On The Trail

Preparation: noun.  The state of being made ready beforehand.

Readiness: This is exactly what my friends and I were NOT when we started hiking the Art Loeb Trail in North Carolina. The trail, “it says” is 30.1 miles. Since then, I have also read it is 35 miles…but I think it was more like 100.

The trail begins at the Davidson River near Brevard, North Carolina and curves around Cedar Rock Mountain. Next, the trail ascends Pilot Mountain and heads toward the Pisgah ledge which is the backbone of the mountains in that region. The trail climbs to 6000 feet above the Blue Ridge Parkway. It continues to climb higher to Black Balsam knob, the highest point on the trail. It travels across many more mountain balds and ventures down through the shining rock wilderness. Finally, the trail climbs Cold Mountain and descends steeply down to the Daniel Boone Boy Scout camp on the Little East Fork Pigeon River. It is supposed to be a beautiful trek and from what we gathered before going, it is a three-day hike and fairly easy. It was considered a “medium-level” trail.

It sounds easy, right? Well, for most people that have hiked, it probably is. On the other hand, for my friends and I who had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, it was the most grueling and intense experience we have ever taken part of.

The idea to “venture out” to hike the North Carolina mountains began about six months ago. That’s when we started buying all of our gear. We decided that we didn’t need to be extravagant since we had never backpacked before, so we went the cheap route. We told ourselves, “It’s our first hike. We don’t need to spend a lot of money.” Well, that ended up being our first big mistake. We couldn’t have been more uncomfortable from the start. I, of course, took being “cheap” to the next level by not getting hiking shoes and decided to attempt wearing my five year old Nike Shocks. By the third mile, I found myself with a major issue; the sole of my shoe actually started falling off. The second problem was that we thought it was cool to buy all of this neat gear because we wanted to be “geared up”, as we called it. We had our knives and tons of heavy cans of soup and fuel for our stoves. What it boils down too is; we packed the wrong things we definitely did not need. Instead of lugging around chunky cans, we should have packed freeze-dried foods. In the end, our packs ended up being at least 80 pounds. 80 pounds, 35 miles, uphill mountainous trails?! Sounds like a plan.

The time finally came. The big day. We were heading off on our summer adventure through the Art Loeb Trail with our extremely heavy packs. We parked our car at the other end and my mom dropped us off at the trail head. We were all smiles, full of energy and excitement to go walk this trail that we weren’t worried about in the least bit. My mom took a picture of us at the beginning that we still laugh at because we were so excited and had no idea the despair that we were soon to go through. It started off fine. Of course, we read up on how to use a map and compass. We also brought a handheld GPS that as it turned out, none of us knew how to use. But, that didn’t stop us. We relied on our novice map skills. We headed up the first leg of our hike which was 12 miles. I’m not quite sure how many miles we had gone that first day before we were all miserable and Matt was already out of water. Brian and I rationed the rest of our water to share with Matt.  Now the trickiness began. Matt was out of water, we were all exhausted and we had a lot of ground to cover. Do we turn back, we asked ourselves? We went through the possible scenarios. What would happen if we didn’t find water and if we even had enough water to make it out? We deliberated and decided to push forward. We had come all this way and there wasn’t anything that was going to stop us from finishing. Through our determination and perseverance, we made it to the end of day one, we found water! When we got there, Matt pulled out his own reserve supply of water. He explained that he had saved a little bit in case of an emergency. Well, this was an emergency! Day one down. I knew now we could make it the rest of the days because that night I ate as much as I could to lighten the load of my pack. I ate every stupid, heavy can of soup I had.

The remainder of the trip was much like the first day. My shoe was slowly falling apart. It was now held together by string and there were holes that I used to poke the string through the top of my shoe to hold it on my foot. Thankfully, our packs were a little lighter but now we were sore from day one. On a positive note, as we got going each morning, our bodies warmed and loosened up. The only other difficult part was Shining Rock, which is where the trail became unmarked. Luckily, we had our Garmin with us: AKA Brian. Remember how well we know how to use it? Well, Brian had it all figured out. He told us, “Hey guys, we’re heading the right direction.”  But the right direction shortly left us standing with a dead end and nowhere to go except back the way we had come. So that’s exactly what we did. We eventually resorted to the old-fashioned method and finally found a marked branch that got us back on the trail.

In the end, we were in way over our heads. It reminded me of a baseball game I went to last night. The Tampa Bay Rays were down by four in the bottom of the ninth and had made many errors. But they never gave up. They gave it everything they had to come back and score five runs to win the game. For some reason, this reminded me of our expedition. This so-called “moderate trail” wasn’t so moderate. Every sign we passed said “most difficult”, but we pushed on. By our sheer will, we made it to the other end. Through encouraging and motivating each other to go just a little further, we were able to persevere and accomplish what we had set out to do. By all means we were still very ill-prepared but we learned a lot through the experience and have a memory of something we will never forget.

Moral of the story: Learn from our mistakes. Don’t do what we did. Do your homework and BE PREPARED!

Words by Cameron Guinn