Double Spring Gap Shelter to Icewater Springs Shelter

Appalachian Trail, 13.8 miles

It wasn't exactly great timing, the fact that our longest hiking day came on the heels of our night with the bear. We had gotten maybe half the sleep that we normally would've. But our itinerary had no wiggle room, so we were up and out at dawn this morning, our first hurdle being Clingmans Dome, the highest point on the entire Appalachian Trail. In this photo, we're about a quarter of a mile from the summit, and I'm trying to negotiate a steep and rocky part of the ascent.

For breakfast, in addition to my usual protein bar, I had my most prized menu item: a cup of applesauce. It was a good day to carb-load, since the climb ahead was hard. Plus, better to consume the heaviest item in my food bag on a hard day than to carry it!

The trees at this elevation show a lot of signs of the harsh elements. A lot of them look like this stick of a pine tree -- ravaged by extreme heat in summer and extreme cold and wind in winter.

We summitted Clingmans Dome at 8:45 a.m. and it was such a rush. It really redeemed the disappointment I had felt over our previous AT trip fizzling. The morning was clear and beautiful, and there was not a soul at the observation tower. I was really glad for a moment of peace up there, because sometimes that tower can get really clogged with tourists. This is one of the few points in the park where the trail intersects with civilization. An access road allows tourists to drive within half a mile of the summit, and then they can walk a paved path all the way to the top.

At the top of the observation tower I finally got a strong enough signal to phone home, though it took several attempts. It was so sweet to hear Jay's voice. No matter that he was in the middle of an interview at work and, once off the phone, probably had to explain to the poor interviewee what a kook he has for a wife! We couldn't talk long, but long enough for me to find out that Joe's little virus had run its course and that he and Maria were doing fine. I miss those three terribly.

We are at Icewater Springs now, with several other hikers, having made it through the longest day of our hike. All of us had to hike the last couple miles (which were very rugged) in the rain. I am filthy and sweaty. Everyone stinks but no one really cares. It's remarkable the way you lose your sense of decorum out here. Case in point: Tonight there were several lengths of rope strung across the shelter, with everyone's stinky, sweaty underwear and socks hanging from them. Mine were right up there along with everyone else's.

Night of the Living Bear

I'm including the following events as a separate entry because the hours between nightfall on May 30 and the earliest part of May 31 turned into such an adventure that it felt like a whole separate day!

After dinner, Dan the Bear Man set up the bear snare behind the shelter. The snare consists of a clamp and a metal cable secured to a tree, all hidden with branches and baited with a can of tuna. Bear Man explained that bears love tuna, but that he sometimes uses bacon because bears are really attracted to that too. (As he was saying this, I realized with horror that my food bag contains several foil packets of tuna and a large shrink-wrapped package of pre-cooked bacon. Note to self: consider bringing some other forms of protein next time.)

The idea is, when the bear goes for the bait, the snare clamps his leg and restrains him long enough to be darted with a sedative. The drug makes him limp but still somewhat conscious. While in this compromised state, the bear gets tagged and measured. Since bears hate to be vulnerable and manhandled, the whole experience is hopefully so negative that the bear stays away from the area where all this occurs. However, if the bear does choose to keep coming back and posing a threat to hikers, the Park Service's only other option is to drug him again, and then physically relocate him to another part of the park! Picture four Park Service guys carrying a comatose bear on a stretcher, up and over miles of mountains. This really happens sometimes!

After the buildup of watching the snare being built and participating in all this bear talk, I was pretty nerved up. And all we had left to do all evening was sit around and wait for nightfall. I tried to read a book I had brought with me, but I found myself just sitting there staring at the (now flimsy-looking) chain link fence on our shelter, wondering what kind of force it could withstand. While we sat around, Bear Man passed around his night-vision goggles for us to look at. The goggles lent an eerie green cast to everything, but they really did provide amazing ability to see in the dark. It was especially cool to look up at the clear night sky and see zillions more stars than our normally feeble eyes are capable of noticing.

About dusk, two more Park Service guys showed up for the stakeout. They too would be spending the night at the shelter, to help with the bear. This was turning into quite a large-scale sting operation. All of us -- three Bear Men and six hikers -- burrowed into our sleeping bags about 9 p.m., wondering what the next few hours would bring. We heard coyotes howling as we were lying there trying to go to sleep.

I dozed until 11 p.m., when I suddenly heard Bear Man #2 frantically whispering: "DAN! DAN! DAN!" Apparently he had heard the snare activate. Dan and the other two Bear Men immediately jumped out of their sleeping bags and into their boots, and went trotting out back. All six hikers (including me) followed suit, headlamps beaming, to see a 350-pound black bear thrashing around in the snare and doing the best voice impression of Chewbacca that you've ever heard. They shot him with a dart full of sedative and he quieted down... for a moment. Then he started thrashing and yowling again. Another dart. Another brief moment of quiet. More thrashing. This cycle went on and on till they had used up seven darts -- the amount that would normally be used on a six hundred pound animal! None of the three Bear Men could figure out how the bear could stay that worked up with all that sedative in its system. They (and we) were relieved when he finally lay down and his breathing slowed a bit.



While the bear was sedated, we got to photograph him and touch him. His fur was very soft, like a dog, only longer.
Then the three Park Service guys went to work cooling him down. He had gotten so agitated during the sedation ordeal that his body temperature was quite high, and Bear Man was worried that this might result in a seizure. So we brought our water bottles and they started dumping cold water on his fur until he cooled off a bit. (For the record, the water bottle in this picture is the same one I drank out of during this trip!) Once his temperature was under control, the next task was to tag the bear's ear and take a whole bunch of measurements for the Park Service records. That's about the time I finally went to bed. It was a little past 1 a.m.

Once the sedative started wearing off and the bear came to, Bear Man and his friends basically ran him off, and he was glad to get the heck out of there. By then it was after 2:30 a.m. As far as we know, he didn't come back that night.

Derrick Knob Shelter to Double Spring Gap Shelter

Appalachian Trail, 7.2 miles

A much shorter day today mileage-wise, but it stretched into a nearly 6-1/2 hour trek because of rain. It was beautiful all morning, but just as we stopped for a quick break at Silers Bald Shelter, a substantial storm blew in, so we ended up staying there for like two hours. It kind of put the brakes on a pretty well-paced day, but oh well. We were thankful that we didn't get soaked. We waited till the worst of the rain was over, then pushed on through our last two miles to Double Spring Gap while it was still sprinkling.

I had feral pigs on my mind today because of the two other hikers' boar sightings yesterday. Those animals scare me, probably even more than bears. They're reputed to be very unpredictable. We saw lots of cloven-hoof footprints in the mud today, and big patches where the pigs had rooted up dirt and leaves, looking for food. I worried about running into hogzilla every time there was a bend in the trail. A ranger told us that the pigs are a terrible nuisance because they're an invasive, non-native species with no natural predators, and they compete for food with the bears and the deer. They also eat all kinds of rare and endangered plants, including wildflowers and beech saplings. Apparently the pigs were introduced to this area accidentally when a handful of them escaped from a game preserve in Georgia several decades ago. They multiplied like rabbits and now they're all over the Smokies. The Park Service kills as many of them as they can, in an attempt at pig population control.

This morning I was running dangerously low on TP. I realized after we hit the trail that I only packed half the tissue that I intended! Crisis was averted, however, when I put on my rain parka this afternoon and found an entire package of Kleenex in the pocket. Woot! Must've left it there last weekend when we hiked the Poto.

Still no blisters, despite hiking through wet weeds and mud puddles this afternoon. My boots seem to be leaking quite prolifically, though, which does make for some discomfort. I don't think Gore-Tex boot linings are all they're cracked up to be.

We have been trying frequently to phone Jay and Pete, but still cannot get a signal. We had hoped we might get cell reception at the top of Silers Bald (here is Cindy at the top, cell phone in hand!) but it didn't work.

The shelter where we're staying tonight is one of the few in the park that still has a chain-link fence across the front. At one time, all the shelters in the park had this feature, with the intent of protecting hikers from bears at night. But the fences apparently made people feel a little too safe, because many started keeping their food bags with them overnight in the shelters instead of hanging them from the bear cables provided nearby. (Duh!) Then, in a really remarkable lapse of common sense, some began actually feeding bears through the shelter fence! All this, of course, compounded the bears' interest in hanging out at shelters. They learned to come around at dusk for their nightly feedings, and they started getting surly when hikers didn't pony up their goodies.

After a while of battling the bear problem, the Park Service decided to try removing the fences from just a couple of shelters. Hikers who visited those shelters obviously felt a stronger sense of responsibility for their own welfare, took care of their food properly as a result, and the bear problems at those shelters stopped. Now the Park Service has removed most of the fences.

I'm glad, however, that tonight's shelter still has a fence. Because when we arrived this afternoon, we were greeted by a Park Service guy named Dan, who has a gun, a snare, and night vision goggles. Dan's main job is to hunt and kill the wild pigs that live in the park. But tonight, he is Dan the Bear Man. He's here to corner and sedate a bear who has been frequenting this shelter and causing problems. It might be an eventful evening.

Four other hikers are here tonight.

Here are Cindy and I, nervously awaiting nightfall in front of our shelter, and wondering if the bear will show up.

Mollies Ridge Shelter to Derrick Knob Shelter (and my first bear sighting!)

Appalachian Trail, 11. 7 miles

You know how that one woman at Standing Bear Farm called the Smoky Mountain portion of the AT "very, very rugged"? Well, she was right. It is tough. Really tough. Today was even tougher than yesterday, which I didn't expect. And not just because the distance was greater. It's that we were constantly climbing or descending, and the grade was never gentle. In fact, I learned that the second half of our hike today (from Spence Field to Derrick Knob) is closed to horses, because they can't handle the terrain. Which begs the question: if a horse can't handle it, can I handle it?

There were a lot of really huge snails on the trail in the morning. I kept worrying I was going to step on them.

The big thrill today (and a great distraction from the difficulty of the trail) was that we actually saw a bear! It was the coolest thing... we started hiking early, when the ground was still wet and the sun wasn't fully streaming through the trees, and for whatever reason we both felt a little skittish and jumpy. We actually joked about having "bear vibes" -- feeling like there was constantly something around the next tree, watching us. And then, after hiking about half an hour, I noticed some pretty unmistakable paw prints in the mud on the trail. A little later, we passed another hiker coming from the opposite direction, who told us he had actually seen a bear about half a mile earlier! So we were really scoping out the woods as we hiked, and sure enough, before long we saw the real deal. He was a little guy, probably about 150 or 200 pounds. Not a baby, but probably not an adult, which made us think: is his mother nearby? We didn't stick around to find out, or even to take pictures. He was too far away to get a good shot anyway -- probably 100 yards off, through the trees. So as he bumbled along, looking for something to eat, we cranked it up a notch and hiked briskly away, pretty pleased about catching a glimpse of him.

We summitted Rockytop, Thunderhead Mountain, and then Briars Knob, and the view from each of these peaks was pretty amazing. Even though none of these summits are called "balds," it seems to me that they could qualify. Here's a shot from near the top of Thunderhead -- doesn't it look rather bucolic? Park-like almost? Hard to believe from this picture that we had just ascended to over 5,500 feet! Other than the fact that my heart was about to leap out of my chest because of the intensity of the climb, it almost felt like we were taking in an afternoon at County Farm Park in Ann Arbor. It wouldn't have seemed at all out of place to see an elderly gentleman in a cardigan walking a miniature poodle.

In the afternoon, it seemed like we went forever without seeing any milestones, and as we came upon a sign that we thought was going to say "Derrick Knob Shelter" (which was the end of our hike for the day) we were quite chagrined to see that it said "Sugartree Gap." Translation: another 1.2 miles to go! Uphill!

We made it. We're fatigued, but done.

Same guys at the shelter tonight as last night. Two of them had an encounter with wild pigs today, so between that story and our bear sighting, there was some pretty good conversation over dinner tonight.

Fontana Dam Visitor Center to Mollies Ridge Shelter

Appalachian Trail, 11 miles
It was a pretty grueling day, but we're still standing. It started with a two-hour shuttle ride with Curtis, which was exhausting in its own right. Like all shuttle drivers, Curtis is quite the character. He doesn't seem to have an "off" button. Above is a picture of him with his shuttle van.

We arrived at Fontana Dam Visitor Center about 9, where we used a real potty for the last time, topped off our water bottles, and filled out our backcountry hiking permit. By 9:30 we were off. After crossing the dam, we started tackling the monstrous climb up Shuckstack, the first obstacle. It was wicked hard. But we made it to the top, and beyond, all the way to Mollies Ridge Shelter. It took about seven and a half hours. I feel like if we can make it through this day, we can surely make it through the ones ahead -- even the thirteener on Wednesday.

Mid-morning, we came upon a mama pheasant sitting right on the trail, and when she flew off, we saw one of her babies run off in the other direction. As we passed, she chastised us pretty loudly until we were probably 200 yards down the trail.

Two deer wandered very close to our shelter tonight. They are so big that I thought they might even be some form of elk or something. They made me a little nervous. They have velvet antlers and seem to have no fear of people.

Four other hikers are at our shelter tonight. Two guys from Florida and two others from someplace sort of local (I think somewhere in Tennessee). They are all quite respectful and nice. You know, it's interesting -- the overwhelming majority of hikers are men, but even among the solo ones, I've never run into anyone creepy on the trail. It feels very safe here.

Regarding my ponderings from Saturday night:

• I decided to wear my Salomon boots. Go big or go home.
  
• I did bring my extra one-liter water bottle, and am really glad I did. I've needed it.
• I left the tent behind. Living dangerously I guess.
• My knee has spontaneously healed itself. I'm grateful. No knee pain at all.

On the Eve of Hiking the Smokies

Well, so begins our spring trip to the Smokies. Cindy and I had an uneventful drive down here... till the end. We got within about a mile of Standing Bear Farm (the hiker hostel where we'll spend the night tonight) and couldn't figure out where to turn next. We found ourselves on the side of a mountain, driving past a few shacks that I'm pretty sure were used in the filming of Deliverance. We thought about asking for directions but honestly feared for our safety. It was starting to get dark, and I pictured us knocking on the door of one of the shacks and being threatened and chased by a crazy mountain man, rifle in one hand and jug of moonshine in the other, trailed by a mangey rabid dog. So we switched the Trailblazer into four-wheel drive and sprayed gravel all the way back down to the interstate, where we could get a cell signal and call Curtis, the proprietor of Standing Bear. He got us pointed in the right direction and we arrived around 7:30 p.m.

Standing Bear Farm is about one notch above the Deliverance houses. But at least there are some clean bunks and a privy, and a dry place to lay our heads. And Curtis, who's sort of an ageing hippy, seems safe and friendly enough. Here's a picture of the bunkhouse where we're sleeping tonight. We're going to leave Cindy's truck here for the duration of our trip. Tomorrow morning Curtis is going to shuttle us over to Fontana Dam to start our hike.

For the last week I've felt a vague sense of unease about whether I can actually do this trip. I've had frequent thoughts that I have no business taking on this kind of challenge, and that I'm nowhere near sturdy enough to pull this off! My unease graduated into full-blown trepidation this evening as we chatted with a few other hikers staying at Standing Bear. One of them, named Bill, had just finished hiking Great Smoky Mountain National Park and moaned quite a bit about how hard it had been. His thirty-pound spare tire made me wonder if this was the first exercise he's gotten in a long time. That and his dinner of creme-filled sugar wafers, Snickers, and a large bottle of Coke helped me to (at first) discount pretty much everything he had to stay. But to my horror, another hiker who had also just finished the park -- a lithe, fit, middle-aged woman named Wendy -- backed up the cookie eater 100%. She called the park "very, very rugged." Crap.

I called Jay tonight to let him know we arrived here safely. I was really upset to find out that Joe is sick with a fever and a headache -- some sort of virus. I was even more upset that I lost the call before we could finish talking. The cell signal here is terribly patchy and I really wish I could have just five more minutes on the phone with him. But I keep trying to re-connect and nothing's working.

Things I'm pondering tonight (when I'm not fretting about Joe):

• Is my right knee going to make it? Like an idiot, I chose this week to double the length of my usual run. Instead of running three miles, I ran six. Twice. And my knee has been aching over it since Thursday. I am seriously worried that what happened to Monika on our last trip will happen to me.
• Should I wear my Merrell hiking shoes (which are short, cute, and light)? Or my Salomon hiking boots (which are huge, heavy, and burly)? I'm thinking the boots.
• Should we bring tents? Doing so adds two more pounds to my pack weight. We are confirmed to stay at hiking shelters throughout the trip, so we shouldn't need tents. But if there's an emergency that prevents us from keeping to our itinerary...
• Is 64 ounces of water enough to carry at one time? Other hikers have told us that water sources between shelters are sparse (even though the AT data book indicates otherwise). Wondering if I should bring along my extra 1-liter bottle.

Mother's Day Hike

Part of my Mother's Day present this year was 12 miles on the Potowatami Trail. Cindy and I hiked a few hours while Jay and Pete occupied the kids. The intent was to use this day partly as a getaway but also as a sort of final attempt at preparing for our Appalachian Trail trip, which is looming large before us. We leave in less than a week. So we both wore our packs today while we hiked, and I must admit, mine felt heavy, even at under 25 pounds. I am trying desperately to go as ultralight as possible, but to really accomplish that I'm going to have to start replacing some of my old gear -- which is impractical this time around. So I'm working with what I have, and cutting down to the bare minimum. I am even taking my external frame backpack this time which, though it looks a little retro, is almost four pounds lighter than my internal frame. We'll see how things go with that.

I'm a little nerved up about the Smokies trip. There are a lot of bears there. And the terrain is rough. I feel like a weenie. I hope I make it.