by Bill Walker
Justin appeared, unlike me, to be well-schooled in the wilderness and preferred solitude. While solitude is obviously part of the bargain on the AT, this springtime Sunday saw hikers galore all over the trail. Most everyone appeared clean, well decked-out, and upbeat—not a surprise given that it was opening day. It was a scene not to be witnessed again.
Out of a combination of shared camaraderie, curiosity, and insecurity, I was trying to talk a bit with everyone possible. Adding to the buoyant atmosphere was some quite friendly terrain that wound along Stover Creek. In 1958 the trail’s southern terminus had been moved twenty miles north from Mount Oglethorpe because of overdevelopment, and the change seemed fortuitous.
At the 7.6-mile mark Justin and I came to a sign pointing to the Hawk Mountain Shelter. One look over there showed a scene out of Grand Central Station. As a true babe in the woods I was heavily influenced by Warren Doyle’s iconoclastic bias (“people farting, snoring, mice running rampant”) against these nocturnal gathering points. And, given Justin’s solitary instincts, we trudged on.
But then I began to feel winded going up Hawk Mountain and said, “Ha, Justin. You wanna’ take a quickie?”
“It’s getting late,” he said. “I’m gonna keep going and scout out a campsite.”
“I’ll try to catch up with you,” I said, feeling a bit forlorn.
Unsure of myself, but trying to remain calm because this was going to be my life for the next six months, I cut my break short and caught Justin as he was descending Hawk Mountain. We decided to spend the night right there at the gap.
My biggest weakness as a long-distance hiker was not in walking, but in camping. The first thing ninety-five percent of hikers do upon making camp is cook. But I didn’t have a stove. So, as Justin pulled all sorts of cooking gadgets and culinary delights out of his backpack to prepare a meal, I began nibbling on pop tarts, bagels and peanut butter. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, but Justin apparently was.
“Ha, man, let me cook you some noodles and make you some hot tea or something,” he said, concerned. “You gotta’ eat better than that.” But I declined. It seemed unfair to eat something another hiker had carried all day. (I would later alter this principle, modestly).
As we sat on a log nibbling away, a trim young mid-twentyish hiker, wearing a wide-brim straw hat, approached. “You guys mind if I camp with you?” he asked.
“Sure,” we replied.
Despite Justin’s counterculture appearance he went by the book in his campsite preparations. “I took an Outward Bound (wilderness-preparation school) course,” he said, “and just do this stuff out of habit.”
When I started to put my food bag back in my backpack he said, “Gimme ya’ll’s food bags,” and commenced setting up an elaborate roping system to hang our food out of reach of any nocturnal visitors.
Justin built a fire, and the three of us warmed ourselves and talked like close friends. Justin was a singer, as evidenced by his deep, soulful delivery. “Man, I’m really glad to be hiking with you two,” he said movingly. And then in words I would remember hauntingly, he added, “I’m really uncomfortable in crowds. They freak me out.”
Seth was a twenty-five-year-old English teacher from West Virginia, and this was his second straight try on the AT, after being struck down by injury in Virginia the previous year. “This year is going to be different,” he said confidently.
When it was time to go to sleep, Justin said, “Did ya’ll see that sunrise this morning? It was red.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Foul weather soon.”
With a bit of anxiety stirring, I decided it was necessary to set up my tarp. I found a couple trees the right distance apart to attach the strings, although the ground was slanted, which meant sleeping at an angle. But after watching me flail around, trying to erect an effective shelter, Seth got the message. He quickly showed me a more user-friendly way to do it. It wasn’t the Hilton Hotel, but appeared capable of warding off rain.
This would be the night with them I would most fondly remember when, a few months later, one of us was still ambling up the trail, one had suddenly and surprisingly gotten off, and one had died in the most tragic way imagineable.
On the third day we faced Blood Mountain, the highest point on the AT in Georgia. The southern Appalachians are a natural mystery. Stretching from north Georgia to southern Virginia are about eighty-five mountains (including Blood Mountain), known as balds. Their summits are treeless, in spite of being below timberline, which is about 7,000 feet at these southern lattitudes. Even the Cherokees, who dominated the area for centuries, were baffled by these balds.
The dark, leaden sky looked ominous. Justin and Seth, exhibiting more equanimity than me, were scattered along the trail separately taking snack breaks. But I anxiously tried hurrying up the mountain as the visibility worsened. Warren Doyle had specifically warned about clearing exposed areas in high winds, poor visibility, and rain. Indeed, this would be my first taste of just how harshly the winds can blow at high elevations.
Blood Mountain was impressively steep, and I ran into my first “false summit”—clearing an area that appears to be the summit of a mountain only to find another summit ahead. One big concern at the higher altitudes is the lack of blazes, usually due to the dearth of trees. Thus, it was a relief when the Blood Mountain Shelter came into view out of the dense fog. Inside the shelter, attempting to warm up, was a big, hefty fellow named “Study Break.” He was taking a semester off from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School to attempt hiking the AT. I tried bundling up in all three corners of the shelter to stay warm, but it was useless. The shelter was exposed to the high winds, and it was necessary to get out of there quickly.
For the first time it wasn’t clear where to go, as Study Break and I started off in one direction, then another. Finally, identifying a badly faded blaze on a rock, we started the 2.5-mile descent into Neel’s Gap. I kept hiding in the rhododendron bushes to shield myself from the wind while Study Break caught up. But he kept warning, “I’m slower than Christmas, Skywalker. Don’t wait on me.” It soon became clear that he was correct, and I hurried to get to a lower elevation.
I was amazed after one thousand feet of descent to see how much the intensity of the wind had waned and the visibility improved. Soon I was at Neel’s Gap. The archway, with a blaze painted on top, at the Cherokee Outdoor Center there is the only place on the entire AT where the trail runs through a building.
Justin and Seth soon arrived. “Did ya’ll meet Study Break?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Justin laughed. “He’ll be down by dinnertime.”
It was only one o’clock, so we went inside to see if they had any “real” food, and gorged ourselves on the available fare of microwaveable hamburgers and ice cream sandwiches.
When I went back outside Study Break had arrived in high spirits after a five-day walk from Springer Mountain—a trip that had taken everybody else three days.
“I’m first going to call my wife,” he announced buoyantly, “and let her know I haven’t been eaten by a bear yet.”
I had gone thirty-one and seven-tenths miles in three days without feeling overly taxed. But I was feeling impatient and set my sights on going all-out starting the next day.
Hypothermia refers to any condition in which the core body temperature falls below a level at which it can carry out its normal bodily functions. It can happen at any time of the year, even on a seventy-degree summer day. In fact, hypothermia is actually more likely when the temperature is above freezing. And it’s a killer, make no single mistake about it. In the 1990s an average of seven hundred, fifty-four people per year died from hypothermia.
The common thread in most hypothermia stories is human error of some sort. Stories are legion of outdoorsmen dying with their backpacks full of clothes. At forty degrees a human head may lose half of its heat production. The process is insidious and can kill in minutes. The key is to avoid letting even mild hyp
othermia begin.
Wednesday, April 13, I awoke restlessly at four o’clock, anxious to leave early and cover a lot of miles. But it was raining, and I wanted the owner of the Cherokee Outdoor Center, Lyle Wilson, to do a “pack shake” before I started, so I waited around. Wilson advertised that he could reduce a hiker’s backpack weight by an average of ten pounds.
He proceeded to rearrange my pack in dizzying fashion as I stood over him, tensed up. My biggest concern was whether I would be able to remember how to pack everything once back on the trail.
His manner was so self-assured that when he said a Thermarest self-inflated pad was an absolute necessity (Warren Doyle had said just the opposite), I relented. But the Thermarest was only six feet long—almost a foot shorter than me. Meanwhile, the Ridge Rest sleeping pad I had traveled all around Atlanta looking for, but would now be giving up, was seven feet. “No problem,” he said when I pointed this out. “I’ll just cut off a foot from your Ridge Rest that we’re getting rid of, and you can put it at the end of your new Thermarest.”
A week later at a shelter in North Carolina a hiker right next to me pulled out the remaining six feet of my ridge rest for her sleeping pad. I swear to God.
We went through a few more songs and dances as my eyes got wider and wider from being told that this or that item would be highly beneficial (I thought this was about reducing weight!). This guy really knew how to ring the cash register. And this was the point in the journey when hikers were the most vulnerable and flush with cash.
So it was ten-thirty in the morning, instead of the intended eight o’clock, before I finally left Neel’s Gap, and this would begin to loom more fateful as the day drew on. There was a light drizzle from dark clouds overhead, but the sky seemed clear both east and west, so I was optimistic. It would prove to be the first of many awful weather-related prognostications on my part.
The section ahead was known as difficult, but I felt good. Determined to make good time I gave polite, but brief, salutations to other hikers on the trail. At three o’clock, I arrived at Low Gap Shelter having made eleven miles in four and a half hours. Better yet, the familiar faces of Justin and Seth were on hand, as well as an elusive redheaded fella’ named Beeker. We sat there dutifully eating “trail food,” as everyone who had been laid up at Neel’s Gap by the previous day’s rain started trickling in.
Vertical Jerry, appropriately named, pulled out a copy of the Companion Data Book and chortled, “Oh, great. Look at this. ‘Shelter closed in summer of 2000 due to continued trouble with bears. A 2000 thru-hiker reported waking in the shelter to find a black bear straddling him.’” That, of course, drew wry remarks from various quarters.
“This doesn’t look like my type scene developing here,” Justin whispered.
“Yeah, I’m thinking about going,” I said.
The big wild card was the weather. I was cold when sitting still and didn’t think I could stay warm by remaining at this shelter. Beeker was the only one committed to going the full nine miles to Unicoi Gap on Georgia Highway 75. He claimed the trail runs fairly flat along an old forest service road and then over a small hill and down to the road. This was a surprise since the data book showed sharply undulating topography for the rest of the time in Georgia. But I was later to learn that Beeker made up for his social unease by telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. He planned to hitchhike into Helen, Georgia, a Bavarian style village, and spend the night in a motel. Now, there was an enticing plan—my first twenty-mile day, followed by a full-night’s sleep in a warm bed. My heart said yes, after feeling a bit shackled the first three days. After all, a thru-hiker’s mantra is “no rain, no pain, no Maine.”
I headed off in the threatening weather. When I turned the first corner water was unexpectedly shooting out of a big rock face, probably due to all the recent rain. I filled up my Nalgene water bottle, and this would prove to be crucial.
The drizzle became steadier as I pushed on, determined. The trail, which had been almost teeming the first few days, was abandoned; I was to see no other hiker the rest of the day. I kept looking for this old forest service road Beeker had mentioned, but had trouble making anything out in the increasingly dense fog. Meanwhile, the trail was winding up and down, but with the elevations increasing for each peak.
On a nine-mile stretch I would normally take at least a couple breaks. But I was reluctant to do so here because of the time constraint and the worsening weather conditions. I did, however, keep swallowing water and chewing on GORP (Good Ol’ Raisins and Peanuts). Meanwhile, I was becoming concerned because I was stopping quite often to urinate, even though my mouth felt dry. My assumption had been that I didn’t need to bring a lot of water out of Low Gap Shelter, which had a stream, because I would be able to find water easily on such a rainy day. However, the water spewing from the rock was the only drinking water I would see, and I was steadily drinking it down. As I later learned, this was misguided, because higher elevations often lack any water sources at all.
I had belatedly put on a rain jacket, when I realized just how drenched and cold I was from the steadily increasing downpour. But now that I had begun chilling it was tough to warm up again—a classic rookie mistake. But what was even more unnerving was that I had started feeling lightheaded, which could have been caused by my having walked as hard and as fast as possible with very few breaks for about seven hours. Or maybe it had something to do with waking up at four o’clock. Or maybe it was all a figment of my imagination.
However, I wasn’t hallucinating about the fundamentals: It was cold and getting colder; I was soaked; the trail was getting muddier by the minute; the visibility was poor and getting worse the higher I climbed; my water supply was running low; the howling winds were adding to my paranoia; and nobody else was on this trail as night approached.
Finally, I saw a wooden post that I hoped would be for Blue Mountain Shelter. But instead it read Brass Town Bald, a name every Georgia school boy knows because it is the highest point in Georgia. This fact contributed to the forbidding feeling that I really was stuck in the mountains, and that I was totally reliant on the remaining energy in my legs to get me out of there in one piece. One of the scant comforts I could honestly conjure up was that I had made out my will before starting the AT.
I kept straining to hear the sound of cars from the road, down at the bottom of the mountain. But every time my hopes were lifted by what seemed like a whirring sound, I would look over to my left and realize that it was just another powerful wind gust sweeping over the mountain. Trees swayed as if they were going to bend in half. I began to wonder if I would ever see another human being.
As I cleared the next rise in the fog, the trail began to flatten. It’s the summit. I looked ahead expectantly for a descent that would lead straight to the road. Instead, it was a false summit and the outlines of yet another mountain appeared in front of me. I was exhausted and felt unable to continue.
A friend back home with hiking experience had told me that if immobilized and faced with high winds and rain, I should just take out my tarp and wrap it around me like a burrito. I pulled out my tarp, wrapped it around me, and lay in the middle of the AT. I attempted to relax and breathe deeply, only to be buffeted by cold, slanting, merciless sheets of rain. This wasn’t working. Now all the concerns and paranoia of the last few hours morphed into a full-fledged fear for my life. As cold and soaked as I was, I didn’t think I could survive the night exposed to these elements.
I began envisioning my funeral. In a perverted way I even felt “embarrassed” for my family, that I had so ceremoniously undertaken this long journey only to die the first time the weather turned sour. I had to get out of there quickly and decided to do something that had been at the back of my mind the last couple hours. I would abandon my backpack. I rushed it over to a clump of trees, quickly gulped down some Tylenol from the first aid kit, and grabbed the remaining quarter-liter of water. Then I urinated again for approximately the tenth time since Low Gap S
helter three hours before—a telltale sign of hypothermia.
Then, deciding I was in a dead-even situation and that this was my best chance, I took a deep swallow of my precious remaining water, said a quick prayer for faith, and resolved to walk very slowly up the mountain. Concentrating on each step, I felt a tangible difference without a backpack. This was a relief. Within about 200 or 300 hundred yards I began to make out through the fog yet again what looked like a summit. As it flattened at the top I wondered if I was in for yet another false summit. But then the trail seemed to be descending, and finally it started down steeply. The distant noise of cars from the road 1.4 miles away was now unmistakable. Yes, I considered turning around to retrieve my backpack, but after hours of nagging doubt, followed by fifteen minutes in which I thought I was looking death straight in the eye, I was happy to be apparently out of danger and decided to continue descending to the road. A half hour later, I arrived at Unicoi Gap and Ga. Hwy. 75. The rain had almost stopped and the visibility was much better, but I consoled myself that I had made the right decision to abandon my backpack. The weather was probably still diabolical up on the mountaintop.
It was getting dark and it was a ten-mile hitch east to Helen, Georgia. Furthermore, not many cars were passing. After a few failed thumbs, the thought occurred that, without a backpack, I looked more like a bum than a hiker. With no sleeping bag, shelter, or dry clothes and the nearest town ten miles away, I could be facing a long night. Finally, another car rounded the hill, and I threw up my hands as if in prayer. A thirty-ish, rotund fellow stopped and agreed to take me to Helen. Despite the odd circumstance of my backpack being on the mountain I was positively giddy and had him drop me at the first motel we saw.
That night my relief turned to worry, as I lay awake wondering if a bear or rodents were tearing through my backpack, which contained not only a food bag, but thousands of dollars of equipment as well. At first light I got up and caught a taxi back up the mountain to Unicoi Gap, hoping to retrieve my backpack.
