discovery, and bear-clawed logs at the very least.
        I called the Chattahoochee National Forest’s work center in Clayton, Georgia, and talked to an old timer.  I told the woodsman what we wanted to do and asked him about the thin dashed line on the quad map: the one leading from the parking-area end of FS 54 up to the Appalachian Trail at Coleman Gap.  He told me the line was an old single-track that had not been legally used by motorized vehicles since the area received wilderness designation back in 1984.  The former road, at least for the first mile or more, was still open enough to walk if you didn’t mind the sun-gap saplings and the unknown but growing number of deadfalls.
        He also told me how we could begin our trek.  We could follow the woods road for maybe a mile to a small stream, a Coleman River feeder clearly shown on the topo map, and a former wildlife opening before turning to the left just before the branch.  Then we could follow an old logging road, probably grown over, for perhaps a quarter mile to the high end of a former timber sale where the road petered out.  After that we would be on our own, have all the bushwhacking we could want or stand.
        Since he had helped me and worked for the federal government, he felt compelled to offer a short CYA disclaimer.  “I hunted up there when I was a boy and worked up there for the forest service.  That’s rough country up there where you’re going, a fair amount of rock in places, cursed with rhododendron in others.  That rhododendron will snatch the hat off your head, damn near pick your pocket.  Easy to get lost, hard to get found again.”

        Someday came on May 21 and 22, a weekend so we wouldn’t have to take off work.  Roger and I drove north on US 441 beneath an overcast sky, the ceiling low and completely closed with the medium gray of socked-in cloud cover.  The weather forecast had called for gradual clearing, but as the two of us traveled west on US 76 from Clayton, we drove through light rain.  At the empty parking-area end of dirt-gravel FS 54 (2,860 feet), the clouds floated higher and lighter gray, giving us hope the called-for clearing was on the way.
        The low-elevation forest was lush and shady, full of small buzzings and birdsong.  The extra-large leaves of the deciduous saplings invading the edges of the former road’s light gap were wet and dripping from the recent rain.  Roger and I followed the former single-track as it entered the zoned wilderness and ranged north on mostly easy uphill grades.  Dense vegetation crowded our frequently curving line of least resistance in places and occasional deadfalls blocked easy passage as expected, but overall the road was still remarkably open for one closed to vehicular traffic twenty-one years before.
        Early on, we had quick looks at two colorfully feathered wood warblers-hooded and black-throated blue-and heard the insistent song teach  teach  teach of a third, the Ovenbird.  The two of us heard the loud and fiercely ringing Tarzan tremolo of the crow-sized Pileated Woodpecker, one of the wildest voices left in the Southern Mountains, twice before our first pack-drop break.  A single showy orchis bloomed beside the track, its bicolored orchid flowers a deep pink hood over a white landing-strip lip.
        We turned left off the woods road at the small branch and former opening.  The autumn olive shrubs planted for wildlife were still growing beneath the gathering shade of the 6-inch-diameter tuliptrees quickly reclaiming the clearing.  After some scouting and thrashing around, we found the old logging road, grown over to a faint path through the monocultural recovery of more tuliptrees.
        Roger and I passed through the young stand into a much older and far more diverse forest of mixed mesophytic hardwoods, not a conifer in sight.  Now there was no single-track, no cleared and beaten path bisecting the forest into right side and left side.  The sun-seeking grace and ancient symmetries of the forest surrounded us on all sides, making us feel swallowed up and small on the mountainside.  The novelty of increased difficulty and danger intensified our focus, added a kind of excitement missing when a footpath tells you where to go and where to place your feet to get there.
        We were no longer on the map’s landscape of contour lines and imagination.  We were now cross-country backpacking, traveling trail-less through sharply slanted mountainous terrain with only maps and compasses, looking for the easiest seams through the forest along our desired route.  Our sense of entering a wilder and more challenging phase of the trip was palpable.
        The clouds brightened even more, gave us expectations of blue-sky gaps soon.  We were both in bouyant moods, happy to be out in the big untrailed woods, our senses ratcheting up to meet the demands of tough hiking.  Roger and I decided to gain a few-hundred feet of elevation by climbing up the steep hardwood slope to the west-southwest before bending our ascent toward the notch of a hollow.  We stopped for a breather beside a rotting log ripped apart in places by the long claws of a black bear, the deeply incised parallel lines signs of the wildness we were seeking.
        The sky cleared; we could now see blue and brighter white through the canopy gaps in the forest.  We plodded up the formidable sweep of the green mountainside, steering around the dark and dense barriers of rhododendron.  Roger and I entered a scattered colony of flowering flame azalea, then turned so we could contour toward the hollow’s ravine.  As we curled around the head of the hollow, we flushed a tall doe out of her day bed.  She took off with a loud snort and bounded down the slope, her tail flipping up to full white flag, waving goodbye with every leap.
        We passed through that rising sweet spot in spring’s surge up the slope.  Higher up, the leaves of the trees were still unfolding, not yet fully grown.  Down below, the leaves were already grown and darkened, already marred from caterpillar munching.  But we were now walking through that ephemeral and upwardly mobile band of freshly unfurled foliage, spring’s first full blush of pastel green, newborn and pristine.
        Around the hollow we changed course so we would strike the spur we wanted where the top of its fold was narrow enough to form an obvious ridge.  The two of us crested the ridgetop and angled toward a higher and more prominent spur.  We gained elevation atop the slick footing of wet, moss-covered rock and roughed our way through a tightly knit snarl of rhododendron to a reward: another bear-raked bole, the gap between claw marks wider than the one before.  We found the ridgecrest we wanted where our spur met another to form a single well-defined keel rising toward Dicks Knob.  The ridgeline led us up into cloud mist, the dim and gauzy gray half-light making the crosshatched mesh of the heath-shrub hells appear even darker.
        We followed a narrow game path past several small patches of pulverized soil, the roto-tilling work of feral hogs. (2)  We flushed a rabbit and spooked a Red-tailed Hawk into flight in quick succession.  The fronds of finely wrought New York and hay-scented ferns offered welcome easy walking where the contour lines spread further apart.
        Roger and I climbed the final 400 feet of the calf-buster grunt up the knob’s sunrise slope: no trail, no trash, no game path, just the sharp green rise of rarely trod land.  We zigzagged up short switchbacks of our own design to lessen the difficulty of the pitch and to avoid slabs of wet rock.  Below seeps we waded nearly knee high through the exuberant growth of herbaceous plants.  Near the end of our slow ascent, we noticed the curling, yellowish-silver bark of a yellow birch, a cold-adapted northern hardwood, a sure sign we had entered the Mountain South highcountry.
        We shared the knob’s tiny topknot (4,630 feet using the newest topo), our first major waypoint, with a colony of Catesby’s trillium, their three-petaled flowers having already turned a darker pinkish red with age.  Using our packs for pillows, we lay down in the thatch of last year’s leaves and rested for half an hour, a great luxury of peace and pleasing fatigue.
        Break over, our bushwhack continued down the easy gradient atop the main ridgecrest barely east of north.  That high fold stretched north-south across our small squares of laminated topo map and connected Steeltrap Knob to the south with Dicks Knob and Bear Gap and Little Bald to the north.  A few hundred yards downridge from the mountaintop, Roger and I heard a large animal tear off from us at close range, just the other side of the circular wall of opaque mist murk.  The animal made far too much racket smashing through the shrubs for it to have been a long-legged and graceful deer.  No, the critter we walked up on and spooked to sudden panic was thick and powerful and built low to the ground, probably a feral hog.
        The distance from the knob’s highpoint to the middle of the saddle was only 0.4 mile on the flat map, and the wide spaces between the 40-foot contour lines told us our downgrade to Bear Gap might be relatively effortless.  But after an easy beginning, the interlaced limbs of rhododendron kept jungling together at the leading edge of our portable round of visibility.  Parts of the keel were so completely cordoned off with impediments we thought we were fighting our way through a partial heath bald.  The latticed braches of the tall shrubs snatched the hats off our heads repeatedly.
        Our almost-over-the-hill team gradually ramped down from the mist-shrouded mountain to the lowest sag of the gap, 4,420 feet and only 0.1 mile on the map from the North Carolina border.  Roger and I rigged up A-frame, lean-to tarps for lightweight shelters, snacked and rested on our ground cloths.  And waited for the mist to clear.

To be continued next week.

Notes

        (1) North
Carolina, Nantahala National Forest, approximately 11,732 acres;
Georgia, Chattahoochee National Forest, approximately11,633 acres.  The
Nantahala N.F. holds title to approximately 594,456 acres.
       
(2) Since my first Southern Nantahala hike in 1985, I have seen only
four free-running swine-a pair and two solos-in the wilderness.  All
four lacked humps, had very short black hair, and possessed the
keg-on-short-legs, porky pig build of feral hogs.  None of the hikers I
have chatted with over the years had observed wild boar phenotype swine
in the wilderness.

by Tim Homan

         Later, the sky promising with large patches of blue, we decided to complete the ridgecrest climb to Little Bald’s crown only 0.6 mile away as we would walk it and a little over 600 feet higher in elevation.  We carried only water, snacks, fanny packs, and overconfidence, dressed only in shorts, gaiters, and T-shirts.  We did not pack any survival gear: no headlights, no warm shirts, no space blankets, and no ponchos or rain jackets.  Both of us probably had a lighter or two in our fanny packs.
        A short distance above camp, we noticed a large-dollop plop of place-name apropos scat deposited close beside a faded Budweiser can (the only human spoor along the bushwhack segment of our hike) with two small-caliber bullet holes, probably from a .22.  The scene looked choreographed, like the bear had marked his territory next to the littered beer can, one signpost of passage beside the other.  Less than 30 yards further, we walked past a small colony of Catesby’s trillium blooming close to a fairly thin, flat-sided rock the size of a large platter.  The rock had recently been turned over by the incessant hunger of a foraging bear, leaving its sunken imprint right beside its new position.  Two sets of easily remembered pairings-bear scat and beer can, trillium colony and bear-flipped rock-would signal our return to shelter and supper.
        We made steady progress and quickly crossed North Carolina’s unmarked boundary.  An animal path bisected the length of the ridgeline like on the other prominent crests we had trekked earlier in the day.  The new leaves of the oaks, which were not fully grown in Bear Gap, became even smaller-small as mouse ears-as we ascended the upper slopes of Little Bald.
        The two of us gradually curved to the west without knowing we had done so and were soon on top of the former bald without taking any compass headings as planned.  Highcountry-hardy broadleafs and evergreen heath shrubs had reforested the mountaintop since it was last used as a summer-range pasture.  Small scattered areas of the summit were tufted with doghair stands of deciduous saplings: a jailbreak of early succession growth filling in the former opening’s light gap.  The nearly level highpoint had no cairn, no rock outcrop, no view, not even an old fire ring.  We sat down and tanked up on water and snacks.  The sky sagged down and smothered us in cloud-belly mist before we began our backtrack.
        Roger and I waited to determine if the mist-wrapped mountain was the result of a single cloud cutting an upside-down furrow across the bald’s pate.  It wasn’t.  We followed a compass heading east before turning to the right and south onto what we hoped was the right ridge.  Nothing looked familiar.  The thick gray fog whittled down our visibility to a small moving bubble, blotted out all landmarks: ridges, slopes, hollows, everything.  Our sightlines were pitifully short.  We followed the top of the fold down into the forested mist.  Somewhere, while making end runs around the usual hindrances, we slid off the ridgeline and slanted onto upper slope.  We were now trudging east-southeast almost diagonally across the contours of a sharply canted mountainside.
        We stopped to study our small squares of laminated map.  We talked out our problem.  If we had dropped off the left side of the right ridge, the one leading to Bear Gap, a bushwhack west would take us back to its crest and camp.  But if we had taken the wrong ridgeline, the wide and less distinct one running nearly southwest away from the bald, we would need to travel east or southeast to regain the correct ridgecrest.
        We studied the grain and gradients of the respective sidehills.  We decided to keep descending the veiled pitch of the slope toward what we hoped was the bottom-most notch of a hollow.  Roger was wearing a watch; we knew there wasn’t time for befuddling circles or even a single faulty decision.  We traversed a slope mined with heath shrub skirmishers and seepage-slick rocks.  I thought about what the forest service man had told me, but kept his warning to myself.  We slipped and slided to slow-motion falls, but kept popping up and angling down into a forest gone darker gray.  Fatigue and the first clench of dread, kissing cousin to fear, sapped our strength and focus.
        The two of us frequently huddled around map and compass, steadying ourselves with calm consultations.  We tried to right ourselves with first one plan then another, but all of our plans fell flat on the fact that we were temporarily misplaced, that we really didn’t know where we were with a 100 percent certainty.  Our compasses and maps and guts were telling us we were west of the Bear Gap crest, but we were unwilling to bet a cold and hungry and wet night out in the unsheltered woods without absolute confirmation.  Not yet, anyway.
        The lay of the land remained a cloud-buried mystery.  But we did have one arrow left in our quiver: a spring-born rivulet, a high headwater rill of the “Creek” (3) labelled on the left side of our maps, began in the hollow just across the Georgia line on the west side of the crest we wanted.  The east side did not show a stream, and it did not show a high hollow that might give rise to a spring.  We decided to work our moveable eye in the mist down to the beginning branch and take a compass heading on its flow.  Both of us wanted the clincher, we wanted to right ourselves on the map before spending the last of our light and energy climbing up the steep slope to a ridgeline.
        We didn’t panic.  But the two us were increasingly concerned and determined not to make another disorienteering mistake.  Roger was worried, but he remained outwardly calm, perhaps steeling himself for a long and uncomfortably cold night.  We zigzagged down the sidehill generally to the southeast, so that we would strike the strongly tilted bottom of the hollow we hoped was down there in the gray void closer to Bear Gap.
        Daylight kept draining away, dimming to an early and ever darker dusk.  I noticed my tongue was sticking to the roof of my dry mouth and that it was difficult to swallow.  My scant saliva had the odd metallic taste of a copper penny, primitive fear now the taste on my tongue.  I pinched my forearm hard and told myself, once again, that I had to get Roger out of this mist-bedeviled mess.  We needed to find our bullet-hole and bear-scat ridge with unerring accuracy, and we needed to start climbing toward that ridge within ten minutes or it would be a very long night.
        We struck the bottom of the hollow’s furrow; it descended south-southwest, about 210 degrees.  That heading matched the map.  Good, really good.  Hot meal good.  Now we needed to know if the hollow gave rise to the rivulet on our map.  Our almost-whipped team shadowed the sharply falling notch.  If we were right, we would be traveling in the correct direction, parallel and to the west of our tarp-strung camp.  The bushwhacking was rough-steep, rocky, and wet-rhododendron alternately friend or foe, handhold or shackle.  Increasing exhaustion and resignation made us clumsy.  We thrashed through the vegetation down and down until we found a yellow Georgia Wildlife Management Area sign facing north.  We were standing on the state line.  That fact gave us a boost; we were in the ballpark, had a chance for a dry camp and the welcome warmth of sleeping bags.
        Roger and I stumbled down the hollow a little faster, the darkening sky a ticking time bomb of “if-only” recriminations and grim prospects.  We found the spring and tracked its outflow just far enough to get a reliable compass reading.  The trickling run of the rivulet matched the thin black line on our maps: south-southwest and seaward, close to 210 degrees.  We had our proof.  We had finally deciphered the landscape; we had finally fixed ourselves on the map.  Now it was time to move with all the resolve we could muster.  I made a quarter turn to the left and climbed up the slope a vegetation-altered version of east.  Roger called out for me to remain within easy shouting distance, a reasonable request.  I hollered OK and pushed on as hard as I could, stopping only for standing eight counts.  I heard Roger engaged in the contact sport of rhodo wrestling below me in the fast-fading light.
        Reinvigorated, we crossed over the rocky ledges of a short spur and continued up and generally a little south of east.  We hooted and hollered to stay in voice contact with each other.  I turned more to my right so the hiking would be easier, and the ridgecrest would come down to meet me.  Less than 200 yards after changing direction, I topped a ridge descending south through a small pocket of open hardwoods like the one we had passed through just after setting off for Little Bald.
        I quickly found a familiar sight: the small colony of flowering Catesby’s trillium next to the recently flipped-over rock.  I trotted down the backbone of the ridge to find the clincher: the bullet-holed beer can beside the big pile of bear plop.  I let out a loud celebratory whoop, hurried back up the easy rise of the ridge and told Roger we were back at camp.  We stepped under our tarps safe from a miserable night with less than ten minutes of increasingly marginal light left.
        We celebrated our deliverance with supper-desiccated dinners-and kept up a cheerful banter, stress leaving our bodies with every laugh.  I told him about the metallic coppery taste that had taken up residence in my mouth, dread and fear come to say hello.  He told me about the constricted feeling in his throat that had tightened as the minutes ticked toward last light.  I told him I was glad he had held his emotions in check, that he had passed the bushwhacker’s stress test.  I also assured him, if he wanted to go again, that we would not make another mistake the rest of the summer.
        Dusk darkened to cloud-cover night while we waited for our freeze-dried feedsacks to rehydrate.  We could see the minute droplets of the heavy mist in our headlights.  A light rain pattered on our tarps after we had slipped into our sleeping bags.
        As I lay in my fart muffler safe and warm, I had a powerful feeling that Roger and I were the only backpackers for miles around.  The black sky and the silence, no sounds save the occasional rain tapping on the tarps, buttressed the strong sense of our far-reaching isolation.  All our effort to reach Bear Gap the first time, and all our struggle and stress to find it again before nightfall further bolstered that feeling of an expansive isolation.  I knew the reality of our location.  But I also knew the psychological distance felt much further, spanned miles and miles further in all directions.
        We slept the sleep of the just, the just done-in and dog-tired.  Late that night, some time on the morning side of midnight, coyotes startled us with a loud yipping alarm-their singing high pitched and piercing, close and quickly over.  They had been working the ridgeline on the hunt, padding down toward the saddle from the north, when they had run right into the sounds and sweat-drenched scents of our camp.  The coyotes had hit the brakes and sounded the alarm, their music a welcome wildness to the night.
        The coyotes kept us awake long enough to notice that our breaths now plumed smoke, a visual to accompany the audio of our snores.  The night was now cold and wet enough for us to know. …

Notes
        “the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest.”  South of the divide, the Tallulah River’s clear and cold water makes its short and dam-stoppered way to the Atlantic Ocean at the seaport city of Savannah.
        North of Standing Indian, the Nantahala River’s fast moving freight begins its long-expedition journey from grits to gumbo.  Pushed and pulled along by the Earth’s one-way water shepherd, the Nantahala’s contribution glides down the Tennessee and the Ohio before mingling its mountain water with the Mississippi.  After sweeping its meandering, mile-wide way far to the south, the Mississippi gains its lowest and final level where it ends at the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.  There the mighty river loses its name, loses its linear traveling life, and loses its sweet water to the salty sea.

        Place names from the Southern Nantahala Wilderness: Sugar Cove, Cherry Cove, Burnt Cabin Cove, Milksick Cove, Stillhouse Cove.  Milk sickness came from a rhizomatous perennial known as white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum).  This native Aster family plant is poisonous, and milk from cows that grazed this wildflower will cause milk sickness in humans, an especially serious affliction for young children.  During periods of the nineteenth century, milk sickness was the leading cause of death in the nation.
        Mayapple Knob, Little Nell Knob, Newt Knob, Deadening Knob, Rattlesnake Knob.  When Southern Appalachian settlers found land flat and fertile enough to farm, their first step in the laborious process was girdling all the trees, killing them to let in the light.  These girdled-tree areas were known as deadenings.
        Whiteoak Stamp.  Stamps and stomps, former sites of corralled livestock, are occasional to uncommon place names throughout much of the Mountain South, especially in the high land of former summer pastures.

        (3) The spring that gave rise to the rivulet we followed to verify our bearing is the highest headwater source of Mill Creek, a tributary of the Tallulah River.

by

Tim Homan       

       Summer 1988, Canyonlands National Park*, southern Utah’s redrock and hoodoo country.  Wingate Sandstone, Chinle Formation, Moenkopi Formation, White Rim Sandstone: a geologic layer cake from the Permian, the Triassic, and the Jurassic, each band with a distinct composition, age profile, and color that changes with the light.
        Page and I arrived at the small primitive campground (Willow Flat in the park’s Island in the Sky district) late in the afternoon, the day cloudy and surprisingly cool, and staked out our tent, a dinky two-person dome.  We are both in the tent, resting from the three-day drive.  I am flat on my back and moaning intermittently from unaccustomed chest pains: a fast pulse with some sort of arrhythmia, painful and thudding, at a ratio of one squirrely misfire every five or six quick beats.  The pain is not heart-attack severe, not excruciating, but damned inconvenient and disconcerting nevertheless.

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