Bartram Trail to Cheoah Bald April 25, 2012
Posted by Jenny in hiking, Nantahala National Forest.Tags: Appalachian Trail, Bartram Trail, Cheoah Bald, Nantahala Gorge
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Cheoah Bald
I did this hike on April 14 and just now found the time to write about it.
The Bartram Trail is a footpath that travels about 115 miles through north Georgia and North Carolina, named for botanist William Bartram, who explored the area between 1773 and 1777. His account of his experience, The Travels of William Bartram, was published in 1791 and remains in print. The North Carolina Bartram Trail Society was organized in 1977 and devoted many years building the NC portion of the trail within a corridor in Nantahala National Forest. It has now been completed. It features some elegant trail construction, such as this bridge that protects a steep sidehill section.
Elegant trail construction
I did this 10-mile hike on a warm Sunday afternoon, getting a late start and not beginning the climb until 1:00. I started at an elevation of about 2000′ in Nantahala Gorge. The endpoint elevation on Cheoah’s summit is 5062′, but the actual amount of climbing turned out to be closer to 3400′ because of a couple of significant ups and downs.
Cheoah is the northern terminus of Bartram. The last time I set foot on its summit was in 1986 with the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club on a dual mission: to do trail work on the A.T. and to see Halley’s Comet. We camped out on the Bald and set our alarm watches for 4:00 a.m. for the best view of the comet, which was visible but partially obscured by haze. The A.T. reaches Cheoah in a longer distance than the Bartram trail, starting further north in the Gorge at Wesser and traveling up the infamous “Jump-up” and across Sassafras Gap.
Once I crossed the highway and the railroad tracks across from the Winding Stair trailhead, I was greeted by the not-so-pretty sight of a large burned area. I believe the scorched areas I saw along the way were part of a program of prescribed burns, though unplanned forest fires have also sprung up in the area during recent dry weather.
Near the railroad tracks
The burn and the high position of the sun in the sky contributed to an overly toasty sensation as I toiled up through switchbacks to get up the steep wall of the gorge. I realized that I had probably not brought enough water. And I’d neglected to carry my usual bottle of iodine tablets.
Beware of the luxuriant poison ivy all along the first section of the trail. It finally fades out above 3000′.
Once the trail reaches the rim, it traverses over to the valley of Ledbetter Creek. At the high point of the traverse, I saw my first ladyslippers of the season.
Pink ladyslipper
The trail then makes one of its discouraging descents. But a colorful spattering of wildflowers along the way softened the realization that this would be a tougher hike than I’d anticipated.
Geranium and solomon's seal
I arrived at Ledbetter Creek, which the trail crisscrosses for the next couple of miles, passing through rubbly areas and making numerous small climbs and descents.
First crossing of Ledbetter Creek
I’ve become fixated with the patterns of light in streamwater.
The light was dancing
The wildflowers continued their kaleidoscopic progression.
Bluets beside the stream
It amazed me how well various plants were coming back in the burned areas.
Squaw root emerges through charred ground
The area has been battered by ice storms as well as by fire. This devastation zone may date to the harsh winter of 2009-2010.
Ice storm damage
I saw a painted trillium, one of my favorite wildflowers.
Painted trillium
Three miles in, I reached Bartram Falls. It has a lower section and an upper section. The lower has the major drop of the waterfall, but the upper features some interesting sluiceways between large rectangular blocks of stone.
Lower section of Bartram Falls
Upper section, featuring water moving among geometric shapes. I liked that.
I entered a zone of Sweet White Trillium.
Sweet White Trillium
My water situation was looking grim to the point that I thought I might have to turn around. But I explored a bit and found a spring. I refilled my bottle here.
A welcome sight
Not far above the spring, the trail crosses a forest service road and then tackles the steep climb up to the high ridge of the A.T. It runs beside a small stream drainage that was filled with the lush greenery of false hellebore.
False hellebore
At last I reached the junction with the A.T. and made the final push to the summit. I found two thru-hikers there—it’s so easy to spot them by their giant packs. We chatted for a bit and I enjoyed the view.
Be careful there, though. I spotted a tick crawling up my leg, and a day later found another one clinging to my earlobe—it had survived a hot shower!
It was time to face up to the trip back. An interesting hike of many contrasts and novel features. I highly recommend it—but start in the cool of the morning, not at 1:00.
Trillium grandiflorum in burned area
Cammerer via Chestnut Branch January 4, 2011
Posted by Jenny in hiking, nature, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Appalachian Trail, Chestnut Branch, heath, Mt. Cammerer, quartz, southbounders
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Looking toward Mt. Guyot from Cammerer. Note snow on upper slopes.
This was a trail hike of 11.8 miles and 3500 vertical feet, starting from the Big Creek ranger station and going to the Mt. Cammerer fire tower. I’d never been on the Chestnut Branch trail before or on any part of the A.T. east of the Mt. Cammerer trail junction. I decided to grab a day of good weather and get in some decent mileage and vertical.
The temperature was in the mid-20s when I started up through the valley formerly occupied by many homesites. I noticed some old fence posts still standing along the trail, and I was on the lookout for old rusty washtubs, since Bill Hart’s writeup in the brown Smokies trail guide says, “The washtub is probably one of the most common artifacts found at abandoned homesites throughout the Smokies.” Sure enough, I spotted one!
Old washtub along Chestnut Branch
It did make me wonder, though, if the folks forced out when the park was created maybe thought they were going to places that had more sophisticated laundering devices, or whether they just were so fed up with life at that point that they just left some important things behind.
The Chestnut Branch trail ends steeply at the A.T. after two miles. The grade on the A.T. is steady and moderate. I passed a large dead hemlock that showed a reddish color where the bark had dropped off. This seems to happen with all of the large hemlocks after the woolly adelgid kills them off.
The bark drops off the dead hemlock, leaving a reddish color
There were heaps of bark fragments on the ground around it.
Bark fragments were heaped around the tree's base
Shortly thereafter, I met the only two hikers I saw the whole day—a pair of southbound thru-hikers, “Ragamuffin” and her husband, whose trail name I didn’t quite catch. Coming down from Hot Springs a couple of weeks ago, they had arrived at the I-40 crossing just before a lot of snowy weather came in. They had very wisely decided to bypass the Smokies and continue on southward from Fontana. They’d made it nearly to Springer and were now coming back to do the Smokies before completing the final segment of their hike, begun July 1 at Katahdin. They were breaking the Smokies into two segments with a stay in Gatlinburg in between: first Newfound Gap to Davenport Gap, where I crossed paths with them a couple of hours before they finished that half, and then Newfound to Fontana. They said there was still a fair amount of snow from Newfound as far as Tricorner Knob.
I saw my first spruce at 4050′ and my first stretch of icy trail at 4500′.
Icy trail
I decided to put on my microspikes. As it turned out, the ice was spotty, and I could have manuevered around it without the spikes (which I did on the way back down). Nevertheless, the spikes are a very useful tool (far superior to instep crampons, for instance), and I always wonder why people down here don’t all get them instead of whining, “It’s too icy to hike now…”
Easy to put on and take off, and effective
After three hours of hiking I arrived at the tower. It was the first time I’ve ever been there that I haven’t encountered a single other hiker.
Mt. Cammerer fire tower
It was a bit chilly and windy, so I went into the tower to have my lunch. I am fixated on how beautiful the tower’s ceiling is.
Ceiling of the fire tower
On my way out, I noticed some ferns growing between the stones of the tower.
Ferns growing between the cracks
On my way back down, I stopped at an overlook rock on the A.T. looking into the extensive valley of Chestnut Branch. Across the valley I noticed one particular ridge that is covered with heath. This is something I have often wondered about: what determines the particular places where the heath develops? Adjacent ridges did not have any heath.
And I might as well bring up my other question of the day: why is it that quartz is found in many places in the Smokies, but always as an isolated rock or boulder, not as part of any apparent larger bedrock complex? It is almost as if quartz was scattered randomly across these mountains from some overhead source. And with these profound ponderings occupying my brain, I completed my hike.
Heath-covered ridge surrounded by non-heath terrain
The Bald Mountains in dense fog December 23, 2010
Posted by Jenny in hiking, Southern Appalachians.Tags: Appalachian Trail, Bald Mountains, Blackstack Cliffs, Hot Springs, Jerry Cabin, Jerry Miller trail
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Seth gives helpful info to guys holed up at Jerry Cabin
I’d told Seth O’Shields that I was interested in exploring the area around Hot Springs. He’s done a lot of interesting hikes in the area. So we set December 22 as the day to have an adventure in the Bald Mountains along the A.T. northeast of Hot Springs. We’d talked about a fairly high-mileage option, so I chirped up and suggested a 7:00 a.m. meeting time in downtown Hot Springs.
At 7:00 I arrived in drizzle and dense fog, and it was about as dark as the hind end of a black cow in a coal mine. It seemed absolutely insane to be setting off on a hike. It had been hard enough just seeing the edge of the road along the twists and turns of Hwy. 25/70 past Marshall and Hurricane and Tanyard Gap. So we took the only sensible option and went down to the diner for a breakfast of delicious sweet potato pancakes. By the time we got done with that, it was light enough that hiking seemed almost reasonable. But we opted for a shorter route, going up the Jerry Miller trail to the A.T. and then past Fox Cabin Gap and Bald Mountain to the Fork Ridge trail with a short roadwalk at the end to bring us in a triangular route back to the car. We needed Seth’s good knowledge of the roads and his 4-Runner to get up the last icy unpaved section with a stream ford.
The Jerry Miller trail has a nice cascade along it. I was conducting an unsuccessful experiment with using something called Cat Crap to keep my glasses from fogging up. (I’m going to have to go back to using contacts for winter hiking, even though the prescription is pretty out of date since I never use them for anything else.) So we stopped, I wiped off my glasses, and then I could see the cascade.
Jerry Miller cascade
A bit higher, the trail followed an old road through a pleasant forest with quite a bit of Virginia pine. The slushy snow got steadily deeper, maybe 4 or 5 inches on this section, just enough to make it a bit of a slog. We reached the junction with the A.T. and contemplated a sign there that is so weathered that the letters have become literally invisible.
Seth contemplates the blank sign
We decided to make the short side trip to Blackstack Cliffs. Seth claimed that on other trips to that spot, clouds lower down had opened up, due to some specific meteorological condition that seemed to occur there. Unfortunately, the condition was not occurring that day.
View of the interior of a large, dense cloud at Blackstack Cliffs
We ate lunch nearby, thinking optimistically the clouds might dissipate during that time. Nope.
Back to the A.T. Our next section had two route options, an open semi-bald ridgetop section exposed to bad weather, and a more sheltered sidehilling section. Since we would have no views, and it was quite windy—real hypothermia weather with the dampness—we opted for the sheltered route.
Two options
The wording seemed funny to me: it sounded as if BOTH trails gave you bad weather, though the intended message was obviously “Take the Bad Weather trail to AVOID bad weather.”
As we climbed over Bald Mountain, we kept running into patches of windblown slushy drifts where we were postholing up to a foot or more in depth, which made it a bit of a grunt. We were amazed to see ATV tracks in the snow where some moron had come up the Fork Ridge trail, knocked down one trail sign and stolen another. They, and others, had left quite a bit of trash along the way as well. I dedicated one large pocket of my parka to crushed beer cans, while Seth took charge of the candy wrappers and cigarette boxes.
Seth wanted to check out the Jerry Cabin, one of the oldest shelters on that stretch of the A.T. So we continued a bit past the Fork Ridge junction and were much surprised to discover five jolly hikers inside. They had decided to give themselves a break on their multi-day trip and hole up in the cabin and, basically, drink whiskey. Actually, they were surprisingly sober considering the very large bottles of Southern Comfort and other similar poisons out on the table. We had a very entertaining conversation about the working telephone that used to be mounted on the wall of the shelter, imagining various scenarios of it ringing and some cheery stranger calling just to say hello. Those guys were really lucky, because Seth was able to offer them some good detailed advice about the different options for daily objectives between there and Hot Springs.
We descended Fork Ridge and had a fast icy roadwalk (no problem—we both wore microspikes on the whole trip). There were two fords of Big Creek that involved wading in fairly fast current, but no one got swept away. As soon as we reached the car, the clouds started to break, and we experienced some beautiful shifting crepuscular rays and changing windows of blue sky as we drove back to Hot Springs.
Another view of the Jerry Miller cascade
