by Tim Homan
In the years 2000 and 2001, when I researched and wrote a hiking guide that included the Southern Nantahala Wilderness, I frequently postponed the real work of writing by studying the wilderness map. For a relatively small area the two-state wilderness (1) is unusually rich with place names, boundaries, a well-known ridge, a major hydrologic divide, our country's first long-distance trail, 5,000-foot peaks, even a reference to the prominent honker of a Revolutionary War general: Pickens Nose. There was much to make a willing mind wander. Over and over again, I procrastinated by reading the rugged land's contours, tracing the trails and long ridges, following the blue-line flow of the high headwater rills down to their respective rivers, or fantasizing about bushwhack routes, my imagination eagerly striding the land with no thought of dark green and glossy discouragements of rhododendron.
This pocket-sized parcel of the Southern Highlands, approximately 23,365 acres and still puny, is steeped in evocative place names reflecting the weave of natural and human history: the rugged Appalachian landforms, the abundant wildlife and the magnificent forests that once animated the mountains, the rough and hard-labor lives of the early European settlers. A reminder that these ancient and eroded mountains are still a formidable geography, still plenty big and tough going for a person afoot on untrailed slopes.
Here the Appalachian Trail closely follows the equally famous crest of a multi-state long and winding ridge, the Blue Ridge, as the heavily trod treadway threads its white-blazed way alongside and through the wilderness. And here in this small protected sanctuary of the Mountain South, where congress has granted the land a provisional deed to its own life, the Blue Ridge serves double duty as the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest.
A careful scan of the wilderness map leads to another fact: all four of the Southern Nantahala's highest peaks raise the horizon to over 5,000 feet in North Carolina's northern and higher-elevation half of the two-state wilderness. These four mountains-Standing Indian, Big Scaly, Ridgepole Mountain, Little Bald-stand over or close to a mile high as the southernmost 5,000-footers in the Appalachian cordillera, which automatically qualifies them as the southernmost mountains of that height in eastern North America. Standing Indian, the site of a former firetower, is the tallest of the four; its final touch of sky rears up to 5,499 feet. The lowest 5k peak by the slim margin of only 10 to 20 feet, Little Bald's highest thrust of ancient orogeny, approximately 5,045 to 5,050 feet, is just over 0.4 mile above the Georgia border. The bald's southernmost 5,000-foot contour line is only 0.25 mile north of the Georgia-Carolina line, giving it clear title to the southernmost terrain over 5,000 feet in height of any mountain, knob, bald, ridgepole, or Standing Indian in eastern North America.
After all the idle hours of map study, I decided to hike off trail, bushwhack, in the Southern Nantahala Wilderness someday soon before I became too decrepit. I also decided to climb Little Bald on my first backpack trek. The other three five-grand peaks all had trails leading right to or closely approaching their highpoints. Little Bald was the only one that offered the challenge of hard off-trail hiking.
In the spring of 2005 I asked hiking buddy Roger if he wanted to join the ascent of Little Bald. (Roger is Roger Nielsen, a former, and hopefully future, rambler.) I showed him how our route stepped up in pitched rises of contour lines pinched tight and dark on the wilderness map. I told him we should work our way up to Dicks Knob-a very high peak for Georgia, one that few people have planted their boots on-along the line of march to Bear Gap and Little Bald. I guaranteed him strenuous hiking up a wild reach of rough country, wildland walking that would test the want to of our wills. I also guaranteed wildflowers, total solitude for our group of two, a heightened sense of adventure and discovery, and bear-clawed logs at the very least.
I called the Chattahoochee National Forest's work center in Clayton, Georgia, and talked to an old timer. I told the woodsman what we wanted to do and asked him about the thin dashed line on the quad map: the one leading from the parking-area end of FS 54 up to the Appalachian Trail at Coleman Gap. He told me the line was an old single-track that had not been legally used by motorized vehicles since the area received wilderness designation back in 1984. The former road, at least for the first mile or more, was still open enough to walk if you didn't mind the sun-gap saplings and the unknown but growing number of deadfalls.
He also told me how we could begin our trek. We could follow the woods road for maybe a mile to a small stream, a Coleman River feeder clearly shown on the topo map, and a former wildlife opening before turning to the left just before the branch. Then we could follow an old logging road, probably grown over, for perhaps a quarter mile to the high end of a former timber sale where the road petered out. After that we would be on our own, have all the bushwhacking we could want or stand.
Since he had helped me and worked for the federal government, he felt compelled to offer a short CYA disclaimer. "I hunted up there when I was a boy and worked up there for the forest service. That's rough country up there where you're going, a fair amount of rock in places, cursed with rhododendron in others. That rhododendron will snatch the hat off your head, damn near pick your pocket. Easy to get lost, hard to get found again."
Someday came on May 21 and 22, a weekend so we wouldn't have to take off work. Roger and I drove north on US 441 beneath an overcast sky, the ceiling low and completely closed with the medium gray of socked-in cloud cover. The weather forecast had called for gradual clearing, but as the two of us traveled west on US 76 from Clayton, we drove through light rain. At the empty parking-area end of dirt-gravel FS 54 (2,860 feet), the clouds floated higher and lighter gray, giving us hope the called-for clearing was on the way.
The low-elevation forest was lush and shady, full of small buzzings and birdsong. The extra-large leaves of the deciduous saplings invading the edges of the former road's light gap were wet and dripping from the recent rain. Roger and I followed the former single-track as it entered the zoned wilderness and ranged north on mostly easy uphill grades. Dense vegetation crowded our frequently curving line of least resistance in places and occasional deadfalls blocked easy passage as expected, but overall the road was still remarkably open for one closed to vehicular traffic twenty-one years before.
Early on, we had quick looks at two colorfully feathered wood warblers-hooded and black-throated blue-and heard the insistent song teach teach teach of a third, the Ovenbird. The two of us heard the loud and fiercely ringing Tarzan tremolo of the crow-sized Pileated Woodpecker, one of the wildest voices left in the Southern Mountains, twice before our first pack-drop break. A single showy orchis bloomed beside the track, its bicolored orchid flowers a deep pink hood over a white landing-strip lip.
We turned left off the woods road at the small branch and former opening. The autumn olive shrubs planted for wildlife were still growing beneath the gathering shade of the 6-inch-diameter tuliptrees quickly reclaiming the clearing. After some scouting and thrashing around, we found the old logging road, grown over to a faint path through the monocultural recovery of more tuliptrees.
Roger and I passed through the young stand into a much older and far more diverse forest of mixed mesophytic hardwoods, not a conifer in sight. Now there was no single-track, no cleared and beaten path bisecting the forest into right side and left side. The sun-seeking grace and ancient symmetries of the forest surrounded us on all sides, making us feel swallowed up and small on the mountainside. The novelty of increased difficulty and danger intensified our focus, added a kind of excitement missing when a footpath tells you where to go and where to place your feet to get there.
We were no longer on the map's landscape of contour lines and imagination. We were now cross-country backpacking, traveling trail-less through sharply slanted mountainous terrain with only maps and compasses, looking for the easiest seams through the forest along our desired route. Our sense of entering a wilder and more challenging phase of the trip was palpable.
The clouds brightened even more, gave us expectations of blue-sky gaps soon. We were both in bouyant moods, happy to be out in the big untrailed woods, our senses ratcheting up to meet the demands of tough hiking. Roger and I decided to gain a few-hundred feet of elevation by climbing up the steep hardwood slope to the west-southwest before bending our ascent toward the notch of a hollow. We stopped for a breather beside a rotting log ripped apart in places by the long claws of a black bear, the deeply incised parallel lines signs of the wildness we were seeking.
The sky cleared; we could now see blue and brighter white through the canopy gaps in the forest. We plodded up the formidable sweep of the green mountainside, steering around the dark and dense barriers of rhododendron. Roger and I entered a scattered colony of flowering flame azalea, then turned so we could contour toward the hollow's ravine. As we curled around the head of the hollow, we flushed a tall doe out of her day bed. She took off with a loud snort and bounded down the slope, her tail flipping up to full white flag, waving goodbye with every leap.
We passed through that rising sweet spot in spring's surge up the slope. Higher up, the leaves of the trees were still unfolding, not yet fully grown. Down below, the leaves were already grown and darkened, already marred from caterpillar munching. But we were now walking through that ephemeral and upwardly mobile band of freshly unfurled foliage, spring's first full blush of pastel green, newborn and pristine.
Around the hollow we changed course so we would strike the spur we wanted where the top of its fold was narrow enough to form an obvious ridge. The two of us crested the ridgetop and angled toward a higher and more prominent spur. We gained elevation atop the slick footing of wet, moss-covered rock and roughed our way through a tightly knit snarl of rhododendron to a reward: another bear-raked bole, the gap between claw marks wider than the one before. We found the ridgecrest we wanted where our spur met another to form a single well-defined keel rising toward Dicks Knob. The ridgeline led us up into cloud mist, the dim and gauzy gray half-light making the crosshatched mesh of the heath-shrub hells appear even darker.
We followed a narrow game path past several small patches of pulverized soil, the roto-tilling work of feral hogs. (2) We flushed a rabbit and spooked a Red-tailed Hawk into flight in quick succession. The fronds of finely wrought New York and hay-scented ferns offered welcome easy walking where the contour lines spread further apart.
Roger and I climbed the final 400 feet of the calf-buster grunt up the knob's sunrise slope: no trail, no trash, no game path, just the sharp green rise of rarely trod land. We zigzagged up short switchbacks of our own design to lessen the difficulty of the pitch and to avoid slabs of wet rock. Below seeps we waded nearly knee high through the exuberant growth of herbaceous plants. Near the end of our slow ascent, we noticed the curling, yellowish-silver bark of a yellow birch, a cold-adapted northern hardwood, a sure sign we had entered the Mountain South highcountry.
We shared the knob's tiny topknot (4,630 feet using the newest topo), our first major waypoint, with a colony of Catesby's trillium, their three-petaled flowers having already turned a darker pinkish red with age. Using our packs for pillows, we lay down in the thatch of last year's leaves and rested for half an hour, a great luxury of peace and pleasing fatigue.
Break over, our bushwhack continued down the easy gradient atop the main ridgecrest barely east of north. That high fold stretched north-south across our small squares of laminated topo map and connected Steeltrap Knob to the south with Dicks Knob and Bear Gap and Little Bald to the north. A few hundred yards downridge from the mountaintop, Roger and I heard a large animal tear off from us at close range, just the other side of the circular wall of opaque mist murk. The animal made far too much racket smashing through the shrubs for it to have been a long-legged and graceful deer. No, the critter we walked up on and spooked to sudden panic was thick and powerful and built low to the ground, probably a feral hog.
The distance from the knob's highpoint to the middle of the saddle was only 0.4 mile on the flat map, and the wide spaces between the 40-foot contour lines told us our downgrade to Bear Gap might be relatively effortless. But after an easy beginning, the interlaced limbs of rhododendron kept jungling together at the leading edge of our portable round of visibility. Parts of the keel were so completely cordoned off with impediments we thought we were fighting our way through a partial heath bald. The latticed braches of the tall shrubs snatched the hats off our heads repeatedly.
Our almost-over-the-hill team gradually ramped down from the mist-shrouded mountain to the lowest sag of the gap, 4,420 feet and only 0.1 mile on the map from the North Carolina border. Roger and I rigged up A-frame, lean-to tarps for lightweight shelters, snacked and rested on our ground cloths. And waited for the mist to clear.
To be continued next week.
Notes
(1) North
Carolina, Nantahala National Forest, approximately 11,732 acres;
Georgia, Chattahoochee National Forest, approximately11,633 acres. The
Nantahala N.F. holds title to approximately 594,456 acres.
(2) Since my first Southern Nantahala hike in 1985, I have seen only
four free-running swine-a pair and two solos-in the wilderness. All
four lacked humps, had very short black hair, and possessed the
keg-on-short-legs, porky pig build of feral hogs. None of the hikers I
have chatted with over the years had observed wild boar phenotype swine
in the wilderness.
