Racing the Sun (Part 6 of 7)

Greg, Keith, and I reconvened at TriCorner Knob, the halfway point on our 31 mile trip, around noon, seven hours after the start. This was one of those places where Greg and Keith had to wait 15 minutes for me to catch up so we could fill our water bottles. I, the weak link in the chain, was ensuring that we didn’t make good progress. Greg and Keith’s fast pace wasn’t helping us to get finished faster. It simply meant that they got to rest longer on our rest stops. It probably frustrated them, but it’s their own fault for having a hiking partner who’s 10 to 15 years their senior.

At TriCorner Knob we spent some time doing sock adjustments and foot repair. We cut moleskin and stuck it to every red or sore spot possible. Uphill hiking is tough on legs and lungs. Downhill hiking brutalizes legs and feet, especially toes. Since there were plenty of ups and downs, we were getting a nice variety of blisters and bruises. Blisters on our heels. Blisters between our toes. Bruises on the top of our feet. Sore knees, both front and back. Even our toenails ached. It would have been nice to relax at these occasional stops, but they were more like NASCAR pit stops than rest stops. We’d spend the entire time patching, pulling, rearranging, readjusting, and refueling. We also did some math…

As we sat at TriCorner Knob for a few minutes, we did some quick and easy calculations which told us that we were making a little better than 2 mph. We clearly would be hiking after sunset. Once that became clear, we began doing a little more math, and it began to reveal an option that we hadn’t seriously thought about before: where would we be at sunset? Our calculations told us that we had a pretty good chance of being on top of Mt. Cammerer – one of our favorite places on the planet – as the sun set. That would be too good to be true, spending sunrise on Charlies Bunion and sunset on Mt. Cammerer – two of the best grandstand views in the eastern half of the park. Then we began to consider how hard this was going to be – the pace and the timing. We wondered amongst ourselves how many others had ever seen the sunrise from Charlies Bunion and the sunset from Cammerer on the same day. At first we figured the number to be in the hundreds or thousands; then as we thought about hiking in the dark at both the beginning and the end, we talked ourselves down into the dozens. Then we began to wonder if anyone had ever done it. We hadn’t embarked upon this trip to be the first people to do anything, and we couldn’t believe (and still don’t) that we could be the first to do this because anything worth doing has already been done by someone. There have been just too many hikers and too many years for there to be any significant “firsts” left to do. On the other hand, we’ve never heard of anyone doing this particular combination. At the very least, membership in the club must be quite small, and we were hoping to be inducted that evening.

So, today would be like many other days spent outdoors – racing the sun. We had been hoping to finish by sunset, so we had been hiking rather vigorously. At TriCorner Knob we discovered that we were losing that race – we’d be hiking a few hours in the dark. So, the race was off. We could relax… until we decided to aim for sunset on Mt. Cammerer. The race – and the pressure to win – was on again. So we hurried, hiking as fast as the weak link, the old mule, would allow. But somehow, in this section, I didn’t lag too far behind, and we made pretty good time. We covered 10.5 miles in about 4¼ hours. That’s pretty close to 2 ½ mph. Not bad after having already hiked 15 miles.

But it was a tough, tough stretch. The terrain was no better and no worse than the previous 15 miles, but that extra quarter to half a mile per hour really took its toll on us. Going up and down and up again and down again without any significant breaks for over 10 miles (plus the added 0.6 mile side trail to the peak of Cammerer) was grueling. We were definitely in the “gotta get there” mode, which is not normally a good mode for Smokies hiking. It can drain the joy out of a hike pretty quickly. But we had an important goal in mind which made the rush palatable.

And the rush paid off.

[To be continued, one more time.]