Grayson Highlands State Park

I hiked through Grayson Highlands during my Appalachian thru-hike in 1996, but I didn’t camp here for a very good reason.  The Appalachian Trail back then was 2159 miles.  The blue blaze trail to the state park was 0.66 miles.  

My hiking partners and I had some rules during the thru-hike.  We would walk 0.2 or 0.3 if we needed water or a shelter, but I tried to keep extra miles at a minimum.  If there was a cold six pack of beer or a hamburger and fries at the other end of the 0.66, there would be no question.  But the blue blaze trail leads only to a gravel overnight parking lot.

With the Brew Hut and Nissan truck, I am no longer constrained by those rules.  I parked in the ugly little gravel overnight parking lot and started hiking up the mountain where it  joins the Appalachian Trail. Within a quarter of a mile, I saw something that I never saw on my thru-hike: one of the the famous Grayson Highlands wild ponies right on the trail walking towards us.

For once, Callie was quiet and still.  Eventually, the pony got too close (they bite and kick), so we wandered to the left.  It wandered to the right.
Soon, we climbed to the intersection of the spur trail and the A.T.  Just like on Roan Mountain, the ridges are grass and shrubs.  The views are stunning.

Callie and I continued southbound into the Mount Rodgers Wilderness.  We peaked out at around 5200′ in elevation.  The climb was in direct sun and without wind;  Callie was hot.  I shared some of my water bottle with her, but it was time to head back.  A breeze picked up for the mostly downhill hike. We met some other hikers who were southbound and stopped to chat with one guy who wanted a photo of Callie for his daughter.

On the way down the spur trail, there were more ponies.

Hickory Ridge Campground

The campsites at Hickory Ridge are wooded.  I haven’t seen any hickory nuts, but the leaves are falling, and so are the acorns.  When one hits the top of the Scamp, it is startling.  Something that sounded like a larger hickory nut falling several hundred yards just hit the roof, but I couldn’t find the evidence.

Worst Christmas Ever?

Those were my daughter’s words, and I can understand how she feels.  I haven’t blogged recently because we are going through a bit of a tough time.  Julia’s Dad had a stroke last weekend, and we’ve been spending a lot of time at the Intensive Care Unit at UW Hospital.  Christmas is also Julia’s birthday, so I’m sure this won’t go down as one of the best birthdays either.  Gene is in critical condition, and a lot of bad things can still happen. He did open his eyes this morning and gave a small thumbs up, so we are cautiously optimistic.


I’m going to focus on some of the fun stuff we have done together.  I’m not much of a fisherman, but Gene taught me how to ice fish.  This wasn’t the setting up the fishing shack with the gas heater and portable tv type of fishing.  This was drill your hole with a manual auger and plop your butt on a plastic bucket kind of fishing.  We usually caught fish, which is the only kind of fishing that I enjoy.

Gene also hiked part of the Appalachian Trail with me.  After my diagnosis and treatment with Lyme’s Disease, I headed back to the trail with Gene.  He was no backpacker, although he has been an oudoorsman all of his life  We hiked for three days together: 10 miles, 9 miles and 8 miles. Gene’s trail name was Tag-Along.   At the end of the third day, he declared that the A.T. wasn’t for him and hitched a ride back to the nearest airport.  For a nearly 60-year-old man with no backpacking experience, he did quite well.

Hug the ones you love (if you can; I’m not a hugger).  There are no guarantees, and life can change in an instant.  In Gene’s honor, I will go out of order today and post the end of his hike with me on the A.T. in 1996.

All my Life’s a Circle

The first real date with my wife Julia was at a Harry Chapin concert.  My college roommate Joe and I were big Chapin fans.  It wasn’t so much Chapin’s voice as his lyrics.  The guy had a way with stories.  Joe gave me permission to use his ticket to ask Julia out.  When Julia said yes, Joe gave up his ticket and missed the concert.  Unfortunately, Chapin died a year later at the age of 39.  I don’t think Joe ever got to see him in concert.  Thanks, Joe, for making the sacrifice.

One of my favorite Chapin songs is “All my Life’s a Circle.”  Part of the song goes like this:

“It seems like I’ve been here before;
I can’t remember when;
But I have this funny feeling;
That we’ll all be together again.
No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There’s no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.”

I thought of that song this week when I ran into Jeff, a guy I knew in high school and played a lot of sports with–mainly one-on-one basketball.  He was much better than I was in the team sport of basketball and later played college ball. I could compete with him in one-on-one playground ball.  I’ve run into Jeff every five or ten years–mostly randomly.  This week, Jeff spotted me at a poetry and art presentation at my favorite brewpub, Working Draft.  I think it’s probably been ten years since I last saw Jeff.  We’ve both aged and it took us each a while to do the recognition thing.  We both have a disabled adult child in college, and we joked a bit about the challenges of that.  I don’t have many friends from high school that I’ve stayed in touch with. It was good to see Jeff and strange to reflect how our lives keep circling on back.

I’ve spent the last few days hiking the Ice Age Trail with Callie, my new border heeler.  She loves our hikes, especially when we go fast downhill.  Hiking fast downhill (a/k/a running) was something that I did a lot of during my Appalachian Trail hike with a fully loaded pack.  With no pack at all, it’s fairly easy although I’m not getting any younger.

Growing older:   I’ve been doing some reflecting on the A.T. hike.  Over the years, different people have asked to borrow my trail journal, which I gladly loaned out.  But due to the miracle of the internet, I think it would be fairly easy to photograph an entry of the journal and put it at the end of my posts. Some people might find that interesting, and those who don’t can just skip over the end. I haven’t read it in over twenty years, so it might even be interesting to me.  There would  be some minor editing to partially preserve family privacy.

The thru-hike represented a huge shift in my life.  “No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends.”  I went from being a fairly well-respected young trial lawyer, practicing on the civil defense side of things, to an unemployed guy living in the woods putting one foot ahead of the other for 2159 miles.  This all started in the spring of 1996. The original journal was scrawled in a small spiral notebook.  Pages were ripped out and sent home, where my wife Julia typed them up, best as she could, because my handwriting isn’t very good, especially when laying down in a sleeping bag. 

Quite a bit of the journal went into a local weekly newspaper.  A few excerpts appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal in a story entitled “Trail Attorney.”  A customer/psychologist/part time artist borrowed the journal to read at home and returned it to the coffee shop with an amazing hand-carved leather cover.   The photo inside the cover was taken by Julia near Front Royal, Virginia, a little less than half-way on the hike.

The first page is my wife’s introduction to the journal:

Tennessee: Roan Highlands, Part Two

March 27th:
I woke to a light drizzle and made a quick breakfast of fruit, hot oatmeal, and cocoa.  No one was up and moving at the campground; everyone was tucked into their heated RV’s.  But I was on the road by 8 a.m.  The drive to Carver’s Gap was only about 15 minutes from the campground.

As you can see from the photo above, there were plenty of parking spots available.  In fact, I didn’t see anyone actually hiking for about the first three hours.  Hiking conditions were not ideal.  The climb out of the gap was about 700 vertical feet of icy switchbacks.  The reward was a view of the cloud that covered the top of the mountain.

The Roan Highlands are known for grassy mountain tops (balds) and grassy ridges. In most of the southern Appalachians, mountain tops tend to be heavily wooded and without views. In the northern Appalachians, tree line can be as low as 4000 feet with views for forever from rocky, bare mountaintops.  Although it appears from my photos that there is just a heavy stationary cloud, the winds were actually blowing about 40 mph, so the clouds were in rapid motion.  Down at Carver’s Gap, the thermometer indicated about 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  Up on top, it felt like the low 20’s with colder wind chill.  I was dressed with long underwear (top and bottom), two sets of socks, t-shirt, heavy fleece sweater, rain jacket, and knit cap.  There was a light drizzle at the gap and a stinging sleet on top.

I passed Round Bald and Jane Bald before descending back into the woods.  I passed an abandoned Coleman tent that was apparently not quite up to the conditions.

At just over 3 miles, I was excited to see my first trail shelter in over 20 years.  My excitement diminished when I got up close and saw that someone had taken over the entire shelter by putting up their tent in the shelter.  I had planned to sign the trail register, but whoever was in the shelter was still inside the tent with the trail register at 10 a.m.  Some things don’t change. On my thru hike,  I was always first up in the shelter and on the trail. I was typically finished by 2 or 3 pm after a 15-20 mile day.  Many of the  twenty somethings hiked the same distance but didn’t get started until late morning (or later) and didn’t get to the shelter until after dark. 

I continued hiking on.  The trail traveled back and forth from winter to spring and back again, depending on where I was on the mountain.  I also passed a marker for Yellow Mountain Gap where a group of mountain men traveled in 1780 to defeat the British soldiers during the Revolutionary War.   Finally, I reached my second shelter, Overland Shelter, and signed the trail register:  “Quid Pro Quo Returns”  GA>ME ’96. Translation:  my thru-hiker nickname was Quid Pro Quo, and I hiked northbound from Georgia to Maine in 1996.

The Overland Shelter is a converted barn and has sleeping quarters on two floors.  A lone section hiker in his 20’s was present when I arrived. He told me that he had been section hiking the Appalachian Trail for about eight years.

After eating my lunch of trail mix and water, I said goodbye and started on the return trip to Carver’s Gap.  The folks tenting in the first shelter had woken up and were having breakfast (at noon).  I waved hello/goodbye and headed back up into the balds.  The view had improved.

As I crossed the balds and down the mountain (southbound), I did run into several thru-hikers who were northbound.  I could tell they instantly dismissed me as a day hiker who was not one of them.   And they were right.  My time as a thru-hiker has passed.  It still felt wonderful to be “back on the trail.”  My hike finished up at 13 miles for the day.  My feet were sore, and I was ready for a beer.

I drove to the Station, which is a newish hiker taproom/hostel on Hwy 19e just east of Roan Moiuntain, TN .  The bartender, who was nicknamed “Crazy”, gave me a couple of samples of Tennessee IPA’s.  I selected the Scatterbrain IPA by Bearded Iris Brewing of Nashville.  “Crazy” called it one of the top three IPA’s in the country.  I  agree that it was a great IPA and drank two of them.  We shared some hiking stories and I arranged to use their parking services for the next day’s hike.