One Day in November (Part 1 of 2)

For several years I’ve been telling people that my favorite month for hiking in the Smokies is November, but that hasn’t always been the case. For a long time, May was my favorite. In May the weather has warmed up nicely, wildflowers and Mountain Laurel are showing off, the heavy tourist traffic is still a month away, and temperatures are warm but not muggy. The older I get, the more January feels like a near-death experience (with no warm glow and bright light to walk toward), but May is an invigorating breath of warm, fresh air.  I love May.

And the snakes love it, too.

I’ve had a couple of close encounters with rattlesnakes in April and May that were not so close that I have quit hiking in those months, but they were close enough to make me be a bit more cognizant about where I put my hands as I hop over logs or on top of rocks. They were also close enough to move November to the top of my “favorite months” list. By November cold weather has become well-entrenched in the mountains, sending the snakes underground where they belong, but it’s not so bone-chillingly cold that it sends me underground, too. November is usually crisp, clear, and nippy. In other words, ideal hiking weather – if you can manage those first ten minutes of hiking when you can’t decide whether or not to wear a coat. If you don’t start with that extra layer, you’ll be a bit too cold for about ten minutes, but if you wear one, you’ll have to stop and take it off ten minutes into the hike. That’s usually the biggest challenge you’ll have on a November hike.

Unless it snows 12” overnight.

In spite of my best efforts, I spent most of October acting like a responsible adult, so I was determined to head to the mountains every weekend in November, starting with November 1 – the very first Saturday in the month. That was the year that on the night of October 31 the temperature below 1,500’ hovered just above freezing with a steady drizzle, while anything above 1,500’ got snow. A lot of snow. LeConte got almost 2 feet of snow. It was a record for snow on LeConte in a 24 hour period. Not just a record for November 1. A record for… ever.

Now I like snow as much as the next guy, but I don’t own any snowshoes, and wouldn’t have been in the mood to use them even if I did. It was November 1 for cryin’ out loud! Many years we haven’t even had our first frost by November 1.

So I decided to go fishing.

Trout tend to prefer cloudy, nasty days, and this November 1 certainly qualified. I love trout. I love to fish for trout. I think trout are as pretty as a freshwater fish can be. I have paintings of trout in my home. But their greatest character flaw is that on bright, crisp, blue-sky days they hunker down beneath and behind rocks and sulk; on cloudy, rainy days they come out to play. So I drove to Greenbrier to fish the Middle Prong, and against my better judgment, I dared to be optimistic.

At the Greenbrier entrance the snow on the roadside and tree branches was a few inches deep. By the time I reached my upstream (and, therefore, uphill) spot, the snow was about six inches deep. The air temperature was now about 35 degrees so wet globs of snow were falling off trees onto the road and into the river. This was one of those moments when I had to decide what kind of person I am. Am I a manly man who will venture out into unpleasant conditions because that’s what manly men do, or am I the kind of guy who is afraid of a little snow? I think there’s a strong chance that I’m neither, but I really want to be a manly man with more testosterone than is good for him – or, more accurately, I want people to think I’m a manly man. Of course, people who know me know that’s not true, but those people weren’t here. Instead, there were complete strangers driving along the gravel road, watching me get out of my truck, take off my boots, put on several more layers of clothes, and slip into my waders. [To be continued]

The Joy of Failure

 

So, a fly fisherman dies, and he wakes up in the afterlife, lying next to a beautiful trout stream. The sun is glistening off the water, and because it is a crisp, clear day, he can see the wavy reflection of the mountain peaks in the smooth, swirling water. He sees a trout rise gently to a floating mayfly in the middle of the river, so he picks up his fly rod, ties on a #12 Quill Gordon, wades out into the river, and casts to the rising fish. On his very first cast, he hooks him. The trout shakes his head for a few seconds, then makes a long, hard run across the river and stops and pouts for a moment, a strong clue that this is a brown trout, the fly fisherman’s favorite fish. After a 5 minute game of tug ‘o war in which it was never clear who the winner would be, the fish finally relents and comes closer to his captor. This was the fly fisherman’s favorite moment – when he could see his prey floating effortlessly in the water, a long, shiny, buttery-brown creature, angry but defeated, his fins waving ever so slightly to maintain his balance. The fisherman reached out with his net, which panicked the fish and initiated another two or three minutes of battle. Finally, the exhausted fish came to the net – a flawlessly magnificent 22” brown trout, deeply colored and cold to the touch.

Then he sees another fish rise upstream. He wades. He casts. He catches the fish, again on his very first cast. Another trout – a lively, acrobatic rainbow – well over 20”. Of course, the fly fisherman is thrilled! Eternity will be exactly what he had hoped for – an endless string of days full of big, dumb trout.

That night as the fly fisherman lay in his bed in his cabin by the river, he dreamed of flowing water, mayflies, and rising fish… big fish. In the morning he awoke with the sun and hurried to the river. The trout were rising to a steady hatch of delicate mayflies. This second day was a duplicate of the first: more big fish, always caught on the very first cast. Never a wasted cast. Never a missed fish. It was easy, almost too easy.

And the third day. The same. Exactly the same. A 20+” fish on every cast. It was too easy. The fly fisherman began to wonder if he would ever again not catch a fish.

At the end of the third day, as he stepped out of the river, he saw an old man – the river keeper – walking along the river bank toward him. As they approached one another the old man asked the obvious question: “How’s the fishin’?”

The fly fisherman replied, “Great! Fabulous! A fish on every cast! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

The river keeper nodded his head and replied, “Yeah, that’s what everyone says… at first.”

Then, as his adrenaline and enthusiasm began to settle down, the fly fisherman continued, “But you know, I’m starting to get a little… bored, I guess.” Then, as he paused to swat a mosquito on his neck, he said, “I didn’t think there would be boredom in heaven.”

The river keeper gave the fly fisherman a puzzled look, and replied, “Heaven?”

****

Success is great. It’s what we all yearn for. And yet, as much as I hate to admit it, challenge and failure add spice to life. Without the agony of defeat, we’d never fully grasp the thrill of victory. We only know and understand success when we have something – failure – to compare it to. Many activities in life – including fly fishing for trout; no, especially fly fishing for trout – are frustrating because they are hard, and success is rare and fleeting. And yet, while an endless string of successes might seem like it would be heavenly… I don’t think so. Indeed, it might be just the opposite.

The Land of Sharp Edges: The Top of the Jumpoff (Part 9 of 9)

 

Keith, Charlie, and I had managed to find our way to the top of the Jumpoff, but Greg Harrell was still scrambling around somewhere down below us. I went to the middle of the Jumpoff overlook and yelled for him, wondering where he was.

His response came back to me immediately, because he was only about 50 feet below me. (Later, as we sat at Arbys eating our celebratory meal, Greg told me that at that moment, he was just sitting and wondering what to do next. To quote him: “It was good to hear your voice.” For Greg, that’s a warm and fuzzy moment.) We talked for just a moment – me above and Greg below but both hidden from each other by the shrubs – then I moved north along the Jumpoff and found Charlie and Keith sitting at the spot where they had topped out. About 15 minutes later Greg came up at their spot by aiming at their voices as they taunted him for being so slow. Because I’m the slow one in our group, this was one of those rare instances in which I arrived at our destination before he did. I should have taken advantage of the situation and joined in the taunting, but I was too tired to muster up any enthusiasm for the project, so I let Keith and Charlie do all the work.

We spent fifteen excellent minutes on the Jumpoff, basking in the view, the quiet, the cool breeze… and the sense of accomplishment. It was only at this moment that I realized how relieved I was to be finished. It wasn’t physical relief; it was mental. This trip’s stress level had been a bit higher than average, probably the result of risk mixed with angst about the unknown. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were in serious danger, but for those last few hours we all understood that the consequences of a moment of clumsiness or carelessness could have been serious. We also understood that a few people had probably done this route before, but we didn’t know any of them, so we weren’t 100% assured that we could reach the top before the sun set. Running out of daylight is always a nagging concern when we are off-trail because there’s a very, very thin line between being off-trail in the dark and being lost, and I’m pretty sure that while you are doing it, they’d feel like the same thing.

Of course, the views, the 1,400’ cascade, the effort, and the angst all worked together to make this one of our most memorable Smokies trips. For a full month afterward, during quiet moments I‘d find my thoughts drifting to that eastern slope of Mount Kephart – everything from the rush of adrenaline to the delicacy of the Grass of Parnassus.

As I write this, we’ve all done this Lester-Jumpoff trip one or two more times, and I must admit, each time has been a challenge. I had expected that the drama of the unknown wouldn’t be quite as pronounced because we now knew that it is possible to get to the top, but that wasn’t quite the case. Yes, we now know it’s possible to reach the top, but finding that route isn’t a foregone conclusion. Even a slight deviation from a previous route can create a trajectory that puts you in a spot that you don’t want to be in, which is something that has happened to us every time we’ve made this trip.

The Jumpoff: A bloody good trip

Eventually, sanity prevailed and we decided that we should take a break from the Jumpoff. While we’d had no near-death experiences, we did begin to wonder aloud if perhaps we weren’t pushing our luck. How many times can a guy put his trust in sand myrtle bushes, worn slate, spruce roots, and globs of wet moss, and escape unharmed? We’d been rolling the dice and had continued to win, but eventually the laws of probability would catch up with us. So we quit while we were ahead.

But like any temptation – gambling or otherwise – a relapse isn’t completely out of the question, especially in late summer when the Grass of Parnassus is in bloom and the Jumpoff beckons.

The delicate beauty of the Grass of Parnassus

 

Land of Sharp Edges (Part 8 of 9)

The rock faces that I continued to encounter pushed me further and further away from the cascade and up the slope of the creek valley. I hated to lose contact with the cascade because I had visualized myself following it all the way to its source, but the ridge that I was ascending was too comforting to pass up. Although I had never been on this particular ridge before, it felt very familiar. It was steep but not dangerously so. It was heavily wooded so I knew there was enough soil to support the trees – another sign of manageable terrain. There would be less rock and more dirt than what I had been crawling on for several hours. Although I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, I knew there was an end of the tunnel up ahead.

This ridge was thick with trees, Mountain Laurel, briers, and other obstructions, but it was a pleasant relief from the cliffs and cascade. My sissy gene liked this route better, so I followed the one main rule of hiking up a ridge – when in doubt, go up. My partners and I had become well acquainted with this rule. It’s one that never fails, and it didn’t fail me this day. Later on, after we were all reunited at the top, Greg said that he spent a few minutes sitting among the bushes, wondering what to do next, when he heard me pushing and crashing along the ridge less than 100 yards away. He watched me make my way toward the top. Once again, being a guy of few words, he didn’t say whether this gave him comfort or more frustration at his own plight.

Keith and Charlie had apparently crossed a rocky scar at a different place than Greg did which highlighted how much luck is a part of this process of picking your way around rocky scars and faces and through mountain laurel thickets. In this kind of terrain, you tend to hike in ten or twenty foot segments. You don’t usually have the luxury of looking far ahead and seeing the big picture. You just try to get from point A to point B, and point B is rarely more than a few yards away. Only after you arrive at point B can you begin to look for point C. Sometimes the route you take leads to the end of the tunnel, sometimes it runs you into another wall. It’s a lot like rolling dice. Sometime you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. Keith and Charlie managed to find a path of least resistance that evaded Greg. At one point he was in such tight quarters that he had to take his pack off and tie a rope to it so he could climb over a rocky spot and pull his pack up after him. I think that was one of those spots that he didn’t want to be in. If he has a sissy gene, it was probably causing him to wonder – like I had – if there really was a path to the top and how much a search and rescue mission costs, and who pays for it?.

About an hour after we had split up – yes, it took us about an hour to travel that final 300 feet – Keith and Charlie reached the top, a mere 100 feet from the northernmost overlook at the top of the Jumpoff. At about the same time, I pushed through the bushes at the top of my nameless ridge. As I stood on the trail at the top, it seemed too small to be the AT or the Boulevard. Could it actually be the thin trail that runs along the edge of the Jumpoff? After walking a minute or two, I passed the southernmost overlook of the Jumpoff. Somehow my ridge had topped out not near the AT as I had expected, but about 200 feet from the southern end of the Jumpoff.

I went to the middle of the Jumpoff overlook and yelled for Greg, wondering where he was. [To be continued]

 

The Land of Sharp Edges: The Four Inch Ledge (Part 7 of 9)

As I worked our way slowly up the mossy, brushy, upper portion of the Jumpoff, I didn’t exactly visualize my own death, but I did wonder how much a NPS search and rescue mission costs. I guess I’m just not cut out for off-trail hiking in unknown territory by myself. Greg Harrell has a death wish gene. Apparently I have a sissy gene. Although, in my defense, one of my fears did materialize. I found myself hemmed in by the cascade on my left and a rocky cliff above me and to my right. So I began to backtrack, not knowing exactly what I’d do if I came to a point that would allow me to move right again. I had climbed through that territory a few minutes earlier and had ended up stuck. What could I do differently? (My sissy gene was definitely exerting its control over me.)

It was then that I noticed that the other side of the cascade looked a bit more manageable, a smoother slope and maybe fewer rocky walls to maneuver around. So I worked my way down the edge of the cascade, clinging to spruce roots and sand myrtle when available but settling for other shrubs and moss when necessary, until I found a narrow ledge across the cascade. Stepping along this wet ledge wasn’t my preferred option, but I was down to Plan D or E by now, so I worked my way across the flowing water, making sure I always had two hands and two feet firmly planted on the rock. The slope here was only about 45 or 50 degrees, so it was manageable, the main drawbacks being that my ledge was about four inches wide, and wet, and the long, fast, bumpy slide that I’d have to endure if I slipped. If my feet slipped off the narrow ledge, my only hope was to grab that ledge with my hands as I began my slide. If that didn’t work… well, my grandchildren would one day hear stories about their Grampy, without ever actually knowing him. I decided that my best option was: just don’t slip. Period. That’s why this was Plan D or E, not A or B.

As I crossed the cascade, I wondered how Charlie, Keith, and Greg were faring. Earlier I had looked across the slope and seen one or two of them stuck in the shrubs of a nearly vertical slope. From where I sat I pitied them because there seemed to be no alternative for them other than backtracking downslope and trying again. At the end of the day, I was amazed when they told me that they had found their way across and up because from my vantage point it had seemed impossible. As Greg succinctly put it about some of his predicaments, “I was in a few spots that I didn’t want to be in.” He didn’t elaborate further. He didn’t have to. We all knew exactly what he meant. At this moment, as I crossed the cascade, I was in one of those spots.

As I shuffled my way across on my little ledge, I used that tactics that I’ve developed from other, drier rock-scrambling trips: focus on those four points of contact (two hands, two feet), move only one part at a time so there are always three points of contact, and your whole world at that moment consists of that 8’ by 6’ piece of rock directly in front of you. Oh yes, one more: don’t have an emergency, don’t slip, because if you slip that’s your last alternative. Oh, and another: don’t lean too far in toward the rock. That’s a really, really hard one to obey, but it’s good advice. If you’ll stand mostly straight up, the soles of your boots get better traction on the rock than if you lean in. Leaning in too far tends to push your feet out from under you. In situations like this, you just repeat that list of instructions over and over, and before you know it, you’re across and breathing a sigh of relief.

As I sat on the other side, breathing and sighing, I noticed that this side of my cascade was not as smooth and easy as it had appeared, a “grass is greener on the other side” kind of thing, I suppose. As I looked up along this edge of the cascade, it looked exactly like the side I had just left. It took only about two seconds to decide to stay on this side rather than shuffle back across. So I resumed my upward crawl.

[Note: If you’ve ever done a trip like this, you’ll understand why there are no pictures of this part of the trip. I was a bit preoccupied. ]

 

The Land of Sharp Edges: Wandering and Wondering Up the Face of Mount Kephart (Part 6 of 9)

The Jumpoff Cascade is so long that just standing at the bottom and looking up its path gives you absolutely no idea of its real length. It twists and turns and just disappears after about 200 feet. So you can’t see it from the bottom. Later that day, as we stood atop the Jumpoff and looked down, we could see the general path of the creek as it zig-zagged down the slope, but there was too much distance and greenery to see the actual rock and water cascade. From above there’s no visible evidence that anything extraordinary is happening in the valley below – other than a wonderfully steep slope. And the Lester Prong valley is so remote that there’s no place to stand in the distance and hope to see this cascade. The only way to view it is to climb alongside it for several hours, from bottom to top, which only adds to its mystique. It’s unapproachable, unattainable… and, therefore, that much more alluring.

On the less-dramatic, more-delicate side, this slope surrounding the Jumpoff Cascade is covered in thick, wet moss with frequent outposts of Grass of Parnassus, a lovely, white wildflower that few visitors ever see. As my Wildflowers of the Smokies says, “Consider yourself very lucky to find this outstanding native of bogs and seepage slopes.” My hiking partners and I are not exactly wildflower enthusiasts, but we do like to know what’s going on around us, so we did indeed consider ourselves lucky to stumble across these small, white reminders that much of the wonder of the Smokies is at knee or ankle level.

The split in the creek at this “top” of the cascade is at 5,700 feet – about 300 vertical feet from the top of the Jumpoff. At this point we all split up, not out of design, but simply to follow our various interests. I decided to go up the left fork; although I can’t really explain why. This fork had the heavier flow of water, and it seemed that it would lead to the crease where the Boulevard meets the AT. (It didn’t.) Maybe I was hoping there would be a few gawking tourists at the top when I walked out of the woods. Greg, Keith, and Charlie followed the right fork which seemed to head straight up to the highest point of the Jumpoff, but certainly couldn’t go all the way to the top, simply because the last 100 feet or so would be a nearly-vertical climb. Even a guy with a death wish gene would have enough presence of mind to think about the people who love and depend on him to keep him from trying to climb that last vertical 100 feet.

So my three partners headed right, but they spread out a bit as well. There was a rocky scar that stopped their progress across the face of Mount Kephart, so they did some backtracking and re-routing to find a path that would lead them to the top. In short, they had the same troubles that I was having – rocky cliffs that would form a barrier that had to be avoided, usually by moving laterally along the base until a gap in the cliff would allow them to move upward. It’s a zig-zagging route that always holds that possibility of climbing for an hour or two, only to find yourself hemmed in by cliffs above and to both sides, meaning that the only option is to retreat and regroup.

There were several points in their climb that this seemed to be happening. Occasionally during the afternoon I was able to look across the slope only to hear and see patch of rustling bushes on a frighteningly steep slope, but they were usually able to find a crease or a gap or a ledge or some escape route that eventually led them to the top. Of course, this involved the same tactics that we had been using for the past two hours – push through the bushes, hang on to roots and limbs, crawl up moss-covered rock, rest, repeat.

While they were engaged in their struggle, I was working my way up the left fork in much the same manner. They had stayed with their part of the cascade for several more minutes before the slope became too steep and they had to move laterally. I also stayed with my fork of the creek, but it quickly became too steep and slippery for me to actually climb in the cascade, so I moved to the brush and thickets along the side. As I pulled myself up through the bushes and moss, my imagination began to run away with me. The slick cascade wouldn’t let me go further left. What if I came to a rocky cliff that wouldn’t let me go higher and another that wouldn’t let me go right? My only option would be to backtrack, but backtrack to where? The fork where we had separated? How long would that take? Where would my partners be? Would they have stumbled upon a route to the top that I might miss?  [To be continued]

The Land of Sharp Edges (5 of 9): The Jumpoff Cascade

 

As we worked our way up the Jumpoff, we spent more time in the moss and bushes than we spent in the creek because the creek was now a long, winding cascade which was too steep and slippery for us to trust. Only occasionally could we get in it and climb directly on its rocky path and even then only on segments that were ten or twenty feet high – if any higher, a slip and slide would be long and painful, maybe deadly.

The result was a long, slow ascent as we grabbed and pulled and pushed and rested. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The next day, as I recuperated from our adventure, my legs and arms were a little sore, but the body part that suffered the most was my fingers. The muscles in my fingers were almost too sore for me to grip door knobs, write with a pen, and type on a keyboard. I’ve never seriously pondered the fact that there are muscles in our fingers, and to the best of my recollection I’ve never done any activity that actually made my finger muscles sore… until the grabbing and pulling of this trip. From now on I guess I’ll have to put finger exercises into my workout routine; although, I have no clue what kind of exercise to do to get a good finger workout; maybe kneading bread dough or digging in sand. Is there such a thing as finger curls? It’s a question that personal trainers probably aren’t asked very often because finger muscles aren’t glamour muscles. Rock climbers, on the other hand, would know the value of a buff hand.

This was the first trip on which I wore gloves. A couple of recent, off-trail trips had resulted in some damage to my hands and wrists. I normally get some bumps and bruises, but on one of these trips I had managed two good cuts on my hand and wrist. I don’t know how I got them. In fact, as I recall, Charlie and Keith asked where I got the bloody cuts, and I couldn’t tell them because I hadn’t noticed until they pointed them out. Although, I suppose I would have noticed sooner or later because one of them wouldn’t stop bleeding. As a result, I have some good pictures of me wearing a blood-stained shirt. It looks worse than it really is which is the way I like things to be – that is, not as bad as they seem. The cut on my wrist didn’t bleed a lot, even though it was deeper and longer. In fact, Keith called is a “laceration” which had a nice, manly ring to it, but again it sounded worse than it really was.

So, after that trip, I began wearing gloves on some of these off-trail jaunts. Some guys wear stout, sticky gloves like NFL receivers wear, but I opted for a $13 pair of leather work gloves from Wal-Mart, and in this case that seemed somehow appropriate. Not only were these gloves less expensive, but they had a simple “going to work” appearance that I kind of like because some of these hikes are a lot like work, even to the point of looking forward to quitting time when you can go home and take a shower. My hiking partners use headlamps on our night hikes and Charlie wears protective goggles on some of these trips, so between headlamps, goggles, and gloves we look like a gang of laborers heading down into the coal mines. All that’s missing are lunch pails and hard hats.

This cascade, which we now call the Jumpoff Cascade, went on and on and on. One hundred feet, two hundred feet, one football field. More climbing. Four hundred. Five hundred. Two football fields. More climbing. Seven hundred. During the climb we didn’t know exactly how long this cascade extended, but we made a pretty good guess based on elevation and angle. Greg, Keith, and Charlie all had altimeters which measure elevation using barometric pressure. Their equipment all pretty much agreed that after 1,000 feet of vertical elevation gain, we came to a split in the cascade. We had ascended vertically 1,000 feet at roughly a 45 degree angle, which would mean our horizontal distance was about 1,000 feet as well. Using the old Pythagorean Theorem from high school geometry class for calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle, we came up with an estimate of about 1,400 feet. Up to this point, this cascade – which still continued up both of these small forks at this junction – was 1,400 feet long!

To grasp the significance of that, consider that Ramsey Cascades, one of the most popular waterfalls in the park, is about 100’ high. Abrams Falls, another visitor favorite, is about 30’ high. Yes, these two waterfalls have much greater volume and width than Jumpoff Cascade, which at this high elevation is generally just a heavy trickle… but 1,400 feet for cryin’ out loud! And it continues another one or two hundred feet up both of these upper forks on Mount Kephart.

It’s discoveries like this that make hiking in the backcountry really special. There are hidden, rarely-visited waterfalls and cascades all over the park: Mill Creek, Upper Ramsey, Cannon Creek, First Trib. They are everywhere, and in terms of sheer length, Jumpoff Cascade dwarfs them all.