Day 4: Cherry Gap Shelter to Curly Maple Gap Shelter

Tim was the first one up and out this morning, around 7 a.m. He wanted to get going early because he knew today would be full of lots of climbing and descending, and he wasn't feeling too spry due to his still-painful knee. Rob and I wished him well and told him we’d catch up. We set out about 20 minutes later.

Being one of the first hikers to pack up and vacate an overfilled shelter – especially when it’s still not fully light outside – is always hard. There’s gear all over the place, and because there are lots of sleeping hikers lying about, you don’t feel good about bumbling around and making a clatter to collect your stuff. Consequently, you’re never quite sure that you really got all your belongings. Case in point: when we finished hiking this afternoon and began inventorying our stuff, Rob realized he’d left behind his toothbrush and one of the several knives he’d brought. (I think he regards knives just like coffeepots – the more, the better.)

The knife he could live without, but the toothbrush? Ah well, good thing we’re family. We shared.

Saw lots of trillium on the trail today. I never tire of looking at these little beauties. They’re just amazing.

The biggest news of the day was that Cupcake had a near-meltdown when it appeared that it might be necessary to launch a search-and-rescue operation on our first big summit of the day, Unaka Mountain.

Here’s how it happened. By 9 a.m., the three of us had gotten considerably far apart from each other – Tim was way out ahead of me due to his early departure from the shelter, and Rob was quite a ways behind me because he preferred to climb at a slower pace. So for a solid couple of hours, I saw neither brother, which at first didn’t bother me at all – I just figured we’d catch up to one another before Indian Grave Gap, a few miles from Unaka’s peak. But after summiting Unaka and descending down the other side for about an hour, I still hadn't seen either of them.

I hiked and hiked and hiked some more, straining my eyes through the heavy fog, thinking Tim had to be just ahead of me. I even yelled out his name a few times. But I didn’t truly start to fret till I began noticing that every twenty or thirty feet I was running into strands of silken spiderwebs stretched across the trail, which meant no one else had passed through that area yet this morning. So if Tim wasn’t ahead of me, where was he? I started to worry that maybe he’d gotten disoriented at the top of Unaka, since the fog was so dense and the trail was easy to lose in the thick stands of red spruce. What if both brothers got turned around up there? What if they were still up there, wandering around and looking for the trail and each other? What if Tim’s knee blew completely out? What if one of them had a heart attack? Or ran into a bear? Or slipped and fell down the side of the gorge? How would I ever find them?

My heart in my throat, I decided I’d better just sit down and wait for a while, in hopes that one of them would arrive and then we could figure out how to find the other. But after a full 30 minutes of waiting, I lived up to my Cupcake moniker and started to well up with tears. I started to consider how I would break it to my sisters-in-law Michelle and Sue that I had lost their husbands in the wilderness of Unaka Mountain.

I couldn’t just sit there and keep waiting; I needed to go back up the mountain and look for them. I dropped my pack on the side of the trail, took my poles with me, and started climbing. After about 20 minutes (which felt like 20 hours), my eyes caught a flash of yellow: Rob’s shirt. With Rob in it. Sashaying leisurely down the mountain, a relaxed grin on his face. I could see he was listening to his Zune – the wires from his earbuds were flopping around as he walked. I think he was humming a blues tune. Not a care in the world.

“I LOST TIM,” I shrieked wildly, my voice cracking and tears flying out the corners of my eyes as I bounded up to him. Rob gave me a big smooch on the cheek and said “No you didn’t – he’s about five minutes behind me.” I dissolved in a heavy sigh of relief for a few seconds before moxying up my sternest Mom voice so that I could give that Timothy a good talking-to. I strained my eyes through the trees to see him, and there he was, still wearing his jaunty little red hat, stepping gingerly down the mountain so as to protect his knee. When he got within earshot, I fired out a dour “WHERE have you BEEN?”

He looked up, seemingly surprised at the severity in my voice. “I, uh, well… I stepped off the trail for a minute,” he said kind of sheepishly. “You know … when nature calls…”

He got two demerits and strict instructions to never just vanish off the trail again without telling someone. You just can’t mess with Cupcake like that.

The rest of the day involved a blur of – yep – climbing and descending. We hiked through quite a few fire-damaged areas, like the ashen hillside shown here. A passing hiker told us that the Pisgah National Forest had attempted to do some controlled burns recently, and things ended up being, well, not-so-controlled. In fact, some of the shelter logbook entries described how hikers had to walk through still-burning patches of trail as recently as a couple weeks ago. The whole area still smells strongly of smoke.

Right in the midst of a big stretch of fire-damaged landscape, we saw our first rhodo-dendron bloom of the week. Even though the plant itself looked like it had suffered irreparably from the heat and smoke, the flower at the top was open and stunning. Somehow there's something significant in that. It made me think about Isaiah 61:1-4, where God talks about exchanging ashes for a "crown of beauty" - in other words, turning really crummy situations into something good.

This is what the blooms look like just prior to opening up.

Tonight we’re at Curly Maple Gap Shelter, and there are three other hikers staying with us, all around 60. One of them is a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman, and he’s kept us quite entertained all evening. He was quite impressed at my bear-bagging skills when it came time to hang the food this evening.

We’re thankful that there’s a clean, sparkling spring just a stone’s throw from tonight’s shelter. The last couple of nights, the water source has been kind of far off - and it’s quite a kick in the pants to hike yourself into a stupor all day, then finally collapse at a shelter, only to find that you have another significant distance to go for water.

Oh and check this out: at the little creek by our shelter tonight, some inventive person has fashioned a spout out of a rhododendron leaf and a string of dental floss, so that it’s easier to harvest the water. (Click on the photo to get a closer view.) Aren’t hikers cool?