Trail magic at Iron Mountain Gap

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings

I often daydream about food during a long day of hiking. At times I crave  certain restaurants such as Waffle House or all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. Other times I want a particularly unhealthy snack that is so loaded with sugars and fats that I could only justify eating it while burning too many calories on the trail. Generally this is no more than a pie-in-the-sky dream that will go unrealized, leading me to start thinking more about the dried noodle pouches that we'll rehydrate for dinner instead.

Yet on rare occasions when the trail crosses a road, I am pleasantly shaken from my dreams of unattainable food by mirages of a vehicle, collapsible chairs, and coolers. While the Tolkien quote above rings true on a regular basis, my feet rarely lead me to such enticing scenarios. But "trail magic" does exist, even as The Comfort Boys linger on the tail end of most northbound thru-hikers.

On Monday we planned to make our first 20+ mile day, but at mile 15 we were interrupted at Iron Mountain Gap by the sight of a large white van with open rear doors. Our day of hiking had been enjoyable enough already, mostly due to the complete lack of rainfall and only one mountain to summit, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that we would need to hurry on across the road to avoid an encounter with a head case. I cautiously walked around the vehicle to find Gazelle comfortably seated, sipping a can of soda and carrying on with a sixty-something year old bearded man. I followed suit, took a seat with a cold drink in hand and met Rob Bird.

Rob adopts every AT hiker he meets. For 12 years he ran a hostel in Dalton, Massachusetts called The Bird Cage, and retired in December to move south to Unicoi, Tennessee. He chose the town due to its proximity to the Appalachian Trail. Even without his hiker hostel, Rob has has kept his ties with the trail. Now he shares his retirement with long distance hikers, often giving out snacks and cold drinks at the trail's many road crossings. Rob also offers his time shuttling and housing up to five hikers in his apartment, and can tell a story about every hiker he has met.

Trent, Kyle, and I waited for Pockets, who had been trailing us, to catch up and all took Rob up on his offer for us to crash in his apartment for the night. We loaded the van and were soon telling stories around Rob's kitchen table. After the all-important showers, we went out for a big Italian meal and returned to the apartment for a few drinks before bed.

Coffee and cereal the next morning. Rob complained that a chicken woke him up at 6:30. Pockets got back on the trail by late morning, but we decided to take a zero to mail gear home and drop by the outfitters for Trent to get new boots. Shortly after we returned to the apartment in the afternoon, Kyle and I were on the back porch applying sealant to our tent when we heard the shots of a small gun down the hill. I thought nothing of it until Rob walked out to the back porch with a .22 caliber rifle, aiming to put an end to his early, organic wakeup calls. Kyle had spotted the chicken that had been waking Rob up every morning for the past month; it was roosting just 20 feet away in a nearby tree. Rob took aim and fired once. Fatally wounded, the chicken made its final death throes --- a series of clucks --- and fell to the ground. One of the best parts of life on the trail is you never know what you will see next. It might be a bear, or it might be Rob shooting pesky animals. The chihuahua down the hill that barked until 1 am is treading on thin ice.

Over the door in Rob's apartment was written: Don't be sad that it's over. Smile because it happened. Kyle, Trent, and I had a blast getting to know Rob. We were tempted to stay and enjoy ourselves another day but knew it was time to return to the trail. Getting dropped off where we left off at Iron Mountain Gap this morning, I told Rob about my reluctance to get back on the trail. He laughed, then just told me "Get your ass up that mountain." I smiled and hiked on.

Click here to see the chicken hunting video.

Fontana Dam: Trail Culture and Names

During our three weeks so far on the trail, it has been fascinating to observe and adjust to the culture of thru-hikers. Striving for practicality and minimalism, we have quickly learned to eschew excess to make the hike easier. For physical possessions, one must strike a delicate balance between lacking gear and lugging around excess weight. Often times hikers will leave unwanted food and gear in "hiker boxes" at hostels, motels, and outfitters that are frequented by thru-hikers. My best find so far is a capilene long underwear base layer, well worth the leftover bag of grits I left in a box down the road. I didn't particularly need the base layer and ended up sending it back to Charlotte; apparently my hoarding mentality remains for now.

However we have clung to some creature comforts, even earning our group the trail name "The Comfort Boys." Our meals on the first night of camping after resupplying in town are luxurious by hiker standards. After our resupply in Hiawassee we cooked beef tips over the campfire, and after Franklin we filled up on presto tortellini. If it is not actively raining we often get a fire going after finishing our hike for the day, and usually end up cooking dinner over the open flames in lieu of stoves.

In the refuge of the trail, hikers also discard their given names for creative trail names that offer some level of anonymity. From Bambi to Batman, a trail name describes or tells a story about its owner in comedic fashion. As the fastest hiker up big climbs, Kyle has earned the name Gazelle, while Trent's slow and steady pace made him an obvious candidate for the name Turtle. As I insist on fires for all but the wettest nights, Fireman seemed an appropriate name for me. Our favorite hiker so far is named Loon; more on him in another post.

But more importantly than giving up comforts of life, hikers gain a level of freedom and flexibility that is not easily attainable in normal society. We have blank calendars and nowhere else to be but the trail. Our only deadlines are self-imposed, and presently it is time for us to get back on to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. See you on the other side in about 7 days.

Hiawassee, Georgia

It's raining.
A lot.
So we're in the Budget Inn airing out our gear.

Springer Mountain, Georgia

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

- Thoreau, Walden

 

The human mind struggles to grasp astronomical scales of distance and time. The Appalachian Trail spans 2,100+ miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Maine's Mount Katahdin, a distance that is too great to fully comprehend. Such commitments can only begin with half serious talk, only to be followed up the next day with a more serious discussion that can be summed up by, "did we just agree to hike the Appalachian Trail?" So here begins the result of months of planning and preparations. We have shed our normal routines of life, but sometimes we'll keep in touch along the way---

 

- Scott, Trent, and Kyle