I rounded the bend and came to an abrupt stop. Not 10 yards away a woman on all fours wearing a jester’s hat and a full backpack was shinnying across a downed hemlock that crossed the creek. On the far side of the creek were two other female backpackers: one taking pictures, the other encouraging the scooter. “You’ve got another photographer!” one of the landed women informed the scooter.
The scooter turned her head. “Oh! Hi!”
Curious as the scene was, it was to about get curiouser. “Joe Miller!” yelled the woman with the camera.
A Thursday afternoon, first week of November, on a backcountry trail bridging Mt. Sterling and the Cataloochee area in the Smokies: What were the odds of running into someone I knew? Pretty good, if it was fellow guidebook writer Danny Bernstein.
Danny, a retired college professor, and her husband moved to the high country not long ago. In 2007, her “Hiking the Carolina Mounains” was published, and this past April her “Hiking North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Heritage” came out in. Her latest adventure: section hiking the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. She and Sharon McCarthy, the jester-hatted scooter (she wound up walking most of the log), are doing the whole trail. “Carolyn [Hoopes, the third hiker in their party] comes along when she feels like it.”
It was late in the day and we were all racing the sun, Danny, Sharon and Carolyn to get to campsite 40, about 4 miles down the trail, me to loop back to my car 6 miles up the way. Thus, I didn’t get much time to find out what else Danny was up to. Fortunately, she keeps an active blog.
“It’s crazy running into someone you know on such a remote trail,” I said just before we parted ways.
“Acutally,” Danny corrected me, “it’s not so remote. It’s the Smokies.”
Category Archives: Hiking
Why stay in shape
Tuesday evening I sat against a log, just off the Appalachian Trail, bundled against the cold, and watched the sun set. At 4,000 feet on a ridgeline, several miles from civilization, it was a long, slow show. When the curtain turned a deep crimson, I noticed it wasn’t getting darker. I glanced over my shoulder to find a full moon cresting over a near ridge to the east. I switched position and sat for another half hour. It took seven miles of hiking up more than 2,000 vertical feet with 35 pounds on my back, but it was worth it. I’m pretty sure I had the best seat in the house to see November 3rd come to a close in North Carolina.
Night hiking: Beating the Standard Time blues
With the end of Daylight Savings Time on Sunday, GetGoingNC.com is looking at various ways you can keep active during the dark times ahead.
For maybe the fifth time in five minutes Alan stopped to comment on the trail. “This is a great trail,” he commented. And for the fifth time in maybe five minutes I reminded him that we had hiked this same trail maybe a half dozen times. His sense of discovery was justified, though. This was the first time we’d hiked the trail in daylight.
Hikes You Can Do: Buckquarter Creek
Every Wednesday through Thanksgiving, GetGoingNC.com will feature a hike in North Carolina that just about anyone can do. It won’t be a long hike (though we may throw in a recommendation for going longer), it won’t be strenuous hike (there could be a hill-climb option as well). The hikes will be timed to coincide with the changing colors of fall. This week, the 1.5-mile Buckquarter Creek Trail in Eno River State Park.
Paradise: If you have to ask …
I needed a water bottle. I wound up contemplating the price of paradise.
Packing for a week of backpacking last night, I could only put my hands on one Nalgene bottle. My MSR water filter screws into Nalgene water bottles, making an otherwise annoying task – pumping water from a stream – slightly less annoying. Since I was leaving town early this morning, I’d have to pick one up on the road. Which put me standing in front of the somewhat new REI in Asheville late this afternoon.