The Bunion and my fear of heights July 16, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking, memoir.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
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
The Jumpoff via Lester Prong January 30, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: Charlies Bunion, hiking, Jumpoff, Lester Prong, Mt. LeConte, off-trail navigation, Porters Creek, Smoky Mountains
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An unnamed waterfall on LeConte, from the Thompson Bros. collection
Certain places in the Smokies can only be reached by long, hard work. And because it takes so much effort to reach them, they lose their connection with the outside world. When you finally get there, you have shed all your everyday thoughts. You stay for a while, you journey back. And by the time you return to the road, the wilds have closed up again, sealing these places inside. —From my notes after the hike
The Jumpoff is a spectacular viewpoint normally reached by a spur trail from the Boulevard Trail, which connects the Appalachian Trail with the summit of LeConte. On August 11, 1984, the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club climbed it from the bottom, out of the heart of the Greenbrier, working around to the side of just enough of the steepest parts that the route didn’t get technical.
We followed the Porters Creek Trail to where it ends four miles up. From there the well-known but unmaintained Dry Sluice manway continues, crossing the stream many times as it passes through a garden of rhododendrons, tulip poplars, and hemlocks. When the manway reaches the junction of Porters Creek and Lester Prong, the manway leads to the left to continue up Porters Creek along a faint cairned path, while our group went to the right.
Each tributary of Lester Prong leads to a different adventure. The first one leads to the “real” Charlies Bunion. The second leads to the “tourist” Bunion, the one with the little footpath off the A.T. (People may not understand what I mean when I say “leads to the Bunion.” I mean, leads to the bottom of it. Then you climb up the rock spine.) The third tributary—I’ve never been up it, but it would put you between the tourist Bunion and a series of nameless dragon’s-back ridges. On this trip, we stayed with the main stream at all of these junctions until we got to the bottom of the Jumpoff.
Charlie Klabunde and Matt Kelleher were the fearless leaders of our group of 12. Charlie’s newsletter writeup said: “There it is: towering over 1300 ft. above us, only 1/4 mile away by the map and a like distance vertically. Awesome! No, we don’t attempt a head-on approach, but even staying with the main Lester Prong valley all the way to its source at the intersection of the Boulevard and Horseshoe lead ridges, then turning left along the crest, is still plenty steep and barely half a mile…. Since we don’t use ropes or other aids we’ll stick to a reasonably safe route.”
It happened that we did this hike after a deluge the night before. (I know, sounds like Raven Fork.) We had to wade the manway’s crossings of Porter’s Creek—most of us just went barefoot between the numerous fords. As we progressed up Lester Prong past the 4200 or 4300 foot elevation point, the stream changed its character and became a sluiceway that gouged its way between solid rock walls. We had to do some interesting sidewall maneuvers, looking for toeholds and going sideways. We were now climbing steeply. Around a turn, we came to a giant logjam created by floods. We clambered over, under, and between the heaped-up trees.
At the top of the logjam, we could see the stream descending in a series of silver cascades, one after another. We climbed up beside the gliding water, feeling the mist in our faces. Then we angled toward the right and began our 1300 foot climb up a slope upholstered with moss and ferns and pink turtleheads. This was the kind of steepness that somehow I don’t mind because it is so engrossing, where I’m using my hands almost as much as feet and I’m working my way methodically step by step. At some point partway up I saw Charlie sitting under a tree, waiting for his flock to come through, looking like a wise man of the mountains.
Clouds had silently swaddled the mountain before we reached the top. We didn’t care about views. We were all hungry. I watched with fascination as one boy opened a can of cold beans and ate out of it with a spoon. Most of us were tired enough that we could have eaten almost anything.
Our hike was half over. We still had to descend back into the Greenbrier by a new route that Charlie had scouted on the east fork of the east branch of Porters Creek. We ended up coming down a stream valley that had been completely scoured out by a flash flood just the night before. I’m going to save that description for another post.
That night, back at home, I kept thinking about those high cascades, quietly flowing in their secret valley. Flowing right then, as I thought about them.
