On Monday, I went for a hike in Pisgah National Forest that marked a kind of milestone for me, as I got to return to a place in the Shining Rock Wilderness that I first visited almost exactly 30 years ago: Flower Gap.
It was here, in this picturesque spot between Flower Knob and Ivestor Gap, that 30 years ago this month, I spent the first night of my first backpacking trip: a four-day walk from Big East Fork trailhead on U.S. 276 westward toward Shining Rock and the Art Loeb Trail, then south (more or less) on the Art Loeb to end at the Davidson River Campground just outside the town of Brevard. I was twelve years old, and the youngest of four boys and two adult leaders from my Boy Scout troop in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Now, I live in Brevard, and at times still can't believe that I live in this place that was so much a part of my childhood. My scout troop made a number of camping trips to Pisgah over the years, and I wore out at least several pairs of cut-off blue jeans on Sliding Rock, a natural water slide and popular tourist attraction on Looking Glass Creek in the national forest. The place we normally camped was a site near the fish hatchery (where a friend of mine now works), across the Davidson River accessed by a suspension bridge. The campsite is still there, but the bridge is long gone, washed away years ago, I am told, by a flood on the river.
When I moved to Brevard four years ago, I started re-acquainting myself with these places I had first experienced as a child. Some weren't quite as I remembered them, like the fork on the gravel Forest Service road past the fish hatchery. On my first trip to the campsite on the river, I was sitting in the front of the car driven by an adult leader, but I wasn't expecting the sudden fork to the left -- and when the car took this abrupt shift down and to the left (instead of up and to the right), I just knew that we had just driven off the mountain. It was good for a pulse-pounding adrenaline moment, until of course I realized fractions of a second later that we were in fact safe, still on a road, and not tumbling off a cliff to our deaths.
When I look at that fork on the road now, I can't believe it gave me a fright. I can't even see how it was frightening; it seems downright tame. Is it just the difference of a child's viewpoint and an adult's? It is possible that the road was re-engineered; indeed, it is perhaps likely, given how the road has fared in floods. The lower road, along the river, was closed as recently as 2005 following devastating floods in the fall of 2004 when Hurricanes Ivan and Frederick washed out many bridges and roads for months; even parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway were closed because of "roadway failure." Euphemism for part of the mountain eroding away in the wash.
So some of my childhood memories of the region don't quite match the realities of today, while others are just as spectacular as they seemed then. I have now hiked many of the trails in this area, many more than I got to as a mere occasional visitor to the area, but until this week, I had not ventured to this particular location in the Shining Rock Wilderness.
Flower Gap. Except for Shining Rock itself (glimpsed, briefly, off to the right somewhere on our long hike from the trailhead on the first day of our trek), it was the first tangible named geographic point I remember from that backpack trip. I had not yet developed a love for maps and topography, or even really much of an interest in the outdoors and nature. I was twelve years old. All that was to come.
All I knew then was that when the summer backpack trip was announced at a troop meeting sometime in January or February, I was determined to go. Perhaps more so because at that moment, I did not "qualify."
The troop scoutmaster, Roger -- a bona-fide forester in his day job -- laid a few ground rules designed to spur self-improvement and development. First, in order to be eligible to go on the trip, any scout had to advance at least one rank. Second, the scout had to have reached the rank of First Class.
For me, that meant I had to advance not one but two ranks in just four or five months. I was a Tenderfoot, fairly new to the troop having just come up from Webelos. Our troop did not meet during the summer, and so I would have to get the work done, in conjunction with the BSA time requirements between ranks, by late May or early June. So I had to get started right away if I wanted to be eligible.
And so I did. I did the work, earned the requisite skill awards and/or merit badges, along with the other requirements that came with advancement of rank in scouting. Roger also required all of those who were to go on the trip to attempt at least one "shakedown" hike -- basically, a short day hike with a full pack, and a close examination afterward of what was packed, and what should not be packed in an actual backpack trip. I went on two.
It was probably a good thing, because the trip was in some ways harder than I had expected it would be. First, I was the youngest to go; Conrad and Phillip were a year older than me, and Steve was two or three years older than them. My boots were not well fitted to my feet, and I ended up with a few blisters that had to be doctored on the trail. And I was (and am) not, by nature, athletic: even though our trek on average was downhill, it was a hard slog.
So that first night in August 1978, when we arrived in Flower Gap, after eating lots of blueberries and blackberries right off the trail, it was a welcome and amazing sight, and a personal accomplishment that I am proud of even to this day. I was exhausted, could barely pitch my tent, but it was a good, honest exhaustion. My tent-mate, Steve, shared my exhaustion in part, but I don't think he was as dog-tired as I was. Conrad and Phillip, in contrast, would seem to have endless energy -- as we saw toward sunset, when some low-hanging clouds came bounding through the gap just a few dozen feet higher than us. They ran a ways up the trail onto the next ridge so that they could be "in the clouds" as they drifted past.
On Monday of this week, I descended that very ridge, along the same trail, in my approach to Flower Gap. Still not particularly athletic, I nonetheless like to hike whenever and wherever I can. I did not carry a full backpack as I did 30 years ago, but I can say with certainty that on this occasion, I carried considerably more weight than I did when I was twelve. Enough said....
There were no clouds drifting through the gap this time, but it was approaching sunset, so the time of day was similar, and it looked just as I remembered it. Dry and grassy, excellent flat spots for tents, spectacular views to the west, a feeling of exposure, a place to catch the breeze. And solitude -- Shining Rock Wilderness as a whole is suffering from too much love, becoming in effect almost an oxymoronic wilderness, but on this Monday evening, with a cold front moving through (temperatures were already in the sixties, and would be around 55 shortly after the sun went down), I was not disturbed by any intrusions of people. The only evidence of others I encountered in fact -- and it was a disgusting bit of evidence -- happened when I began to leave, cutting down the side of the ridge to the more level Ivestor Gap Trail to return to my car: where someone had chosen to have a bowel movement, without burying it, and had violated one of the key tenets of Leave No Trace ethics -- they had even left the dirty toilet paper right on the ground. At least, they hadn't left it right in the middle of the gap.
