by Tim Homan
Later, the sky promising with large patches of blue, we decided to complete the ridgecrest climb to Little Bald's crown only 0.6 mile away as we would walk it and a little over 600 feet higher in elevation. We carried only water, snacks, fanny packs, and overconfidence, dressed only in shorts, gaiters, and T-shirts. We did not pack any survival gear: no headlights, no warm shirts, no space blankets, and no ponchos or rain jackets. Both of us probably had a lighter or two in our fanny packs.
A short distance above camp, we noticed a large-dollop plop of place-name apropos scat deposited close beside a faded Budweiser can (the only human spoor along the bushwhack segment of our hike) with two small-caliber bullet holes, probably from a .22. The scene looked choreographed, like the bear had marked his territory next to the littered beer can, one signpost of passage beside the other. Less than 30 yards further, we walked past a small colony of Catesby's trillium blooming close to a fairly thin, flat-sided rock the size of a large platter. The rock had recently been turned over by the incessant hunger of a foraging bear, leaving its sunken imprint right beside its new position. Two sets of easily remembered pairings-bear scat and beer can, trillium colony and bear-flipped rock-would signal our return to shelter and supper.
We made steady progress and quickly crossed North Carolina's unmarked boundary. An animal path bisected the length of the ridgeline like on the other prominent crests we had trekked earlier in the day. The new leaves of the oaks, which were not fully grown in Bear Gap, became even smaller-small as mouse ears-as we ascended the upper slopes of Little Bald.
The two of us gradually curved to the west without knowing we had done so and were soon on top of the former bald without taking any compass headings as planned. Highcountry-hardy broadleafs and evergreen heath shrubs had reforested the mountaintop since it was last used as a summer-range pasture. Small scattered areas of the summit were tufted with doghair stands of deciduous saplings: a jailbreak of early succession growth filling in the former opening's light gap. The nearly level highpoint had no cairn, no rock outcrop, no view, not even an old fire ring. We sat down and tanked up on water and snacks. The sky sagged down and smothered us in cloud-belly mist before we began our backtrack.
Roger and I waited to determine if the mist-wrapped mountain was the result of a single cloud cutting an upside-down furrow across the bald's pate. It wasn't. We followed a compass heading east before turning to the right and south onto what we hoped was the right ridge. Nothing looked familiar. The thick gray fog whittled down our visibility to a small moving bubble, blotted out all landmarks: ridges, slopes, hollows, everything. Our sightlines were pitifully short. We followed the top of the fold down into the forested mist. Somewhere, while making end runs around the usual hindrances, we slid off the ridgeline and slanted onto upper slope. We were now trudging east-southeast almost diagonally across the contours of a sharply canted mountainside.
We stopped to study our small squares of laminated map. We talked out our problem. If we had dropped off the left side of the right ridge, the one leading to Bear Gap, a bushwhack west would take us back to its crest and camp. But if we had taken the wrong ridgeline, the wide and less distinct one running nearly southwest away from the bald, we would need to travel east or southeast to regain the correct ridgecrest.
We studied the grain and gradients of the respective sidehills. We decided to keep descending the veiled pitch of the slope toward what we hoped was the bottom-most notch of a hollow. Roger was wearing a watch; we knew there wasn't time for befuddling circles or even a single faulty decision. We traversed a slope mined with heath shrub skirmishers and seepage-slick rocks. I thought about what the forest service man had told me, but kept his warning to myself. We slipped and slided to slow-motion falls, but kept popping up and angling down into a forest gone darker gray. Fatigue and the first clench of dread, kissing cousin to fear, sapped our strength and focus.
The two of us frequently huddled around map and compass, steadying ourselves with calm consultations. We tried to right ourselves with first one plan then another, but all of our plans fell flat on the fact that we were temporarily misplaced, that we really didn't know where we were with a 100 percent certainty. Our compasses and maps and guts were telling us we were west of the Bear Gap crest, but we were unwilling to bet a cold and hungry and wet night out in the unsheltered woods without absolute confirmation. Not yet, anyway.
The lay of the land remained a cloud-buried mystery. But we did have one arrow left in our quiver: a spring-born rivulet, a high headwater rill of the "Creek" (3) labelled on the left side of our maps, began in the hollow just across the Georgia line on the west side of the crest we wanted. The east side did not show a stream, and it did not show a high hollow that might give rise to a spring. We decided to work our moveable eye in the mist down to the beginning branch and take a compass heading on its flow. Both of us wanted the clincher, we wanted to right ourselves on the map before spending the last of our light and energy climbing up the steep slope to a ridgeline.
We didn't panic. But the two us were increasingly concerned and determined not to make another disorienteering mistake. Roger was worried, but he remained outwardly calm, perhaps steeling himself for a long and uncomfortably cold night. We zigzagged down the sidehill generally to the southeast, so that we would strike the strongly tilted bottom of the hollow we hoped was down there in the gray void closer to Bear Gap.
Daylight kept draining away, dimming to an early and ever darker dusk. I noticed my tongue was sticking to the roof of my dry mouth and that it was difficult to swallow. My scant saliva had the odd metallic taste of a copper penny, primitive fear now the taste on my tongue. I pinched my forearm hard and told myself, once again, that I had to get Roger out of this mist-bedeviled mess. We needed to find our bullet-hole and bear-scat ridge with unerring accuracy, and we needed to start climbing toward that ridge within ten minutes or it would be a very long night.
We struck the bottom of the hollow's furrow; it descended south-southwest, about 210 degrees. That heading matched the map. Good, really good. Hot meal good. Now we needed to know if the hollow gave rise to the rivulet on our map. Our almost-whipped team shadowed the sharply falling notch. If we were right, we would be traveling in the correct direction, parallel and to the west of our tarp-strung camp. The bushwhacking was rough-steep, rocky, and wet-rhododendron alternately friend or foe, handhold or shackle. Increasing exhaustion and resignation made us clumsy. We thrashed through the vegetation down and down until we found a yellow Georgia Wildlife Management Area sign facing north. We were standing on the state line. That fact gave us a boost; we were in the ballpark, had a chance for a dry camp and the welcome warmth of sleeping bags.
Roger and I stumbled down the hollow a little faster, the darkening sky a ticking time bomb of "if-only" recriminations and grim prospects. We found the spring and tracked its outflow just far enough to get a reliable compass reading. The trickling run of the rivulet matched the thin black line on our maps: south-southwest and seaward, close to 210 degrees. We had our proof. We had finally deciphered the landscape; we had finally fixed ourselves on the map. Now it was time to move with all the resolve we could muster. I made a quarter turn to the left and climbed up the slope a vegetation-altered version of east. Roger called out for me to remain within easy shouting distance, a reasonable request. I hollered OK and pushed on as hard as I could, stopping only for standing eight counts. I heard Roger engaged in the contact sport of rhodo wrestling below me in the fast-fading light.
Reinvigorated, we crossed over the rocky ledges of a short spur and continued up and generally a little south of east. We hooted and hollered to stay in voice contact with each other. I turned more to my right so the hiking would be easier, and the ridgecrest would come down to meet me. Less than 200 yards after changing direction, I topped a ridge descending south through a small pocket of open hardwoods like the one we had passed through just after setting off for Little Bald.
I quickly found a familiar sight: the small colony of flowering Catesby's trillium next to the recently flipped-over rock. I trotted down the backbone of the ridge to find the clincher: the bullet-holed beer can beside the big pile of bear plop. I let out a loud celebratory whoop, hurried back up the easy rise of the ridge and told Roger we were back at camp. We stepped under our tarps safe from a miserable night with less than ten minutes of increasingly marginal light left.
We celebrated our deliverance with supper-desiccated dinners-and kept up a cheerful banter, stress leaving our bodies with every laugh. I told him about the metallic coppery taste that had taken up residence in my mouth, dread and fear come to say hello. He told me about the constricted feeling in his throat that had tightened as the minutes ticked toward last light. I told him I was glad he had held his emotions in check, that he had passed the bushwhacker's stress test. I also assured him, if he wanted to go again, that we would not make another mistake the rest of the summer.
Dusk darkened to cloud-cover night while we waited for our freeze-dried feedsacks to rehydrate. We could see the minute droplets of the heavy mist in our headlights. A light rain pattered on our tarps after we had slipped into our sleeping bags.
As I lay in my fart muffler safe and warm, I had a powerful feeling that Roger and I were the only backpackers for miles around. The black sky and the silence, no sounds save the occasional rain tapping on the tarps, buttressed the strong sense of our far-reaching isolation. All our effort to reach Bear Gap the first time, and all our struggle and stress to find it again before nightfall further bolstered that feeling of an expansive isolation. I knew the reality of our location. But I also knew the psychological distance felt much further, spanned miles and miles further in all directions.
We slept the sleep of the just, the just done-in and dog-tired. Late that night, some time on the morning side of midnight, coyotes startled us with a loud yipping alarm-their singing high pitched and piercing, close and quickly over. They had been working the ridgeline on the hunt, padding down toward the saddle from the north, when they had run right into the sounds and sweat-drenched scents of our camp. The coyotes had hit the brakes and sounded the alarm, their music a welcome wildness to the night.
The coyotes kept us awake long enough to notice that our breaths now plumed smoke, a visual to accompany the audio of our snores. The night was now cold and wet enough for us to know. …
Notes
"the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest." South of the divide, the Tallulah River's clear and cold water makes its short and dam-stoppered way to the Atlantic Ocean at the seaport city of Savannah.
North of Standing Indian, the Nantahala River's fast moving freight begins its long-expedition journey from grits to gumbo. Pushed and pulled along by the Earth's one-way water shepherd, the Nantahala's contribution glides down the Tennessee and the Ohio before mingling its mountain water with the Mississippi. After sweeping its meandering, mile-wide way far to the south, the Mississippi gains its lowest and final level where it ends at the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. There the mighty river loses its name, loses its linear traveling life, and loses its sweet water to the salty sea.
Place names from the Southern Nantahala Wilderness: Sugar Cove, Cherry Cove, Burnt Cabin Cove, Milksick Cove, Stillhouse Cove. Milk sickness came from a rhizomatous perennial known as white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum). This native Aster family plant is poisonous, and milk from cows that grazed this wildflower will cause milk sickness in humans, an especially serious affliction for young children. During periods of the nineteenth century, milk sickness was the leading cause of death in the nation.
Mayapple Knob, Little Nell Knob, Newt Knob, Deadening Knob, Rattlesnake Knob. When Southern Appalachian settlers found land flat and fertile enough to farm, their first step in the laborious process was girdling all the trees, killing them to let in the light. These girdled-tree areas were known as deadenings.
Whiteoak Stamp. Stamps and stomps, former sites of corralled livestock, are occasional to uncommon place names throughout much of the Mountain South, especially in the high land of former summer pastures.
(3) The spring that gave rise to the rivulet we followed to verify our bearing is the highest headwater source of Mill Creek, a tributary of the Tallulah River.
