Chapter 3
Charlie's Bunion, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina
207 miles down and 1961 miles to go

Trimpi Shelter Register:

     "At first I thought, ‘what a cute place,’ sturdy shelter, yellow flowers. Then while consuming dinner the birds became active, closer. Then after having a restful sleep, I realized this isn’t just ‘a place’ - it just ‘is’. That’s what I want to be when I wake up."

Rio
GA>ME

     "Hmm. I wish whatever was in her oatmeal would have been in mine."

Smoo
GA>ME

     By the time Fly, Aces, and Squirrelfight crossed from Georgia into North Carolina, they had decided it was time to split off. Fly and Aces were ready to begin their hike together, and Squirrelfight was ready to do some hiking on his own. Even after deciding to go their own ways, though, Squirrelfight still saw a lot of Fly and Aces. They were all going north, and sticking to the shelters and campsites meant one group would have to do significantly more miles than the other to actually lose contact. They ended up at the same campsites the first few days, but then Squirrelfight got ahead of the couple and started hiking faster. By the time they reached Fontana Dam at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains, though, Fly and Aces had caught up again. He had been ahead of them for three days, and they shared their brief adventures from the trail behind. Having hiked a little more than 160 miles as of Fontana Dam, they only had about 2,000 left to go. In order not to finish the trail too quickly, all three decided to take their first zero mile day and prepare for the tallest mountains along the A.T.. They spent a relaxing day in and around Fontana Dam and the resort attached to it, eating pizza, sorting through mail drops, and enjoying good company. A few others joined them, and other hikers were kept from crossing into the Smokies by a forest fire that was still playing itself out just across the dam. That night they watched the small forest fire sparkle along the dark ridge of the Smoky Mountains.

     As the Squirrel, Aces, and Fly entered the Smokies the next day through still smoldering trees and scattered smoke, they were absorbed into the large group that had caught up and waited for the fire during their day off. Despite the risk of overcrowding the small shelters, the group, now totaling 11 hikers, plunged into the National Park and headed up the steep miles toward the ridge. During those cold days, though, there would be almost no day-hikers or weekenders in the freezing Smoky Mountains, and they could almost count on having the shelters to themselves. In the shelter notebook registers they read the scrawled entries of hikers ahead. Some of them had been only a short distance ahead for a long time, but traveling at the same speed, they hadn't caught up to them. The hikers who had stayed in a shelter the night before might never know of those hikers behind, who were always reading their register entries and browsing through their thoughts. Squirrelfight and his companions had no way of knowing anything about the hikers catching up behind them, who read each day the little notes and thoughts they jotted down and watched as the dates the entries were written landed closer and closer to the dates they were read.

* * * * *

     When Wayah entered the Great Smoky Mountains, he remembered his dreams of the trail from before he ever began. The mountains of Georgia had their immaculate peaks, but the Smokies rose from North Carolina like the spine of the earth, and he walked in the heavens for days on end. The goal of reaching a view was laid to rest when the land always stretched below and away, and his boots clung to rocks that sloped down off of cliffs and endless slopes. All day he would walk from one high peak to the next, stopping when the wind caught him just right or the sun shone off the valleys below, and he would look down, more spellbound than tired, into the patches of trees, grass, and mirror lakes so far below. Wayah was beginning to feel at home in these mountains and woods, and he would stop sometimes to lay on a rock by himself, just to feel the sunlight.

     The first days of spring in the Smokies were a bit colder than the tail of winter in Georgia. It seemed the temperature only stretched above freezing in the middle of the day, and Wayah would start out in the morning wearing the thick, white polar-fleece jacket his cousin had made for him. The jacket was the envy of everyone he met in those days, not much to look at, but obviously as warm as an entire flock of sheep. After he had been hiking for an hour or so, his body was hot enough to be comfortable on all but the coldest, windiest, rainiest days and the jacket would come off. In the mornings, Wayah arranged his stove and cooking gear while still in his sleeping bag. Even when the water bottles were kept in his sleeping bag against his body to keep from freezing, he would pour the water into his pan only to watch icy sludge scatter on the aluminum. With the cold, though, came an unparalleled crispness that revealed faraway mountains as if tiny particles of ice in the air were magnifying the light. During a hike, that chilly air was a blessing and a curse, freezing the throat one minute, cooling an overheated torso the next. It could be hard to bear without the sun, but Wayah was blessed with more sunlight than rain along the ridge. Those days of hiking along the peaks of North Carolina made Wayah feel like a king with mountains for a crown.

     In the Smokies, as in most national parks, camping is restricted to designated shelters and camp sites, and campers are strongly advised to use the shelters strapped with chain link fences to keep out the bears. Wayah had heard stories about bears tearing open the fencing to free a trapped cub, but never just to get at a camper's food. Mice, on the other hand, treated the shelters like a cross between a theme park and a buffet. At dusk they could be seen bouncing towards the shelter from the woods, finding hiding places among the rocks where they would wait for the hikers to settle in before beginning their scavenging patrols. At night Wayah would wake up as a mouse bounced across his forehead, or began tore into some loud fabric nearby. Once, another hiker woke to find a mouse perched on his lips eating scraps of food from his mustache. The food bags were hung on strings from the roof with tuna cans threaded just above the bag. The idea was that when mice climbed down the string and tried to go around the can, it would tip and they would fall. It worked most of the time. Backpacks had to be left with all the zippers open so that the mice could indulge their curiosity without chewing a hole in the pack wall. Anything edible would be stolen or gnawed on, and any good nest material like toilet paper or the pages of a book were possible victims. The mice ran the night show, but as Squirrelfight would later say, "Hey, they live here."

     Shelters are spaced every six or eight miles in the Smokies, and since there is a fine for not camping in designated spots, each day offers the option of hiking the short day of six to eight miles to the next shelter, or the long day of twelve to sixteen. In the months ahead, most hikers routinely hiked 15 or 16 miles even through the high mountains, but in the beginning only a few were willing to go so fast or long. Wayah was one of them. He needed to average 15 miles a day to finish the entire trail before school started again in the fall. Another was Bicycle man, a hydro-geologist from Tennessee.

     The first night in the Smokies, Wayah, Bicycle Man, and about ten other hikers shared a shelter. It was incredibly noisy. Between the snoring and the scurrying of the mice and a possible rat, it was quite a chore to go to sleep. The second night there were only five of them who had hiked to the second shelter, and after that day, Wayah and Bicycle Man were the only ones hiking the long day.

     Bicycle Man was a kind, quiet man who seemed completely unaffected by the cold. He had done field work in Greenland and had no sympathy to offer Wayah when it came to temperatures just below freezing. In the evenings he would strip down behind the shelter and wash the sweat off of himself with a wet bandanna despite the frigid air and biting wind. He was obviously a little insane. Wayah had grown up in the South and preferred ending the cold days by covering himself with his polar-fleece and rain jacket and by letting his body heat dry up the sweat in his clothes, even if he had to wear them in his sleeping bag all night. The thought of putting on a shirt in the morning that had frozen stiff in the night seemed far worse to Wayah than sleeping in his own sweat day after day.

     Bicycle Man was a very light sleeper and was willing to sleep in his tent outside the shelter with the bears rather than spend a night awake because of someone’s snoring. Since Wayah didn’t snore, they got along fine. In the mornings they would rise with the sun. Bicycle Man would eat a quick, cold breakfast and pack up his gear while Wayah set up his stove and cooked oatmeal. He would start hiking fifteen or twenty minutes before Wayah each morning, leaving him in the shelter trying to scoop out the little scraps of his oatmeal before they froze to the pan. The Wolf hiked somewhat slower than most but very steadily. In a few hours he would see Bicycle Man sitting on a log where the trail snaked down into a sudden, steep gully, eating a granola bar and looking thoughtfully into the trees.
     "Wayah the Wolf," Bicycle Man would call out when there were only a dozen yards or so left between them. His voice had a little squeak to it and cascaded down as he said the name.
     "The Wolf is upon ya." Wayah would say, stopping for a moment to talk about things they had seen that day on the trail, and then he would keep on walking, leaving Bicycle Man behind until he stopped for lunch and Bicycle man caught up. They would sit on the porch of the halfway shelter and eat their bread, peanut butter, candybars, and any other food they could spare. While they ate, they would pass the shelter register back and forth to read the comments and thoughts of hikers who had already passed through, and add their own thoughts and observations.

     The day before the end of the Smokies, Bicycle Man met his girlfriend where an unusually large and paved road crossed the trail and the ridge. There was a parking lot there where motorists couldenjoy the view, use the bathrooms, or access the trail. Bicycle Man's girlfriend was waiting there, and left the trail to rest with her for a few days. He had been so excited about seeing her in the days before. He talked about the cookies and goodies she would bring and spent quiet moments thinking about the rest. So much so that Wayah felt alone for a while even before coming to the wide, overpopulated roadside vista. Wayah said good-bye to them and walked away from the dangerously crowded parking lot where dozens of passersby had stopped to look off of the ridge that was his home. Five hundred miles would pass underfoot before he would see Bicycle Man again.

     A few miles from the road was a point called Charlie’s Bunion. The path to it was beaten down and hard from the people who had come from the road to have a glimpse. Only a small percentage were willing to walk the four miles there and back, but over time the lure of the Bunion had pulled enough people over the trail to pack it solid and wear the rocks smooth. The peak stuck out of the world like a giant’s thumb, and clambering to the edge of it, the mountain dropped off vertically all around. Wayah laid his pack near the crease where the spike jutted out sideways from the mountain peak and crawled out onto the ledge. His boots rooted solid into the cracks of the rock, and the wind whipped over him and around him and through him. He was aware of every hair on his body as the wind caressed their roots and turned the sweat that covered him and dripped from him into shells and pearls of ice. The Wolf was so awakened that he kept breathing in, and it seemed he would never breathe out. His eyes rolled back and closed as he tilted his head back, preparing to howl.