by Tim Homan
During the summer of 2011 I was finishing the manuscript for my Shining Rock and Middle Prong Wildernesses hiking guide. One of the last items on the field-work list was to find Beech Spring, just south of Beech Spring Gap on the upper-elevation segment of the Old Butt Knob Trail. Clearly marked with the customary tiny blue-line circle on the Shining Rock quad sheet, the spring looked prominent and permanent, the kind all you had to do was follow the footworn path to the cold water.
But that had not been the case the first time I went looking for the blue dot. After mapping out the confusing trail junctions in Shining Rock Gap with measuring wheel distances, GPS coordinates, and compass headings, I followed Old Butt across the southeastern shoulder of Shining Rock before descending to Beech Spring Gap. I paced a compass heading toward the blue circle, but found neither beaten path nor an obvious and easily accessible spring within easy reach. It looked so simple on the map. The lack of a recently used fire ring in the gap's clearing suggested the spring was intermittent.
Two weekends later I traveled to Shining Rock with the sole purpose of finding and recording accurate directions to Beech Spring with compass, GPS, and measuring wheel -- whatever it took to accomplish the task. I left home before daylight, drove up serpentine North Carolina 215 from Rosman to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and parked at the Black Balsam Trailhead at the gated end of FS 816 by nine. I quickly reeled in Ivestor Gap Trail's* old roadbed treadway to its end at Shining Rock Gap. I sat down for a pit stop in the gap's small, trail-junction opening.
As usual on warm-weather weekends, first-time Shining Rock hikers stopped to chat and ask me trail questions. I was a willing and somewhat obvious choice for information: a geezer with ballcap and salt-and-pepper beard, weathered canvas daypack and measuring wheel, notebook and neoprene knee braces. I tried to provide this help whenever possible because I had encountered so many rookie Shining Rock hikers who were walking the wrong trail and quickly losing and gaining elevation in the wrong direction. Shining Rock newcomers who had climbed Dog Loser and Old Butt Knobs to the east all the while thinking they were trekking the Art Loeb Trail north toward Hollywood's Cold Mountain*. Others who had hiked Ivestor Gap Trail to the south all the while sure they were walking the Art Loeb Trail toward Black Balsam Knob's 6,214-foot summit. Still others …
I provided trailside assistance for two dayhiker guys and three young backpacker couples before picking up Old Butt* toward Shining Rock: the iconic 6k peak with the white quartzite crown. I turned east away from the mountain and soon began switchbacking toward Beech Spring Gap. I had been carrying my measuring wheel over my left shoulder, but started rolling it on the downgrade because it was easier on my knees and the vegetation was thicker overhead. On the way down my lead left foot slipped on a slick, boot-polished root aligned straight downhill. I started to fall, tried to catch myself with my hiking stick, failed, then pitched downhill in a near face plant.
My collision with the downhill treadway knocked the wind out of me, left me gasping like a landed fish. Everything else seemed OK except for where my shin might have whacked against the wheel. I sat up as quickly as I could. I knew my assessment was wrong as soon as I saw blood. Then I knew what happened.
My left leg had whacked against the wrong side of the wheel's rim, right on one of the six bad spots. One of my measuring wheel's six metal prongs -- 7/16-inch long, nearly ?-inch wide -- positioned along the left edge of the rim a foot apart had punctured my left leg to the hilt at a slightly upward angle. Blood streamed out of the wound just to the left of my shinbone about 6 inches down from the bottom of my kneecap. The top of my outer wool sock was turning red with soaked blood.
I thought about hiking back to Shining Rock Gap in case I needed help, but immediately abandoned the idea to better sense. I sat down and applied direct pressure with my sweaty and decidedly unsterile handkerchief. I pressed down hard; the blood slowed to a trickle then stopped. I didn't have any of the basic first-aid supplies that I normally carried in my daypack on camping trips to the Shining Rock area. The day's work was supposed to be a relatively quick and easy in and out, no note taking except at the spring, most of the hiking on Ivestor Gap's wide single-track. I was carrying two forty-ounce metal canteens; the water one was empty, and the other was still full of Gatorade mixed at home with powder. I thought about lifting up the meaty flap and cleansing the puncture hole beneath it with Gatorade, but didn't.
The blood flow was stopped and, as the cowboys used to say on TV, it was only a flesh wound. I was close to the spring and didn't want to waste the day, so I tied my kerchief over the wound and went to work. I found the wet spot beside Old Butt and began to follow the seep's likely underground course. The area around the puncture was tender to the bushwhack vegetation's slightest touch. About 60 yards in, the broken end of a rhododendron branch gave me a particularly well-aimed poke, a direct hit, and opened the blood valve again. I forced my way to the clearing and sat down. I untied my blood-sticky kerchief and applied direct pressure again.
The one-two punch of increased pain and fresh blood broke through the wall of my stubbornness. I was done bushwhacking for the day. After fixing the leak, I walked to Old Butt and started the backtrack toward home. I had to pass through the small opening at Shining Rock Gap to make my connection with the Ivestor Gap Trail and its easy but rocky walking back to my truck. But this time I wasn't going to take a sit-down break and open up the information booth.
Four backpackers, all young women, were standing in the gap when I arrived. They immediately asked about the route to Cold Mountain, their day's destination. Before I finished answering their questions, one leading to another, two first-time backpackers showed up wanting to know the best way to Shining Rock's high white perch: the sunset-view gallery. And before I finished answering their questions, a middle-aged dayhiker couple took a number and stood in the queue. I resigned myself to the situation's humor. It was like one of those days back home when the faster I hurried to leave the house, the slower I finally walked out the door.
After more than ten minutes of talking, pointing, and drawing handout maps from my notebook, I was down to my last Shining Rock hiker in need of help, a young-man backpacker. Before he asked his question about the water chance on Cold Mountain, he studied my leg for a second then said, "That's a lot of blood on your kerchief and the top of your sock. What happened?"
I told him about my fall and why I had fallen. He let out a low whistle and said, "What are the odds? Falling, falling on your wheel, falling on the rim of your wheel, falling on the wrong side of your wheel, then landing on one of the six counter-spikes along the rim's 6-foot circumference. That must have punctured a nasty hole in your leg." I told him I had started measuring trails with a wheel in 1986 and had fallen very rarely while rolling the wheel with one hand and holding a hiking stick for extra balance with the other. "Up until an hour ago, I would have said the odds were better for sunrise to slip past a rooster than for me to get gored by my measuring wheel." (I had just read that old country saying in a book and had been waiting for the right time to try it out.)
I cleansed my wound with cold water at the pipe spring a tenth-mile from the trailhead. I lifted up the deep partial divot and looked at the red hole underneath for the first time. It was nasty alright.
Back home, Page cleaned the puncture wound out with warm water and soap. She told me I needed stitches and that I should have rinsed the wound off with Gatorade rather than nothing as she applied anti-bacterial cream and a thick square of gauze. Then she wrapped thin gauze from a roll around my leg to hold the dressing in place and catch the extra oozings.
By Monday the area around the puncture was red, warm to the touch, and slightly swollen. I went to Page's primary care nurse practitioner. She told me the wound was infected, gave me a tetanus shot, and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. Then she said, "You should have had stitches, but it's too late for them to be of much help now. Page told me her mother was a nurse. I suspect I'm the second person to tell you that you should have had stitches." She gave me a look -- head bent forward and cocked to the side, eyebrows arched upward for emphasis: body language that clearly said "stubborn man" or "stupid man" or something like that without uttering a sound.
I made a last-minute decision on the day I fell on my measuring wheel's counter-spike. Just before I drove away from home, I decided to swap my heavy leather hiking boots with their wide, good-grip soles for lightweight hiking shoes -- really just heavy-duty running shoes. I wanted to walk the wide and easy grade of the day's first and last leg, Ivestor Gap Trail, faster. I carried my trusty boots into the basement and replaced them with the much lighter shoes. I threw the shoes into the gear box in my truck's camper shell while it was still dark and drove away in a hurry.
I first noticed that the soles of the lightweight shoes were slick down their centers when I picked them up to put them on at the trailhead. The decision to wear lighter shoes for faster walking had been a reasonable and sound one. In my rush to get going, however, I did not check the tread of their soles. I had forgotten I had used them on the red rock in Utah's Canyonlands National Park a couple of years before. Not checking their tread turned out to be a mistake that cost me time, money, pain, and an exasperatingly slow healing process. And taught me yet another lesson in the dodgy ways of those two Machiavellian co-conspirators: collective risk and human error.
*Primarily an upper-slope route, 4.3-mile-long Ivestor Gap is a north-south running trail with its beginning at the Black Balsam Trailhead and its northern end at Shining Rock Gap (Pisgah National Forest, approximately 450,232 acres, Haywood County). Ivestor Gap is the easiest trail in the Shining Rock Wilderness; it enters the wilderness at Ivestor Gap (mile 2.2).
*Rising to 6,030 feet in the narrow, northern part of North Carolina's Shining Rock Wilderness (approximately 18,483 acres), Cold Mountain is Inman's mountain of book and movie fame.
*Predominantly a ridgeline and upper-slope route, 4.0-mile-long Old Butt Knob is an east-west running interior trail. Old Butt Knob, with its lower-elevation end at Shining Creek Gap and its upper-elevation end at Shining Rock Gap, is the most difficult trail in the Shining Rock Wilderness.
