40,000 headmen on Mt. Davis May 29, 2009
Posted by Jenny in White Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: bushwhacking, Davis Path, Mt. Davis, Mt. Isolation, Rocky Branch, White Mountains
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The east side of Mt. Davis is carpeted with moss
It was my birthday hike in 2007. Bob and I had a tradition that I would get to pick the destination for an outing sometime around August 25 each year (since his birthday is December 29, he always got shortchanged in that department). I had decreed that we would climb Mt. Davis, a 3840-ft. elevation point on the Davis Path that is considered a shoulder of Mt. Isolation because it doesn’t have the required 200-foot prominence. No one climbs Mt. Davis as a destination, though it is sometimes passed along the Davis Path by backpackers. Yet the AMC guide says it has “perhaps the finest view of Montalban Ridge and one of the best in the mountains.”
The route: Rocky Branch trail from Rt. 16 to where it makes a right-angle turn and the Isolation trail comes in. There we would leave the trail and bushwhack on a course close to due west toward the summit.
As we drove to the trailhead, we were listening to a “Best of Traffic” CD. The song “40,000 Headmen” was playing as we pulled into the parking lot. It tells a peculiar dreamlike story:
Forty thousand headmen couldn’t make me change my mind
If I had to take the choice between the deafman and the blind
I know just where my feet should go and that’s enough for me
I turned around and knocked them down and walked across the sea
Hadn’t traveled very far when suddenly I saw
Three small ships a-sailing out towards a distant shore
So lighting up a cigarette I followed in pursuit
And found a secret cave where they obviously stashed their loot….
The song was still going through my head as we started our climb up the Rocky Branch trail. The air felt a bit soupy, but the sky gleamed like a polished piece of metal and the temperature was not too warm. As we crossed over the height-of-land on Engine Hill, we passed by large numbers of white turtleheads in bloom, a wildflower I’ve seen often in the Smokies but rarely in the Whites. Asters were interwoven with the turtleheads in shades of pale blue and pale purple.
We rockhopped the crossing at Rocky Branch with no difficulty, and soon we left the trail and plunged into our off-trail assault on the majestic peak of Mt. Davis. We moved easily through open moss-covered forest, working around small boggy areas that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Above 3300 feet the climb grew steeper and we got into some spindly spruce and fir, but the going wasn’t too bad. We aimed to hit the ridge a little to the south of the summit so that by turning to the right when we reached the Davis Path we would be sure to hit the spur trail to the top.
When we crested the ridge, the altimeter showed us by our exact elevation that we were indeed south of the top. So now all we had to do was drop down less than 200 vertical feet to the Davis Path. But as soon as we broke through to the windward side of the ridge, the going got predictably much worse through wind-carved scrub evergreens. I had a slight alarm when a stubby branch knocked my glasses off and sent them sailing into the brush. Luckily, I found them in a minute.
We felt as though we could have been miles from any trail, but we kept telling ourselves the Davis Path had to be very close, and we finally touched the ground on the trail. We had been bouncing from branch to branch for about 15 minutes. Then it was only a short stroll up the path to the spur trail and the summit. We gazed into the vastness of the Dry River valley and up past the bump of Mt. Isolation to Mt. Washington, which looks like a monarch from this subsidiary ridge to the south. The sky had a glimmering, pearly look. The song was still going through my head, following the adventure of the mysterious loot-seeker:
… Filling up my pockets, even stuffed it up my nose
I must have weighed a hundred tons between my head and toes
I ventured forth before the dawn had time to change its mind
And soaring high above the clouds I found a golden shrine…..
After taking a leisurely break at our tiny rock outcrop surrounded by oceans of wilderness, we continued on to the north for a return via Mt. Isolation and the Isolation trail. As usual, we found the headwater area along the upper Isolation trail to be meandery and slightly confusing, but we got down into the stream valley, made the multiple stream crossings, and took a last look at the glittering waters of Rocky Branch before steeling ourselves for the climb back up and over the height-of-land.
It was as we approached the broad saddle that the 40,000 headmen started coming after us. We could hear thunder rumbling off to the west, but it sounded distant. Then it started to sound closer. And closer. The headmen were right on our heels.
We had just begun the descent when the heavens opened with a mighty crash of thunder and a sizzle of lightning. It seemed as though the air itself had turned into water. A quick stop to put on raingear, but that was a pathetic gesture. We were going to get nailed.
The lightning was so close that I could smell the electricity. With a lot of melodramatic banging and rumbling, the dense raincloud lingered overhead, emptying its full contents directly on our heads. It poured, and poured, and poured. And finally the worst of the storm passed. By that time the sun was starting to go down, for it had been a very long day. The trees grew larger, and darker, and eerier, and the forest grew slimy and slippery. We got out our headlamps. Following the tiny white lightbeams through the drizzly air, we stumbled along. Without the headlamps, I have no doubt we would have been forced to spend the night in the very black woods.
We made it out to tell the tale—and truly, it was a great adventure. Time to get back on the road and find something to eat.
Laying down my treasure before the iron gate
Quickly rang the bell hoping I hadn’t come too late
But someone came along and told me not to waste my time
And when I asked him who he was he said, ‘Just look behind’
So I turned around and forty thousand headmen bit the dirt
Firing twenty shotguns each and man, it really hurt
But luckily for me they had to stop and then reload
And by the time they’d done that I was heading down the road
The place we can’t go anymore March 30, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking.Tags: bushwhacking, Little Duck Hawk, off-trail navigation, Smoky Mountains
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This is why
Before I say anything else, I want to say that I agree that we shouldn’t traverse Little Duck Hawk anymore. That is a place where peregrine falcons live, and it is wrong to invade their homes. This post is partly about how a sense of adventure can collide with environmental responsibility.
The approach to the ridge
The Smoky Mountains Hiking Club used to go up and down, backwards, forwards, and sideways on this ridge. It was a standard hiking club thing to do. Looking through the old SMHC handbooks, I found one from the 1960s that spoke of how the ridge had formerly been the haunt of the peregrines, but because of DDT, they were no longer to be found in that area. This would have been a few years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But now, thank goodness, the peregrines are back. And the hikers are gone—at least, the ones who care about these things are gone, or those who obey the current National Park Service restriction that forbids people from climbing the ridge.
For me, Little Duck Hawk was always a test of my ability to master my fear of heights. At its narrowest point, the ridge was little more than a foot wide with sheer dropoffs on both sides. Before I ever climbed it, I saw a picture in a slide show that captured the spectacle of a whole line of maybe 12 or 15 people going up the hand-over-hand section into the thin air, progressing one by one in steady unstoppable fashion, conquering the ridge in something approaching military indomitability. I recognized some of the people in that line. I won’t name any names, but I knew that some of them were real chickens when it came to things like difficult rockhopping. I decided then and there that if they could make it up Little Duck Hawk, I could make it up Little Duck Hawk.
The first time I did it, it was not on an SMHC hike but with my former husband Chris. He was always much less afraid of heights than I was. We dropped down from the trail into the unofficial territory, maneuvering over slabs of Anakeesta shale that were like giant layers of strudel. This was a good warmup. Before long we had completed the initial descent, and we were looking up at the “crux”—a rock staircase with an extreme amount of exposure. I don’t remember who went up first, me or Chris, but after stopping for a moment to focus and take a deep breath, I simply maintained my forward progress and systematically climbed up the staircase, reaching up and grabbing the Anakeesta layers with my hands and stepping up with my feet. I remember that the rock was nice and toasty in the afternoon sun.
Soon we were up on the narrowest part, the section that has the hole underneath that forces of nature have drilled all the way through the rock. The narrowest part of the ridge is about 18″ wide and continues for about six feet. Walking forward was no more difficult than walking across the living room as long as you didn’t think about what would happen if you stubbed your toe or stepped on your shoelace. Before long the ridge had widened and we were working our way down into the dense rhodo that surrounds the ridge.
The interesting thing for me, something I still don’t fully understand, is that my fear of heights has never bothered me in the Smokies anywhere near as much as it has in some other places, like the Rockies or the Sierras. In fact, I have climbed in some pretty preposterous places in the Smokies. There is something about the Smoky Mountains that seems to nourish me and take away any fear that I might have.
Sometime in the mid-1990s I brought Bob down to the Smokies and took him across Little Duck Hawk. Bob said at the time that it was the scariest place he had ever hiked, but he made it.
I have done it by myself, going up and going down, just to see what it felt like to do it alone. It’s easier to do it from the top down. If you start from the bottom, you have to angle through a jungle of rhodo and keep the faith that you’re going to get past all that rubbery vegetation and up onto solid rock. Going from the bottom, it also means that you downclimb the trickiest part. It meets the definition of Class 3 scrambling: you have to face the rock to go down. It would probably meet another definition of Class 3 that I read somewhere: your dog wouldn’t be able to do it.
The hiking club hasn’t done it for a very long time. I don’t know exactly when the Park Service said you couldn’t go there any more. I understand there are signs now on the rough herd path that tell you not to go any further. I suspect that some people will probably criticize me for even writing about this place. But for me, trying to understand and describe experiences is the most important thing that I do in my life, and I’ll take whatever lumps come my way. And I will also say that there are other places you can go that are just as interesting and challenging. You just have to study the maps.
It was nice while it lasted.
Little Duck Hawk seen from Big Duck Hawk
Climbing the “real” Charlies Bunion March 19, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: bushwhacking, Charlies Bunion, Lester Prong, off-trail navigation, Porters Creek, Smoky Mountains
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This is where it starts to get interesting
This post describes a hike done by the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club up Charlies Bunion on April 10, 1988. First, I have to explain what I mean by the “real” Bunion and the “tourist” Bunion. The real Bunion is the large knife-edge ridge labelled as “Charlies Bunion” on the USGS Mt. Guyot quad. The tourist Bunion is the popular destination just off the A.T. that has the little circular trail around the top. It is just off the Guyot quad, on the extreme righthand edge of the LeConte quad.
I have also been up the tourist Bunion from the Greenbrier. (You can read about that adventure here.) To get to the tourist Bunion from this approach, you take the second tributary of Lester Prong and climb up the ridge to your right. To get to the real Bunion, you take the first tributary of Lester Prong and climb up the ridge to your left.
Partway up the tourist Bunion--I'll be writing about this in another post
Lester Prong might be the most interesting stream in the Smokies. You start in the emerald depths of the Greenbrier, and you end on perpendicular crags of rotten Anakeesta shale. I wrote in a recent post about how insight comes from connecting ideas that no one had previously thought of together. That is mental adventure, and physical adventure is a kind of physical insight: starting here, you make a connection with there, a place you could hardly imagine when you started. That is what makes it so wonderful. By definition, these sorts of journeys are impossible to explain to people who haven’t been there.
I’m fortunate to have a set of pictures taken by Al Watson on the SMHC hike. Al managed to document most of the outing except for the part where he was hanging onto the rocks with both hands. Here are some of the group on the Dry Sluice manway after the first few stream crossings.
(From left) A visiting hiker, Jenny, Steve Higdon, Charlie Klabunde
At the junction of Lester Prong with Porters Creek, we left the Dry Sluice manway and bore to the right. We took the first tributary on the left.
This is the lower part of the tributary
We started to encounter steep cascades that glided over the layers of Anakeesta.
The hiker in the foreground has jeans, tennis shoes, and is carrying a shoulder bag instead of a pack. He did just fine!
We scrambled up beside more cascades as shown at the top of the post (the hikers in the top picture are Matt Kelleher and Dicky Simpson). Then it was time to start the serious climb—out of the draw and up to the ridge. Looking up from the bottom of the V-shaped valley, we faced a wide expanse of corrugated grayish-brown rock rising steeply above our heads. Each person started maneuvering up along whichever route looked most appealing, or least horrible, depending on how you looked at it. Soon all 15 of us were scuttling up toward the ridgecrest.
Al took this picture looking across the valley to terrain similar to what we climbed, but where we went up was more bare.
This is typical of the terrain in the upper valleys
Once we reached the top of our climb, which was pretty much a fingers-and-toes deal, we arrived at the spine of the Bunion, which had a fair amount of vegetation along it.
Looking over to the tourist Bunion
We followed the ridgecrest up to the Appalachian Trail.
The spine of the Bunion
After relaxing for a while at an open spot near the A.T., we walked east on the trail about three-quarters of a mile to Porters Gap and descended by the east fork of Porters Creek. Although four years had passed since a major washout in this valley, it still looked quite bare. Since that time it has filled in quite a bit with blackberry and other vegetation.
You can make out a hiker descending the washout (there's a zoom magnifier for all of these pictures)
We finally returned to the Porters Creek trail and enjoyed the beautiful April wildflowers. Another more sensible group in the club had made its annual pilgrimage to Porters Flats to see the flowers. Our hike was the “alternate” hike!
Triillium grandiflorum, one of the ten trilliums of the Smokies
