5th email in a series from our good friend Ryan Dorsey
Here’s my overdue next installment of Dorsey On The Trail. Every day is super busy and exhausting, even my days off in towns where I need to buy groceries, shower, eat enormous amounts of food just to make up the caloric deficit of the days before, and getting around town on foot. Hotel internet is always spotty and I’ve fallen a bit behind on writing. I hope I keep this worth your while, even at epic length emails. This one gets me caught up to about a week ago. I hope you enjoy.
I left Franklin, North Carolina after being bussed to a church’s free hiker breakfast. I had seven delicious pancakes, about ten thick slices of bacon, a cinnamon bun, and a huge cup of orange juice. As I write this, I am awake in the night realizing what hiker hunger is about. It’s the second night in a row where I’ve woken in the middle of the night hungry even after a day of eating as ridiculously much as I have in a day. Details to follow.
Heading out of Franklin I did sixteen miles to the Cold Spring Shelter site. I took the Budget Inn shuttle bus with a group back to the trail and was right off into the woods, ahead of all of the rest. I didn’t see any one of them again for the rest of the day. Not that it’s a race, or that I intentionally hike faster than anyone, but I’ve found that there’s a pace that’s comfortable for me, and that it does happen to be a bit faster than most. I spent most of the day passing people who had camped ahead of me on the trail and were getting a late start or folks who had started early from before the road to Franklin and had not come into town. Because we’re each out here hiking our own hike- stopping or not stopping in a town, staying the night in a motel or hostel or not, resupplying enough food for three days or five- every day there’s a push and pull of who’s where along the trail. I’ve spent days hiking with people who are now a day or two ahead of me because I chose to stop more places and hang out longer , and there are people I’ve been seeing all along the way, off and on, because I hike faster than they do and while I’m hanging around at the next town, they’re catching up, hiking four days to do what I did in three or three and a half.
The first day out of Franklin was where I came my first bald. A bald is a grass clearing atop a mountain that is otherwise entirely covered with trees and other growth. I know that there are balds in North Carolina, Tennessee, and New Hampshire, but I’m not sure of anywhere else. From what I gather there’s not much certainty as to how or why they exist. At one time, certainly there were people settling on or near these areas, keeping cattle who grazed there and using the open space for gatherings, but the balds may exist in the first place because of wild cattle grazing there. The National Park Service mentions these things briefly and inconclusively on an informational spread atop a stone observational tower at one bald. It makes mention of “Cherokee legend” being that balds may have originated as… something other than something the Cherokee did very intentionally, as they were extremely knowledgeable about maintaining and responsibly using vast stretches of land, using things like controlled burns to affect a healthy balance of plant and animal life. Having taken the land from these people without properly knowing how to maintain it’s ecosystem, the origin of what few and small balds remain, the government attributes only to legend. As they (perhaps Churchill) say, “History is written by the victors.”
I sat and had lunch (peanut butter and Nutella on whole wheat English muffins) at the first bald I came to, where I met a very fast hiker, Trophy Wife. She’s solo on her first major hike, heading home some weekends early on here to see her husband in Knoxville. After eating we left together and I kept up with her (to her surprise) for a while after, and then I passed her for a while, until she eventually caught up with me while I was getting water from a spring at the campsite where she decided to stay the night. I moved another eight miles farther to the Cold Spring Shelter site.
I passed another shelter and stopped in along the way where I met a few other thru-hikers and two younish twenty-somethings who seemed a bit odd. The thru-hikers were in the shelter hanging out for the evening and the youngest one, an obese man about my age called Big Bear, had a pile of tobacco spit in front of him on the dirt floor in front of the shelter’s sleeping platform. I was pretty grossed out by it, and though I don’t think my face let on. I did look down at it several times, and eventually he noticed and kicked some dirt on it. The other guys were smoking by a campfire they’d made and I was surprised to see how much stuff they had with them. They had every bit as large a pack as a thru-hiker, but with things hanging off their packs and old school external frame packs. Most odd about them was the clothing they wore. The one wearing a cotton tee-shirt, cut off jeans, and a flannel jacket tied around his waist had a faint tattoo of a pot leaf on his leg and a backwards hat with an image of the type of sign one would have on a lawn. The sign read, “Keep On The Grass”. The quieter one, the one I assumed to be somehow slightly less degenerate than his companion, was wearing full length jeans on a hot day while making a fire in the sun. This one, Michael, was a little more closed mouthed than his friend about their obviously unrealistic ambitions of making it to Maine. They have a friend on the trail (actually in the hotel room next to mine right now) who is well prepared and who started, like every other thru-hiker, at Springer Mountain, two weeks and more than a hundred miles earlier. After having quickly thrown their things together in a mad dash to be free of the confines of normal living, they had hopped on the trail the previous day at a road crossing only a few miles back, trying to hop on the bandwagon with their friend, Chris, who quickly left them in the dust.
There are very few possessions one requires in order to hike the Appalachian Trail. I want to make this a point now for any reader here who may not be experienced in backpacking, so you know what is and is not resting on my hips and shoulders for hours each day. My pack’s volume is fifty liters. It is not so small that I cannot fit into it everything I need, but it is not as heavy (consider weights in ounces and fractions of ounces, not pounds) as larger packs. I chose it partly for the weight of the pack itself, but partly because I was warned by the awesome people at REI who helped outfit me warned me that if you get a larger pack, you will be doomed to fill the available space, and this will lead to more weight. My goal has been to have a base weight for my pack at fifteen pounds or less, without food or water, and even this has been a real challenge for me. In my pack is a down fill sleeping bag that I can survive in naked at twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Strapped to the outside of the pack is a rolled up foam mat for a ground pad. Those two items are my bedroom. My house is a tent fly that stakes to the ground and pitches with my two trekking poles inside, and a nine foot by three foot piece of Tyvek to lay on the ground. My kitchen is a titanium pot and spork with a lid, a plastic cup, and a burner that uses a gas fuel blend called iso-butane propane that comes in small canisters I have to buy as I run out along the way. I also use my pocket knife for things like spreading peanut butter. I carry toilet paper and sanitary wipes, a toothbrush with half the handle cut off, a small tube of toothpaste, floss, a disposable razor, and a few other things as a bathroom and medicine cabinet.. My wardrobe, reduced from what I started with less than three weeks ago, is two pair of wool socks and two pair of thin wool sock liners, a pair of nylon/spandex underwear and two tee shirts and a lightweight long top and bottom made of other synthetic materials, a pair of shorts, a pair of shoes, a hat, gloves, raincoat and rain pants, sunglasses, and a Pabst Blue Ribbon headband. There’s not much else I carry except my iPhone and charger and a guidebook, and certainly nothing that’s non-essential. Even the guide book is cut in half, with the second half waiting for me at home when I pass through Maryland, and I’ve torn out the pages for the sections I’ve already covered.
The two piss and vinegar filled young stoners I came across we wearing all cotton clothing. Cotton does not breathe well and is very slow to dry, so wearing it out here is the easiest way to get hypothermia. Their packs and sleeping bags were old and heavy. They brought no camp stove but had two Teflon skillets, planning on cooking over a fire, which means having the energy and time each long and exhausting day to gather wood at heavily used campsites where scarce is a loose or dry branch on the ground. They had no guidebook and therefore no sense of the distance from one shelter or campsite or water source to the next. But to aid in what they hoped would be a wonderfully primitive escape (along the most heavily trafficked footpath in the world) from societal burdens they came equipped with a Crocodile Dundee/Rambo style knife, a hatchet, a slingshot, a fishing pole, a blow gun, the largest carabiner I’ve ever seen (but no rope even to tie up a bear bag!), and a machete, not to mention a stash of pot and psilocybin mushrooms.
The two were about ready to head out to wherever the next shelter might be when I ended my snack break there, and after asking them a number of questions and hearing how they realized how unprepared they were, I told them that if they got to the next site that I would go over things with them in the morning and help them see about getting properly outfitted at the outfitter store the day after.
The Cold Spring Shelter, a tiny, supposedly a six person shelter, was being occupied by a middle-aged couple and a hole in the floor. It was the worst shelter I had seen and the register, the log hikers usually write in when staying or stopping by a shelter, reported a high volume of mouse activity. Not all shelters are created equal, just as not all privies are not placed as well as one another. Georgia has awesome shelters. Many of them are less than twenty years old, replacing older ones that were in bad condition and too small to accommodate an influx of hikers and trail use over the years, and almost all of Georgia’s shelters have two levels. North Carolina, because they are in a different park and are maintained by a different volunteer organization, has still a lot of older and smaller shelters, some of which are in bad shape with holes in the walls and floors, and floors out of level because of erosion and movement of the earth beneath. Shelters in Georgia are generally a hundred yards or more off the trail along side trails, and privies are generally another fifty yards from the shelter, out of sight smelling distance. Every Georgia shelter has a moldering privy well stocked with mulch to throw in. Many North Carolina shelters didn’t have a privy at all until 2011, and you’re lucky if those have a few leaves in a bucket to throw on the pile, and you’re lucky if the privy is more than thirty feet off the A.T. and not facing it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Southern North Carolina’s privies more often than not have the occupant facing the trail and, depending on whether a hiker is North or South bound, can be plainly seen by some passers by.
I stopped at the shelter and made dinner before heading to the tent camping area to set up. Our cotton clad, blow gun wielding heroes arrived while I was eating and headed up to set up their tent and I followed soon after. That night I met Zig-zag and Wing-wing, a New England couple with matching clothes, Candyman and his dad, whose trail name I can’t recall, and I met back up with Kellen, who had left me that morning at the Budget Inn.
The boys were gone by the time I got up in the morning, and I set out on my own, the last person out of the camp site. Again at lunch, at the summit of a mountain with an observation tower atop it, I met up with Kellen and the boys. There I also met a couple who met thru-hiking last year, Wiggles and Bam-Bam, and Wiggles’ Alaskan Malamute, Ava. Wiggles, a pretty 21 year old blonde, carried her break-down hula hoop the whole trail strapped to the side of her pack, but hiked without a cooking stove, and the dog hiked 500 miles of the trail with her. She’s in school in North Carolina studying Environmental Science, and Bam-Bam, 17 years her senior, is currently living out of his truck and on the trail, working when he can or must. Before I left home, a friend made me a patch for my pack that says Baltimore, so I could represent the home town every step of the way. Bam-Bam was the first person to see the pack sitting around and ask, “Who here’s from Charm City?” It was the first time I’d heard my beloved city’s nickname since I left.
We left the tower as signs of stormy weather came. A quarter mile down the trail was a shelter where I stopped to look at my guidebook to find the nearest spring or stream where I could get water. A father and two sons stopped in as well just as rain started to come down. I was glad I had come in when I had as the rain came heavier and more people began appearing. I was able to answer most of the thru-hiking questions of the father and sons before the shelter became deafeningly loud with the chatter of ten boy scouts, ten other people, and the pounding of a massive amount of rain coming down on the tin roof of the shelter. The rain passed quickly, I got water nearby, and began a steep descent on twisting rocky trail so difficult and dropping so abruptly at points that Bam-Bam had to lower Wiggles’ giant wolf-like dog down drops off of rocks three and four feet at a time.
Planning to hike in to the Nantahala Outdoor Center in the morning, I stayed that night in the last shelter before it. Hikers mostly go to bed right around dark and get up at sunrise. On this particular night I went to bed as usual, around 8:30 or 9:00 and woke up little more than an hour later at the roaring of the most violent rain crashing down on the shelter roof. There wasn’t a leak or a mouse in the house, but the rain was deafening. It mostly passed after an hour and continued very little for some time after and I went back to sleep. I woke in the morning happy to have less than a mile of muddy hiking to get to the NOC where Kellen and I were having a fresh hot breakfast.
After breakfast Kellen took off. She applied to the Peace Corps before heading out on the trail expecting that if she were accepted she would leave no sooner than November. It seems now she may need to head to Africa as soon as June, so she’s trying to cover as much ground as she can before then. I spent the rest of the day hanging around evaluating my gear and my food supply as tends to happen when you have the opportunity to buy gear and food.
There was a big gathering and a bonfire that night and it wasn’t until then that I started to think about where I might sleep for the night. It was a warm night and it wouldn’t be particularly windy as low down in the valley as I was. I figured I could roll out my pad and sleeping bag just about anywhere. I was on private property though and my options were either to go three quarters of a mile uphill to a designated camping area or leave the property and tent in the woods nearby. As it neared midnight I was offered a ride by AJ, an employee from the Nantahala Outfitter Store. We got in his truck to head up to the campground and he turned on the radio. Beethoven’ fifth symphony, the second movement. This music had lingered and run in my mind for my first two days on the trail. It was fantastic to hear it at that moment. We got to talking about classical music and how damn far away the camping area was and half way up the road to the campground he turned the truck around and we headed to where he and some of his friends were staying the night. What he said was, “Dude you’re alright. I’m taking you to hobo camp.” Hobo camp was a spot, only a quarter mile down river from the Outfitter and Outdoor Center, where AJ, his girlfriend, and a few other friends they thru-hiked with last year had their tents set up and a cooler full of burgers, hotdogs, and other food. The only vegetarian in the bunch cooked meat for everybody and insisted I eat at least one extra burger, as no thru-hiker should refuse food even when he thinks he’s full.