Solo bushwhack to Balsam Point on LeConte September 22, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: Balsam Point, Big Branch, Bullhead trail, Mt. LeConte
add a comment
It's the point in the back. You go up one of those shady draws.
This is a fairly tough off-trail hike in the neighborhood of LeConte. You start at what is now called the Carlos Campbell overlook on the Newfound Gap road, cross the West Prong, and follow Big Branch until you hit the Bullhead trail. If you study the photo above, you see that the valley of Big Branch climbs only moderately for quite a long way, and then it hits a wall. You climb the last 800 vertical feet to the trail in a quarter of a mile. Then you have the option of climbing another 1000 feet to the top of Balsam Point, which is a useless sort of blackberry-ridden place.
I carried my map, compass, and altimeter, as usual, but this hike does not really pose a navigational challenge. It leans toward other sorts of challenge. It was not hard to follow the West Prong to the junction with Big Branch and turn up the branch and climb past the foundation of an old stone house. The trick was to find the best route to take along the stream, for the water was far too high to rockhop it.
Since the stone house stood on the right bank, I continued climbing for a while on that side. But I found that the small ridge I was walking on rose higher and higher above the stream. When I checked my map, I saw that the other side was going to stay flatter along the branch, so I decided to switch sides. I meant to angle gradually back to the water to preserve my elevation, but some bluffs forced me straight down a muddy chute into an indescribably awkward place where I was trapped between slimy logs and the edge of the creek. I found myself teetering on unstable stones, pushing brush out of my eyes, and trying to get my toe unjammed from between two logs. Finally I flailed my way onto a treetrunk and got over to the other bank.
The fast stream roared beside me as I climbed in the sunshine. It sang with the voices of all of the tricklings of water that ran into it as it tumbled down the mountainside. I worked my way along, either close to the water or only within hearing distance of it, depending on the terrain. I would ride up on the back of the ridge until the brush beat me back to the boulders and the singing water.
Eventually the stream got small enough that I could stay in it. When it began to get really steep I stopped beside a waterfall for a snack before the last big push.
The sunlight that day shone pure and brilliant. The light turned the fringes of spruce and balsam into glowing lace. I sat in a little pocket of shadow and gazed up at the light flooding the treetops. The waterfall poured faithfully down into a dark green basin lined with moss.
It was time to move on again, and I had to scramble over the heaped-up boulders to get around the waterfall. It was more or less the same ingredients the rest of the way up. The water had gouged much of the soil away, so that I was scrambling up layers of bedrock over which the stream dropped in shining strands of cascades. It was like a staircase in which each step stood two or three feet high and the treads were only a hand’s width deep. Brush growing here and there made for some good handholds. But my toes were slipping on the slimy rock, and the damp moss was drenching me, so once more I moved away from the creek.
For no reason that I can explain, I enjoyed the steepest part. It was vertical enough to use all fours to get up, it was brushy, and it was crisscrossed by little bluffs that had to be worked around methodically. I was working hard but barely noticing the effort. If your legs are strong, you have the satisfaction of applying good tools to the task at hand, like using sharp scissors to cut through thick paper.
I picked my way through the brush, squirmed under blowdowns, and circumvented a boulder as big as a house. A pleasing little chute led up a bluff. One by one I took on the obstacles, kept moving, sweating, climbing.
Ahead stood another bluff. It stood as high as I am tall, and it was quite vertical, but there was no stopping me now. I grasped a projecting stone and began to pull myself up, noticing out of the corner of my eye a rusting iron stake jammed between two rocks. How did that get there? Grabbing onto a small tree and heaving myself over the top, I suddenly realized that I had just climbed up a retaining wall and now stood on the Bullhead trail at 4800 feet.
Return was via the ridge that leads toward Ramp Creek. I later co-led this hike for the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club. I can’t remember exactly why it was that I was doing this scouting by myself.
A week in the Smokies June 21, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: Brushy Mountain, Bullhead, Caldwell Fork, Cataloochee, elk, Long Branch, Mt. LeConte, Rainbow Falls, Roundtop Trail, Smoky Mountains, Winnesoka
1 comment so far
Laurel at 5500 feet along the Blue Ridge Parkway
Back in the land of towering green ridges and plunging stream valleys… six days of being in the Smokies.
The elk in Cataloochee
I visited Cataloochee to meet up with Ray Payne of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club and see the herd of elk that have been introduced there. Ray volunteers with the Park Service as a member of the “Elk Bugle Corps” to give information to park visitors and sometimes keep them from getting up too close to the elk. The best time to view the elk is dusk, but I got there early and did a stroll on the Caldwell Fork Trail, where I saw a lot of laurel along the stream and noticed a good-sized hemlock. The base of it looked fine, but the top is about two-thirds dead, affected by the adelgid like most of the hemlock in the area.
Base of dying hemlock
But although I saw a lot of dead hemlock, it didn’t alter the whole appearance of the area as drastically as I had feared.
I connected with Ray at about 4:00. He drives all the way from Knoxville every couple of weeks, going over the infamous Cove Creek dirt road (which has some good dropoffs without guardrails) to get to Cataloochee. I’m not sure which is worse, Cove Creek or driving through the Pigeon River Gorge on I-40. We had a great time catching up on things. He is the conservation chair for SMHC and continues to do a tremendous amount of work on the North Shore Road problem over on Fontana Lake.
It was raining pretty hard when we first drove up past the ranger station, but we saw three bull elk with impressively large antlers and a separate herd of does. We saw them in different combinations as we chatted over the next few hours.
The herd of does
Rainbow Falls/Bullhead loop
The next day I did a climb up to the top of LeConte up the Rainbow Falls trail and down the Bullhead trail. The dimensions of the hike are relatively hefty (about 14 miles and 4000 vertical feet), but the going is very easy, at least compared with the 9-mile, 4000-foot vertical hike I did on Mt. Washington the previous weekend. I picked this hike because I liked the idea of going through all the plant/climate zones on LeConte. I got into fog at about 3500 feet and stayed in it most of the hike, but that didn’t matter at all. At Rainbow Falls, there was a catawba rhododendron in bloom right at the top of the falls.
Rainbow Falls and rhodo
I had the falls to myself at about 10:00 on a Friday morning, except for some company that seemed interested in sharing my food:
Friendly squirrel at Rainbow Falls
At one spot above the falls, the trail was carpeted with rhodo blossoms.
The myrtle was just starting to bloom along the Rocky Spur side trail.
Myrtle coming out on LeConte
I was pleased to see that the Fraser firs are looking better on the top of LeConte. Most of them died 20 or so years ago, and areas above 6000 feet used to have a skeletal, devastated look, but now there are a lot of new firs in the 10-15 foot range. People are waiting to see if this new crop will survive.
I ran into a number of people between Rainbow Falls and the top, and the Lodge seemed busy. But as soon as I got down on the Bullhead Trail, I saw not a single person until I was all the way back at Cherokee Orchard. Sidehilling below Balsam Point, the slope (as opposed to the trail) was very steep, and I couldn’t believe that 20 years ago I rockhopped up the headwaters of Big Branch from the Newfound Gap road with an SMHC group. But those places always seem impossible looking down from the trail.
Winnesoka from Long Branch Gap
The next day I attended the concert at Cades Cove described in the post below. One of my poems that was set to music and performed by the Knoxville Symphony was about a solo trip I did up Brushy Mountain from Long Branch Gap. For the following day (Sunday the 14th) I had invited some people to join me for another off-trail hike in the area, but it turned out no one could make it. I decided to go up anyway on my own, back up to Long Branch, but I would head to the other side of the gap, Mt. Winnesoka. It’s an easier hike, since it doesn’t involve crawling through the heath on Brushy.
I left the Brushy Mt. Trail where it comes close to Long Branch and walked through easy open woods for a while on the left bank of the stream. I saw this enormous basswood:
There was a lot of squaw root:
After the valley closed in I started rockhopping up the stream. There were plenty of stinging nettles.
I left the stream and headed up to the gap through woods that was moderately thick. That area has lots of dog hobble (leucothoe):
Dog hobble and rhodo
Once I got up to the ridgecrest, I found the ground carpeted with wintergreen (gaultheria) and galax:
I headed up the slope, tangling with some greenbriers that were lurking in the laurel, and reached the high point of Winnesoka, Lookout Rock, at 4445′. As you might guess, you have to clamber up the rock to get much of a view. The post below about the Cades Cove concert has a photo of the view toward Brushy and LeConte. This photo is a zoom of the same picture to give a better idea of the heath on Brushy, but really there’s no way of understanding what it’s like until you crawl through it:
I opted not to bushwhack over to the northwest prominence of Winnesoka (Round Top, 4308′) but instead to navigate over to Turkey Rock (4000′), a much easier trip. I was able to stay on intermittent game paths near the steep north slope of the ridge. At about the right elevation I found an unimpressive rock, but a bit further on was another rock that I believe is Turkey Rock:
Still not terribly impressive. After touching this point, I continued along the ridge and then dropped back into Long Branch for the trip out.
Roundtop Trail
This trail is hardly used, for two reasons: it has a ford of the Little River at its western end and very restricted parking on Wears Cove Gap road at its eastern end. Going up to the trail’s high point at Joint Rock made a nice easy hike the day after I did Winnesoka, 5 miles roundtrip and 800 vertical feet. The first (easternmost) part of the forest had experienced a burn.
By chance I ran into the trail maintainer, a very nice guy from Chattanooga who is also a 2000-miler on the A.T. He said the burn had started out as a “controlled burn,” but had gotten a little bit out of control in some spots. But life was coming back, including this peculiar lichen:
Even in the burned over area, there were quite a few wildflowers, especially pippsissewa. The burn ends past a private house where the trail touches the park boundary. I saw spiderwort and coreopsis, some lady slippers that had gone by, and some flame azalea near Joint Ridge:
This trail was also good for mushrooms.
These made me think of a parent and child, though they probably actually sprouted at the same time.
The next day I met up with an old friend from Knoxville for a stroll on Lumber Ridge, a place that seemed noteworthy that day mainly for bugs and mugginess. But it was good to catch up before I headed home.
What I always remind myself is that these places are waiting, these streams and these waterfalls are still flowing, at this very moment even though I am now far away.
Blue jeans on Cannon Creek February 21, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: balsam fir, bushwhacking, Cannon Creek, Mt. LeConte, off-trail navigation, pink turtlehead, Smoky Mountains
add a comment
The summit of LeConte. I guess we may have touched this point on our Cannon Creek hike.
From my notes after the hike, July 11, 1988. The climb was 4400 vertical feet from the Porters Creek trailhead, going off-trail up Cannon Creek on the Greenbrier side of LeConte. We came down via the Trillium Gap trail.
As we rockhop our way steadily up the very long watercourse of Cannon Creek, the group has divided into two parts. One hiker was stung by yellow jackets early on, and the front leader accompanied him back to Knoxville because of a possible need for medical attention. Charlie Klabunde is the substitute front leader with a group of 6, and Ray Payne is shepherding a group of 4 somewhere behind us. It isn’t raining, but all of us are pretty much soaking wet because of damp brush, humidity, splashing into the stream, and sweat. At one point Al Watson deliberately splashes water on me with a triumphant laugh. Who cares at this point?
In the flux of people floundering their way up the creek, I find myself with Brian Worley and Tom, a friend of his. The friend has never been on one of these rock-hops before. He is holding up remarkably well, considering. But he has made one serious error—in dressing for the hike, he chose to wear tight blue jeans. The jeans have become wet, and they are clinging to his knees, imprisoning him. It is time for emergency surgery.
The three of us sit down on a large boulder. I take out my Swiss Army knife, open out the scissor attachment, and hand it to Tom. He cuts off the pants legs just above the knees. It takes a while, but he is finally a free man. He stows the amputated legs in his pack, and we continue onward. I notice that Brian is laughing, which is not unusual. He propels himself up these creeks by force of mirth.
We should come to the waterfall before long. We have put in hours of serious rockhopping, ticking off sections of stream foot by vertical foot. This is the “working” section of climbing a stream, when you are chipping away at the vertical dimension at a workmanlike pace. Higher up, the amount of effort is so high in proportion to the distance climbed that it seems haphazard and creative, accomplished by inspiration rather than technique.
We move through the gloom of the woods, under the canopy of dark, giant trees. Now, at 4250′, I see a sudden contrast: the water is flowing down from high above us. We gaze up at a dark, massive bluff perhaps 100 feet high. The water cascades down about half the distance until it reaches a ledge, then slides over the ledge and tumbles down in a ghostly spray. The living, moving stream is beautiful, but it also poses a problem: how do we get up around it? The fall is hemmed in with the usual snarly, tangled rhododendron. We decide to go for the left side, and begin to haul ourselves up. It is the usual ridiculous kind of place. The dirt is so rich, and dark, and soft, that it showers down when the toe of a boot is stuck into it. You interweave your arms and legs with the rhododendron and crawl under, climb over, crawl under. The plant seems to have been designed by a diabolical mind. It’s an extra touch of genius that its flowers are actually beautiful during the one week each year that they bloom.
So we pull, slither, and tug our way up. Eventually we reach the level of the middle ledge of the waterfall. It is not strictly necessary to walk across it, but we’ve heard that others have done so. Jean Bangham once told me she even sat down on the ledge and ate lunch—it must have been a drier year. The ledge looks a bit treacherous, but we carefully make our way across water that’s about an inch deep. At the very middle, I pause. I feel that I’ve gone into the heart of the stream.
When we reach the far side we have more rhodo-pulling to do. I watch as the person in front of me feeds himself into an aggressive rhodo bush. I follow as best as I can and emerge with dirt on my hands and leaves down the back of my neck. Not much further up, we encounter Charlie, sitting on a rock and eating lunch. We tell him about crossing the ledge, and somehow it seems that he certifies the accomplishment by hearing about it—he is the best qualified to appreciate it. Although Charlie is a stickler for doing things properly, sometimes that means taking a deliberate risk. He is disappointed if a valuable experience is avoided. He would say of some interesting obstacle, “You mean you went around that instead of over it? But all you have to do is go right up the middle!”
It is mid-afternoon before we cross the geological divide between Thunderhead sandstone and Anakeesta slate. Our pace slows as we negotiate steep, mossy slabs of streambed up into the balsam zone. There’s one difficult pitch of steep rubble where I watch Charlie churning up through the rock shards, but he keeps swimming upward and then muscles his way into the thick ferns and blackberries above. We are almost at the top—must be about 6300′—and one enormous blowdown stands in our way. There’s a steep drop to the left, a huge complication of sharp branches to the right, and the massive trunk is head-high and impossible to climb over. So we worm our way underneath. As I pull myself out the other side, I see a cluster of pink turtleheads blooming. “Places like this are great!” I say, and the others just start laughing.
