The crag in fog March 26, 2012
Posted by Jenny in bushwhacking, hiking, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Charlies Bunion, Lester Prong, Newfound Gap, Porters Creek
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The ridge was a tapestry of rock, myrtle, and fog
My good hiking buddy Chris and I decided to visit what is called by some the “Real Bunion” and by others “Rocky Crag.” The Real Bunion designation comes from looking at the USGS Mt. Guyot quad, which puts the “Charlies Bunion” label squarely on a ridge that practically no one ever goes to, in contrast to the destination of that name that is visited by many people.
Taken on a different day, obviously. Profile of the ridge we climbed.
We picked a date. The forecast called for 30% chance of rain showers. In one sense we lucked out—it was raining hard on the drive over, but the rain stopped before we met at Newfound Gap. In another sense, we didn’t luck out at all—we were shrouded in dense fog throughout most of our hike except where we dipped down below about 4500′.
Our original plan was to go out on the A.T. to Porters Gap and drop down the East Fork of Porters. But the unfavorable conditions and the likelihood of slow going in streams running high led us to opt for a shorter route via the Dry Sluice manway. The steep upper slopes were decorated with white foaming rivulets everywhere.
Water plunged down everywhere on the steep slope.
The footing on the upper manway is never easy, and the wetness made it extra slippery. But we descended without incident, as the expression goes. (“Incident” always means something negative, for some reason.)
Chris on the upper manway.
Once we reached Porters Creek, we walked through carpets of wildflowers: up at this elevation just getting going, so down at Porters Flats the blooms must be going crazy.
Dutchman's breeches.
I didn’t succeed in keeping my feet dry doing the rockhop up Lester Prong.
Distinctive cairn beside Lester Prong.
We turned up our tributary and reached the beautiful cascade not far above the junction.
The cascade was looking its best in the high water conditions.
The rock beside the cascade makes a lovely staircase for climbing. I apologize for the blurry photos—my fingers were frozen and I had a hard time holding the camera steady.
Chris climbs beside the cascade.
Just above the cascade, we followed a nifty corridor of open woods between big communities of rhodo. We reached the ridgetop and followed it over its lumps and bumps.
The first knob along the ridge.
What’s great about the ridge is that despite the steepness and the exposure, you always have friendly Anakeesta handholds or convenient vegetation to hold onto.
Typical ridge section.
We worked our way steadily toward the prominent crag.
Looking back down the ridge.
We will come back on a sunny day when the myrtle is blooming.
Chris has some great photos of the outing here.
Chris relaxes on the crag.
Of lopping and stone waterbars June 6, 2010
Posted by Jenny in hiking, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Appalachian Trail, Charlies Bunion, Horseshoe Mountain, Jumpoff, Newfound Gap, trail maintenance
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Our crew pauses between Icewater and the Bunion
Yesterday was National Trails Day. I’d decided to get out there and lend one more set of arms and legs to the effort. The Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, the Park Service, and Friends of the Smokies had organized the effort in GSMNP in which an army of 100 volunteers descended upon the A.T. between Indian Gap and Dry Sluice Gap to generally pound, prune, and groom the trail into submission.
I was part of a five-person crew headed by Dick Ketelle, who has been giving much of his time to A.T. maintenance for many years. He is master of all the tools that can possibly be used, from pulaski and pick-mattock to swingblade and loppers, sledgehammer and pry bar, chainsaw and even good old-fashioned cross-cut.
There was quite a long and complicated assembly at Sugarlands before we all carpooled up to Newfound Gap. We heard from park superintendent Dale Ditmanson, although what seemed to be on his mind this morning was not so much trail maintenance as the very unfortunate recent episode in which a tourist-habituated bear bit a stupid, ignorant person who got too close, and the bear had to be euthanized. The Park Service came under a huge amount of emotional attack and intense local press coverage for killing the bear, and Ditmanson gave us his side of the story. The whole bear episode had been a lose-lose situation.
So we could understand the superintendent’s slight obsession with the subject. At any rate, we eventually got up to Newfound Gap and set off to do our work. I grabbed up a swingblade and a surprisingly heavy pick-mattock and headed up the trail as Dick led us along at a fairly blistering pace. I soon began to regret that I hadn’t fueled up with the free donuts at Sugarlands, and I found myself, with a tool in each hand, unable to wipe the sweat from my brow. I did not regret that we got bogged down for a bit among other, slower-moving crews who were stopping to do sections closer to the Gap.
By Icewater Spring we had left all but one group of the others behind. That group went on to Dry Sluice Gap. After we passed the shelter we started working on building up some old defunct stone waterbars. We scraped out the uphill side to create a better outflow trench and found some nice flat, sharp-edged rocks to raise the height of the waterbar.
The flat rocks were placed end-up across the trail
It gets a little crowded with people swinging sharp tools in close quarters, so two of us went ahead and dug out a few more waterbars. As the trail leveled off somewhat and transitioned from sidehill to ridgetop, the number of waterbars decreased, and we turned our attention to lopping.
We, and quite a few random hikers, reached the Bunion at a good time for lunch. I hadn’t been out there via the A.T. for years, and I gazed around at the places in the Porters Creek and Lester Prong valleys where I have had some great off-trail adventures. My friend Brian is talking about doing a climb up a slide on the side of Horseshoe Mountain, and I could see the top of the slide across the Lester Prong valley. If you look closely in the photo, you can see the very top just below the high point on the Horseshoe ridge. (You can click on the photo to enlarge it.)
Looking across to Horseshoe Mountain
You also get a good view of the Jumpoff.
The Jumpoff is the rocky scar
This is an incredible place.
We headed back toward Newfound Gap to do “more of the same.” I have to admit that my talents lie more in lopping than stonework, so I was glad to take over the main lopping responsibilities.
Eventually we worked our way back past Icewater and started running into the other crews. We stopped to help a group between the Boulevard and Sweat Heifer junctions with installing a beautiful new stone step.
The stone was lovingly placed into a carefully created hole
By the time we finished with that, it was getting toward 4:00—time to head out. A picnic was scheduled for Metcalf Bottoms, but I, as the odd North Carolinian amongst a gaggle of Tennesseans, opted to head directly toward home. The picknickers may have had to deal with a bit of moisture, as the heavens opened about that time, dispensing a generous quantity of what someone I know calls “hydrological head poo.” But a fine day nonetheless.
The Bunion and my fear of heights July 16, 2009
Posted by Jenny in bushwhacking, hiking, memoir, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Charlies Bunion, Lester Prong, Porters Creek
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Chris Hebb halfway up the ridge of the Bunion
This post is dedicated to my former husband, Christopher E. Hebb, who died of a brain tumor in 2004. We’d been out of touch a long time when he passed away—our marriage had ended amicably years before—but he left an indelible and positive impression on my life.
Chris and I moved to Knoxville in 1982 when he entered the clinical psychology program at the University of Tennessee. As soon as we arrived, we were doing a lot of hiking in the Smokies. Since we had done some technical climbing together—he was much better at it than I was—we soon started talking about climbing Charlies Bunion from the bottom, out of the Greenbrier.
As I have described in other posts, Porters Creek and Lester Prong in the Greenbrier form pathways for rockhoppers that lead to mysterious and difficult places. Depending on which fork of Lester Prong you follow through the giant trees and cascading streams of the Greenbrier, you end up on the “real” Bunion, the “tourist” Bunion, or the “Jump Off.” The “real” Bunion is what the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club calls the place labelled as Charlies Bunion on the far lefthand side of the USGS Mt. Guyot quad, and I have described that here. The “tourist” Bunion is the place with the little circular trail around the top, on the right side of the LeConte quad, the place most people think of as Charlies Bunion. That is the place Chris and I were talking about going, but not from the A.T.
Chris and I decided in the late summer of 1983 to climb the Bunion from the bottom. We’d do it as an overnight trip. I knew that for me it would be hard because of my fear of heights, but I still thought it was doable. We backpacked up the Dry Sluice Manway to the junction of Porters Creek and Lester Prong, and we followed the stream a short distance to the tributary we would take to climb the Bunion. It had been very dry in the weeks before our trip, so we were able to stay right in the stream.
Hanging out around camp
We set up camp near the stream junction, and I thought about how streams form paths in wild places, how you have to pay attention where they diverge, because a junction may lead to destinations as different as night and day. It’s like the fairy tales of childhood where you watch the hero journey through treacherous places and you think, “Oh no! Don’t go that way!” because you know, and he doesn’t, what lies at the end of that path.
That evening we listened to the beautiful song of a bird high up in the trees. The notes dropped down from the branches like small silver balls. The green gloom thickened as we sat quietly beside our tent, surrounded by shadows. When I looked across the stream valley to the slope on the other side, I felt something like exhaustion to see so many rotting treetrunks that had been there for years, to look at the brush that would take hours to work a way through it.
We passed the night encapsuled in our small warm cocoon while the woods breathed the night air and animals rustled on the forest floor. The stream ran musically down its rocky course.
In the morning I awoke with an indigestible ball of apprehension in my stomach. I watched Chris as he boiled up the water for our oatmeal. He was wearing an orange t-shirt that said “Psycho-canoeists of the North,” a white floppy hat with a green brim that had been worn on our backpack up the Abol trail on Mt. Katahdin (!), and khaki pants from an army surplus store. I felt better when we started moving up Lester Prong. We left our backpacks behind and carried small daypacks—we would circle back around and pick up the larger packs on the way out.
After we turned up the tributary, the streambanks quickly steepened so that we were travelling up a narrow cut gouged by floodwaters. We soon arrived at our first obstacle, a small cliff that ran across the streambed from side to side, blocking the V-shaped draw. At its base lay a deep pool. But you could find a way to the side if you braced your feet and back against rocks and chimneyed your way up.
The streambed was choked with logs and brush that had been swept down in various floods, making for hard going. Chris suggested getting up onto the ridgecrest. I peered up at the slope to our right. It was very steep, and I had no idea what it would lead to. But I looked at it only a moment before I started to climb. Already I had reached a spellbound state. Even though I thought it possible something awful could happen, I’d made up my mind to do this climb. I was somehow able to shut off a whole level of thinking that involved weighing, worrying, and considering.
First we followed this side stream off the tributary
It was, to say the least, extremely steep. We sweated our way up a short distance, and suddenly it was not a matter of exertion any more, it was a question of choosing the right move. We found ourselves nose to nose with the Anakeesta’s familiar thin brittle layers. Unfortunately, we were moving in the same direction as the grain of the rock, which made for fewer handholds: the layers ran up and down as we climbed instead of across, so that we didn’t have steps, we had vertical grooves.
The side of the ridge
The place gave me a deep sense of uneasiness. I didn’t look down, I didn’t look up, I just moved from one section of rock to another, grabbing onto a handy bush here and there. Chris, on the other hand, refused to touch the vegetation, upholding the rockclimber’s ethical standard of “no vegetable holds.” And it really wasn’t necessary to use the bushes to pull myself up, it was just a form of security. My world right then was just vivid blue sky, brown rock, green shrubs, and the scrabbling of my boots as I felt for a foothold.
Finally we reached the ridgecrest, a pleasant place covered with blooming rhodo. All at once everything felt much more secure, as if something that had been upside down had just been turned rightside up. I wasn’t struggling any more to keep from sliding or falling, I was standing surrounded by high rhodo that gave me a sense of being protected.
The ridgecrest where we reached it was almost friendly
We were standing on the back of a whale in an ocean of trees. Then we turned and looked at what we still had to climb. The ridge stayed brushy for a while but steadily narrowed, steepened, and turned to bare rock. I actually looked away, feeling the menace of the place.
We started up the humpbacked ridge. The rhododendron made an arbor that let in a cool, speckled light. Most of the time we had to bend over or crawl to squeeze under the arching branches. It was a secure, enclosed little world surrounded by gaping space. Every now and then we came to small bits of exposed rock that gave us a taste of what was to come.
There started to be more rock and less brush
I continued to work my way over these short rock pitches in my spellbound state, completely absorbed in what I was doing. Each obstacle flowed toward me, towered over me, then receded behind me as I overcame it and moved on to the next one.
A view of things to come
At the open spaces we had an increasingly detailed view of what stood between us and the top. We were getting closer now to the stone staircase that climbed straight up the shadowy mountainside. The bright morning sky glowed behind the jagged ridges, behind the fortress that lay ahead.
We came out onto open rock. Everything was changing again. Just as when we reached the crest of the ridge, we were turning a page, entering a new landscape in which the giant physical shapes around us had shifted. The proportion of air to rock here was high. As I climbed, I sensed a fear that hovered nearby, but there was an interesting sense of detachment between me and the fear.
Lots of handholds and footholds
Somehow I was able to think about what was there, the support the rocks offered, instead of what was not there. I would continue to have three or four points of contact with the rock. My fingers felt for the thin horizontal ledges, for now we were climbing across the grain of the rock rather than parallel to it. I was amazed to realize that I felt happy. How many chances do we have to be surrounded by sky? To be in this place was like having a vision that kept getting deeper with each step.
All around us, ridges and ravines showed sharp edges in morning shadow and light. We climbed up the warm rock, past the small scrubby myrtle that grew here and there, toward the final hump that has the tourist path around it. We reached the path and met a family perched on the rock. Of course they asked us where we’d come from. “From the bottom,” we said, crossing the path and continuing up the other side until we reached the very highest point, where we stopped to have lunch. I had been afraid, but it hadn’t stopped me.
I couldn't have done it without you, Chris
