by Tim Homan
During the early 1980s, when small backpacking shops thrived in Atlanta, the manager at one of the stores called me up and asked if I would assist in guiding a beginner's backpacking trip to the Ellicott Rock Wilderness. I would meet the crew, the paying customers and lead guide, along Burrells Ford Road near the Chattooga River on a Saturday morning in mid-spring. From there, we would carry our packs about a mile and a half to the East Fork Chattooga, pitch camp, then hike up the East Fork Trail later on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, we would follow the Chattooga upstream to Ellicott Rock before doubling back to break camp. The manager offered me a decent sum of money for the weekend's work.
I arrived at the roadside rendezvous in light rain, just as the lead guide was demonstrating the lighting procedure for a new backpacking stove on the doorstep of his van. As soon as he turned the handle to release the pumped up and pressurized fuel to the lit match, the stove -- obviously leaking beneath the burner -- turned into a fireball. Calm as a cowboy, the tall and lean guide hollered "fire in the hole" and tossed the malfunctioning stove onto the dirt-gravel road.
We made introductions all around. The two of us would be leading three attractive and fit young women, not a bad gig, but it made me even more curious about my assignment. Two mentors for three rookie backpackers, it was overkill, and it didn't make sense. Maybe they were wealthy, high-maintenance women. Maybe I would set up their tents, cook their meals, blow up their air mattresses, bandage their blisters and such. I asked the head guide what he wanted me to do. "Oh, you know, just watch what I do and jump in when you feel like it." Again, a vague and evasive answer. I wondered what was up with these guys -- first the manager, now the guide -- both giving me intentionally obscure answers. I told myself not to worry about it, for now. It was still the Chattooga, still money, and the sky was clearing.
I wanted to see the river. I asked if they had been down to the bridge to see the Chattooga. They hadn't. I let it go. But to my way of thinking, you always see the river before getting down to the work of stuffing and shouldering packs.
The guide opened both of the van's back doors. Inside, each of the clients had huge piles of gear, most of it rented or recently purchased. The young man showed them how to load their packs, then lined up new gear and gadgetry for show and tell: backpacker stoves, nesting cooksets, backpacker pillows, sleeping pads, stuff sacks and ditty bags; fuel bottles, fuel funnels just like mine, jerry tubes, and clevis pins, etc. Even three plastic funnel-like things -- red, oval-mouthed, and rockered up along the narrow ends of the oval -- that I had never seen or heard about before.
I was packed, over caffeinated, bored with gear talk, and needed to see the Chattooga. I excused myself and headed down to the river. I walked out onto the bridge and looked upstream. The river ran full and fast and clear. The Chattooga foamed into bank-to-bank lines of white where it rolled over low ledges. Up close, an easy rock throw away, a fin of light gray and lichen-splotched rock jutted out of the left bank and humped up to 10 feet above the surface before curving sharply down to the mountain water. Tall dark green conifers, white and shortleaf pines plus hemlock, flanked and framed the river.
Downstream, I spotted a 13-inch rainbow trout casting a shadow on the light-colored riverbed sand in the shallower and calmer water to the right. Moss-covered rocks and partial ledges poking out from both sides of the river funneled the flow into a whitewater wave train, a straightforward but bumpy Class1 rapid, maybe Class 2 in higher water.
I thought about the plastic dealies on the walk back. They were made to funnel something, but damned if I knew what. I couldn't fit form to exact function. A rubber gasket rimmed the top of those oddly shaped funnels, like that end was designed to make a seal on something and make a seal on something curved to boot. The spout end of the fancy funnel wasn't straight. It wasn't curved either. It was simply angled 15 to 20 degrees off plumb. If the oval mouth were held vertically, it would force flow lower or higher depending upon which rockered side was up. Strange. Hinky.
The mouth of the fuel funnel in my pack was only slightly oval and one side was much higher than the other. The funnel's rim had only a small thickening of plastic to make it sturdier and certainly no gasket. There was no need for one. The narrow spout was set off center and poured straight down for a shorter distance than those funny red funnels I had seen in the van. Unlike the mystery funnels, my fuel funnel also came with a prominent white filter to catch impurities and slow the rate of pour. The fuel bottle in my pack had a narrow mouth that made it easy to pour. It also came with a second screw-in cap that had a small-diameter tube for the fuel to flow through.
Those rockered, gasketed, and long-mouthed funnels had nothing to do with any backpacking stove I had ever seen. But what were the funnels for? They were made to funnel liquid, no doubt about that. Maybe they were part of a new water filtration system. Being a man and a hiking-guide author with assumed knowledge of backpacking gear, I didn't want to ask a point-blank question in front of all four of them and let on I had gaping, rubber-rimmed gaps in my expertise.
When I returned, the clients were jamming clothes into stuff sacks. The odd-looking funnels were already packed or put up. I would have to settle for casual observation, maybe then I could mate function to design.
Our leader halted for the first time before we had backpacked a quarter mile. I guessed he was going to tell us about the sidepath up to Spoon Auger Falls or identify the tall white pines we had been passing without comment. I figured he would tell us that in Bartram's day primary-growth eastern white pine rose in spear-straight splendor over 200 feet into the Southern Appalachian sky, that they rose, pagodalike, above all the other trees -- hardwood or conifer -- rooted in eastern United States and Canada. Nature stuff like that.
But he didn't. He took a few sips of water, unshouldered his pack and began talking about gear again. I watched, but didn't jump in. It was then I caught onto the scheme with a flash of unsought insight. This was all about show and sell. The unspoken plan was now as clear as the Chattooga's foot-deep glide-water. I was pissed. I was auditioning without being asked, filling out a word-of-mouth application for a job I didn't want or welcome. A job that neither of them would admit was open. I had below zero desire to become a trail-to-trail salesman, hawking high-end gear while walking in the woods.
The store management wanted to find out if I had any interest or aptitude for displaying and demonstrating their gear in the field, in hopes that their customers would outfit themselves from head to foot, from balaclava to boot, at their store. They hoped to use my name as a hiking-guide writer to attract more beginning backpackers, to sell more high-dollar gear, to make more money. Good business model. Dishonest execution. Wrong man.
Neither manager nor gear-guide had been anywhere close to honest and forthcoming with me. In fact, they had belied their true intentions with deliberate deception. My anger flared; my blood pressure spiked until I felt slightly dizzy. I owed them nothing. Nada. I lagged behind, let my temper subside to slight simmer and weighed my options. I could say no thanks, hand the check back and head home. I could say no deal and backpack alone. But those options appealed to dignity alone. I decided to salvage the weekend. After all, how often did I get the opportunity to walk along the Chattooga with an experienced guide plus three rookie backpackers and receive money for hiking and talking.
I came up with my own secret plan. I would remain amiable and totally oblivious to the phantom job. I would steadfastly refuse to talk about gear with the lone exception of the jerry tubes. At the first convenient moment, I would explain to the three brand-new backpackers that jerry tubes are notoriously unreliable, that they look far better on the shelf than they perform in the field. The gear-guide could do his job, assess and appraise my suitability as a salesman, or my willful lack of it, then report back.
I wanted to give the first-time backpackers something more for their money and weekend than gear-sales talk. So I would contribute to the outing my way, by identifying trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and ferns, birds and trout. I would try to give the beginners reasons to keep backpacking, not just the baggage to do so. After all, people do not put up with the pain and discomfort of carrying a heavy pack and backcountry camping for long without at least one compelling reason to remain in the woods.
As we walked the Chattooga River Trail northeast along its eponymous stream, I conducted my own sales pitch, telling them about the tall white pines (the distance between whorls of branches equals a year's vertical growth), the tiny-needled hemlock, and the three-partedness of the Catesby's trillium. I showed them the arching stems of doghobble and told them the reason for its bear-hunter name.
The novice backpackers quickly learned to identify the glossy leaves and slightly skunky scent of galax with their eyes and noses. They could soon distinguish Fraser magnolias by their parasol whorls of large leaves, each one conspicuously eared at its base, and rosebay rhododendron and mountain laurel by the size and shape and sheen of their evergreen leaves. After a bit of practice the paying clients were looking hard, through sunglasses, into the clear-water Chattooga and finding trout holding at the slackwater edge of the eddies, their eyes and hunger always facing upstream.
We ate lunch and set up camp in the floodplain flat to the right of the trail just before the bridge over the East Fork Chattooga River. Chores done, we spent much of the afternoon slowly hiking up and back down the mostly easy grades of the East Fork Trail*. We talked and enjoyed the cascades: the clear and silent glide shattering into froth-water white and river song where the East Fork tried to leap from gravity's inexorable grasp.
The three women took photos of a large colony of Catesby's trillium, easily over 100 plants in bloom. They particularly enjoyed the river-sculpted cliff face of the bluff right beside the trail. The entire bluff, rising to at least 45 feet at its highest bare-rock reach, dripped and dribbled wet and dark from recent rain. Herbaceous plants sprouted from every crack and ledge. Further down, a lush wildflower garden, including the huge and jagged leaves of umbrella-leaf, covered the base of the bluff.
That afternoon there was no mention of gear, no demonstrations or displays. No red and rockered funnels in sight. The leader showed us a handy woodcraft trick: how to use a rhododendron leaf to catch a slight skim of seepage water sliding down trailside rock, enough to quickly fill a Sierra cup.
After our backcountry clients cooked their suppers with shiny new pots atop pristine stoves, the guide rigged up a tarp to shelter the group against the forecast rain. That evening, while the rain popped against the tarp in the dark, he delivered an interesting talk about William Bartram and his iconic book, Travels of William Bartram, the subject of his recently completed master's thesis.
The next morning, shortly after the sun rose above the horizon of nearby Chattooga Ridge to the east, I took the urgent walk that campers know so well. I followed the footpath toward the East Fork before angling left into the woods. Finished, I kept bushwhacking to the East Fork's nearby confluence with the Chattooga. After splashing some cold, wake-up water on my face, I walked downstream along the river bank before cutting back toward camp.
Just as I rejoined the track I observed another neat trick, one much more impressive than the rhododendron leaf. The tallest of the women stood on the edge of the treadway, her jeans on but obviously unzipped, peeing two-thirds of a golden sunlit arch, letting fly high enough to clear a picket fence out of one of those red funnels. I was frozen to the spot for a moment, tongue tied and completely bumfuzzled, eyes involuntarily locked on the strange and novel sight. She kept right on looking at me and peeing while standing up. I regained my composure and mumbled something glib and witty like, "Oh," then turned around and walked back toward the East Fork. I had hoped that "casual observation" would explain the red funnel's function, boy howdy, did it ever.
In the end, the weekend turned out well. I received a check for walking and talking in the riverine woods; the manager got my message loud and clear, and I witnessed a new piece of equipment demonstrated under field conditions. I have been an avid tarp user and an even bigger Billy Bartram fan ever since.
Notes
I not only had never seen or heard about those red funnels, but I also had no idea a need existed for them. Up to that time, I had done nearly all of my hiking in the heavily forested Southern Appalachians, where all the women I hiked with simply walked away from the trail and squatted behind a tree. No big deal. My mind had not been puzzling out the product's use in that direction. Far from it.
As I made a point to learn after witnessing its use, the feminine funnel was designed for women hikers out west, where there is precious little privacy above treeline or out in a large meadow. In the east, the gear reps talked up the product as a way to make peeing in the woods easier.
Both clevis pins and jerry tubes are backpacker artifacts. Back in the early Holocene of modern-day backpacking, clevis pins were employed to hold the sack part of the pack onto its external frame. The metal frame came with holes drilled through its tubes so that the sack could be adjusted higher or lower by sliding the clevis pins through different sets of holes. Back then, most backpackers carried a couple of spare pins in case one of them worked its way loose.
Jerry tubes were flexible and clear plastic containers with a cap on one end and a wide slot for loading honey, butter, syrup, jelly, peanut butter, and other goopy foods at the other end. A split plastic pin slid over the flattened end of the tube and was supposed to fit as a rollable and foolproof crimp. This pin proved to be a very weak and leaky link. After one or two backpacking trips you learned to plop the tube into a ziplock bag before leaving home. After a few more messes you learned to leave it at home. The tubes were especially unreliable when driven or packed to significantly higher temperatures and higher elevations.
*The East Fork Trail is a short (2.4 miles) and scenic footpath starting at the Walhalla Fish Hatchery trailhead and ending at its junction with the Chattooga River Trail. This route follows its namesake stream through Sumter National Forest and South Carolina's portion of the Ellicott Rock Wilderness.
