The first rule of encountering a bear on the long, lonely trails of the Smoky Mountains isn’t to yell or to wave your arms, and it certainly isn’t to run screaming in the other direction as fast as your trembling legs will take you.
No, the first rule of meeting a bear in the Smokies is much simpler.
“Enjoy the experience,” said Erik Plakanis as his van whisked me and my fellow city-dwelling friends, Tony and Mike, across curving Tennessee highways into North Carolina, toward a trailhead where we would begin a four-day, 30-plus-mile walk through the woods.
We would be walking west, mostly in a straight-ish line through the eastern edge of the park, uphill and downhill, then uphill and downhill some more, with our worlds on our backs. Water would come from creeks and streams. Our next showers, and anything resembling a toilet, would be enjoyed once back in the land of cellphones and Internet.
But the trip began in Plakanis’ van. Before piling in for the 90-minute ride to our trailhead, we had left our car at the point where we would hike out. Plakanis, who had spent 15 years working in the Smokies, mostly as a trail guide, spent the time imparting wisdom that we eagerly lapped up.
Most eyebrow-raising was his bear talk. He’d had 323 encounters, he said, and if we were lucky, we would have one too. If meeting an aggressive or overly curious bear, he advised, stand tall. Wave our arms. Summon deep guttural sounds. But don’t run. And, most of all, enjoy the experience — at least until the bear gets more aggressive (which, odds were, it wouldn’t).
We weren’t there to see a bear as much as to get away from everything else. The Smokies get nearly 10 million visitors per year, the most of any national park. (That distinction is a function of two-thirds of nation living within a day’s drive of the park, and there are no entry fees.) Lore has it that of all those visitors, fewer than 10 percent leave the park’s paved roads and walking paths. One percent spend at least one night backpacking. Half of those backpackers hike the Appalachian Trail. That math leaves the vast majority of the park’s 521,000 acres to a tiny percentage of visitors.
We wanted something quieter and less trodden. Hopefully with a bear or two — at a distance. To get as remote as possible, we opted for a sliver of the nearly 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail, which parallels the famed Appalachian Trail.
Day 1: 6.1 miles, 3,500-foot elevation gain
There’s no grand way to begin four days of walking 30 miles with 30 pounds on your back; you simply put one foot in front of the other and relish the beginning of a journey. It is, of course, slightly jarring to know that such a journey lies ahead, but there also is joy in not knowing what to expect from the challenge. The joy became increasingly apparent as Mike and Tony talked of how trivial many of our daily worries already seemed. Six hundred miles from home feels infinitely farther without electricity or a roof overhead.
When planning the trip, we had a decision to make: start with a brutal day of walking uphill or end with a brutal day of downhill. We unanimously decided to start with the climb. My vote was rooted in the fact that walking up might be taxing, but walking down hurts the knees, the hips and the ankles. I’ll take hard work over pain any day.
Things started simply enough, with a level walk through the sun-dappled woods. The day couldn’t have been better. We were in nature! The only sounds were our shuffling boots, our chatter and the wind in the trees. But soon every step began taking us higher. Five-minute breaks on the side of the trail morphed into 20. We didn’t see another person after a mile in, and for good reason — who in his right mind would walk uphill with all this weight on his back?
But it was beautiful, and it was where we wanted to be. The leafy forest gave way to thick stands of evergreens, fields of boulders, blackberry patches that doubled as bear cafeterias and acres of moss-covered everything. And, finally, after five or six hours, legs quaking, we reached the top of Mount Sterling and its fire tower. After pitching our tents, we wearily climbed that tower to gaze upon the Tennessee and North Carolina forests rolling out in prefect green carpets, layers of peaks dotting the horizon. It was a distinctly Eastern mountain landscape: rolling and green, not jagged and rocky.
We met the usual collection of peaceful, reflective hikers up there: two friends from Cincinnati who were on their third night in the park; a guy traveling alone who just finished grad school in Knoxville, Tenn., and was trying to figure out what to do next with his life; and a group of students from a Christian college in Southern Illinois doing a trip that would culminate with them splitting up for a solitary night of silent meditation in these woods.
Mike, Tony and I ate the first of our three freeze-dried dinners (chicken, potatoes and gravy in a bag never tasted so good!), and despite a bone-deep exhaustion, nursed ourselves toward wellness with backpacking’s most essential ingredients: food, copious water and ibuprofen. We then used the park’s pulley system to crank our backpacks to a bearproof 15 feet into the air and crawled into our tents as a yellow half moon rose in the sky.
Day 2: 5.5 miles, 200-foot decline
We had vague ambitions of waking up to see sunrise from the fire tower. Instead, we slept. And slept. I was the last awake, finally opening my eyes about 9:30 a.m. The sun was already three-quarters high, and the college kids were long gone. There was no clock radio. No cellphone or email to check. Sweet liberation. Once the coffee was poured — instant, mixed with water boiled on a small propane stove from my backpack — we ruminated on the previous day.
Tony said it was “almost surreal how the incline would not stop.” Mike said it was worth it but later admitted that he might have been hallucinating from exhaustion. In a month, we figured, we’d laugh off the difficulty of the previous day. But that morning, as the soreness flared and we had 25 miles to go, it couldn’t be glossed over quite so easily. Even daily trips to the gym back home don’t quite prepare you for walking uphill with 30 pounds on your back. But that’s exactly why you do it. (I freely admit that we probably overpacked, but it’s hard not to do when imagining how to stay comfortable in the elements.)
After a freeze-dried breakfast, we returned to the trail, feeling a little more in the moment and in the hike. We soon met a man sitting on the side of the trail who wore green shorts and a green-and-yellow button-up shirt. He had a gray buzz cut, a gray goatee and a face that had turned bright red from all the work he’d expended that morning. He was from Tuscaloosa, Ala., and in the accompanying drawl explained that he’d been visiting the park’s most remote trails for nearly 50 years.
Fifteen years ago, he said, he did the very hike we were attempting in a single day. He finished in the dark and was barely able to savor the second half of the journey. He was too tired to even bother climbing the fire tower.
Tony, Mike and I pushed on across a trail of ups and downs, losing and gaining a few hundred feet through thick brush that scratched our legs and across winding, shaded trails of dirt and rock. We crossed the occasional stream, where we would replenish our water and then filter what we captured. We passed ferns, pine and moss-covered fallen logs. The last few miles were blessedly flat, which made for quite the antidote to the previous day.
We arrived at camp about 6 p.m., where the plushest accommodations of the trip awaited: a three-sided stone shelter featuring long, wood platforms where it’s first come, first served and you might end up lying side by side with strangers, as we did. We ran into the college kids again — with whom we would share the shelter — and one said they had wondered what had happened to us.
“Just taking our time, relaxing and enjoying,” I said.
In truth, our groups were practicing very different approaches to backpacking. They would rise about 6 a.m., eat, pack up and hit the trail. They’d get where they were going by about 2 p.m. and spend the afternoon relaxing. Conversely, we were sleeping in and taking most of the day to walk, with long, relaxing breaks; we’d arrive to camp in time for dinner and some lounging (cards, reading or simply staring at the trees) and nipping at our plastic flasks of whiskey before watching the sun set and heading to sleep. I admired their method but remained dedicated to our approach.
The only rain of the trip fell that night. The soft drumming on the shelter’s roof woke me long enough to be glad I wasn’t in a tent. Then I drifted back off.
Day 3: 10 miles, 2,000-foot decline
The intensity and elevation made the first day tough, but if it had a competitor, this was it. Day 3 was a natural roller coaster spanning our longest distance: a 2,500-foot drop along Beech Gap Trail, a 2,000-foot climb and, finally, another drop, of 1,500 feet, to our campsite. The initial drop felt like relief but also made the midday climb, after a brief lunch, a grind. But, of course, it was pretty as we descended from conifers to maples and then back up to conifers. The world was varied, and it unfolded at the speed it was meant to: step by step.
Somewhere around midday Tony said, “You know what’s crazy? We have no idea what’s happening in the world.” We all agreed that the ignorance to current events seemed liberating. Sure, a comet might have been discovered that would slam into the Earth, or maybe the stock market had crashed. But we were on trail time. Our only realities on a sunny, 70-degree afternoon were putting one foot in front of the other, finding the next stream, reaching our campsite by dark and keeping an eye out for bears. About those bears …
We were a mile or so from camp and thankfully wrapping up a difficult day as dusk approached. We were walking along a hillside: the trail angled up to our left, then down to our right. Down the hill, I caught the slow movement of something dark in my peripheral vision. I paused, squinted into the brush and, sure enough: a bear! It looked like a little fellow and moved slowly, toddling gracefully from snack to snack — probably blackberry bushes. I raised a hand and whispered to Tony, who was directly behind, “Bear.” We watched it for a moment without concern — it was about 75 feet below us — when a scuffling and a snort in the bushes directly ahead startled us.
It was no more than 10 feet away, and we collectively shrieked with the thought that it might be another bear — a larger, angrier bear feeling protective of that littler bear down the hill. But we quickly recognized it as a boar. Still, our surprise startled the boar, which led it to scamper up the hill with unbelievable quickness and agility. And unfortunately, that caught the attention of the bear, which booked it in the other direction. It was a brief, but we had seen our bear. And I could say I had enjoyed the experience.
A mile later we reached our campsite, which was simply stunning and the loveliest so far. It sat in a tight, cozy meadow hemmed in on one side by a wall of boulders and trees, with wildly rushing Enloe Creek on the other side. That last night was our favorite. We’d seen a bear and landed at a picture-perfect campsite. We finished off our whiskey in celebration.
Day 4: 9 miles, 1,400-foot decline
I woke to the shadow of a daddy long legs skittering across the skin of my bright blue tent. I watched its graceful movement for a bit, then joined Mike and Tony for coffee and our last freeze-dried meal in the wild, perched beside that rushing creek.
We loaded up our bags, shoulders sore from four days of weight, and pushed out for yet another varied day: We climbed 1,500 feet and then dropped steeply on switchbacks to patches of old-growth forest. Except for the college students lying in the woods in meditation, we didn’t see another person.
That final day was long, but didn’t feel particularly taxing with the knowledge that the end was near. About 3 p.m. we reached Mike’s car in a campground that felt strangely and unappealingly modern — asphalt, campers flying American flags and kids chasing bright, inflated balls. We shed our backpacks and traded our boots for flip-flops. We high-fived and hugged and grudgingly headed back to what seemed like “civilization” in name only.
The pizza and beer and showers that night were quite welcome. But, no lie, that hotel bed was nowhere near as peaceful as the previous three nights had been in a sleeping bag.
Twitter @joshbnoel
If you go
The place to base a trip to the Smokies is Gatlinburg, Tenn., where hotels, restaurants and tourists are abundant. Any gear you might need also is available in town at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (1138 Parkway, 865-277-8209, http://www.noc.com). We hired A Walk in the Woods (865-436-8283; http://www.awalkinthewoods.com) to drive us to the trailhead at a cost of $126 (rates vary based on pickup and dropoff points). It’s a full-service guide company, which also includes guided day hikes (which start at $20 per person) and guided overnight backpacking trips (starting at $235 per person).
