week of 3/20/02
 
 
 

‘Haunting’ solidifies Simmons’ reputation
By George Ellison
When backpacking was the only wayHave you ever really bushwacked through the mountains? I don’t mean getting off-trail for a few minutes. I mean flat-out floundering through the deep tangles for hours or even days without a trail or a decent idea where you might be.

My most memorable experience in that regard occurred back in the mid-1980s when searching for Tsali’s Rock on the headwaters of the Left Fork of Deep Creek. The rhododendron was so thick we had to bellycrawl. The best way out, since there was no trail, was wading downstream in the creek. These days I generally avoid that sort of terrain. But it warms my heart when I hear or read about someone else’s adventures along those lines.

That’s why I stayed up most of a night last week reading Paul Fink’s Backpacking Was the Only Way (Johnson City, Tennessee: Research Advisory Council, East Tennessee State University, 1975). The book had been in my library for years, but I’d never gotten around to reading it. That’s the way good books are sometimes ... they just sit there patiently on your shelves waiting for you to get around to them.

Paul Fink (1892-1980) was an outdoor writer for numerous publications who specialized in hiking and campcraft topics. He was a leader of the movement that led to the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934, a member of the Board of Managers of the Appalachian Trail from 1925 to 1949, and an officer in the Tennessee Historical Society. Moreover, he was one of the most ardent backpackers the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina have ever known.

“Backpacking Was the Only Way” is a collection of descriptions (Apparently based on journal entries) of backcountry hikes Fink made, mostly with his lifelong friend Walter S. Diehl, during the first half of the 20th century. Each outing is headed in the following manner:

Date: June 9-19, 1919.

Destination: Eastern end of the Great

Smokies.

Object: Exploration.

Weather: Generally fair, some rain.

Party: Walter S. Diegl, Paul M. Fink.

The hike that I most enjoyed reading about was the one cited above. Keep in mind that this was 15 years before there was a national park in the Smokies and long before there was an Appalachian Trail — or, for that matter, any sort of trail — along the high divide between North Carolina and Tennessee. Here are some excerpts from that narrative (all material placed in parentheses is by this writer):

“When Walter and I had stood on the Cliff Top of Le Conte in the summer of 1916 and looked out at the rugged eastern half of the Smokies, he had fired my imagination with stories of their untouched and primeval wilderness, where there was only the barest evidence of man’s presence. We had laid tentative plans then to visit this section the next summer. Little did we think that a world was so close in the making, and that three full years would intervene before we would have the chance to be together in the mountains again. When the war ended in the fall of 1918 our plans were immediately revived, and when summer came again we were on our own.”

JUNE 9-13 1919. (They take a train from Knoxville to Townsend and then went on to the Wonderland Park Hotel on the boundary of the Smokies at Elkmont, where they load up their 60-pound backpacks with provisions. Fink’s pack was a “combination pack-harness and trumpline, designed to my own ideas, using a Navy seabag to hold my outfit.” Their tent was a “Compac that had the great virtue of being lightweight, but was very cramped quarters for two men. Walter soon dubbed it our ‘sleeping sock’ and said we put it on rather than get into it.” They hike through Huskey Gap and down the steep path to the West Prong of Little Pigeon River and spend the night at the cabin of Davis Bracken under the Chimney Tops, where they spend two days fishing and exploring, and talking with Bracken, who makes an appearance in chapter 20 of the 1922 expanded edition of Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders as “Jasper Finn.”

“JUNE 14, 1919. (They make a tough climb “straight up” the mountainside to Newfound Gap on the Tennessee-North Carolina state line.) At a fork in the trail, the seemingly best way turned to the right up a short ridge and then took us down five hundred feet, along a steep, rough trail cut through a laurel slick, before we could look back and, seeing the higher mountains on our left, realize our mistake. Losing the way was nothing to worry about. It was the hard pull back up, under heavy pack, that galled us ... Emerging suddenly from the timber screen at the Jump-off, we were perched on the rim of a gigantic bowl, broken in half, its sides the northeastern end of Mt. Kephart (known at that time as Mt. Collins, officially changed to Mt. Kephart in the early 1930s) and the main Smoky range. From beneath our feet the mountain fell away precipitously for a thousand feet and more before sloping sharply down to the headwaters of Porters Creek ... The first night’s camp atop the Smokies was half a mile east of Mt. Kephart. There was no spot level enough for a decent campsite, so our tiny Compac tent was set up right on the state line, where Walter and I, sleeping side by side, lay in different states, he in Carolina and I in Tennessee.

“JUNE 15, 1919. Our shoes were showing some signs of disintegration ... With a rock for a last and the poll of the axe for a hammer, we nailed the soles back on ... The scenery along the Sawteeth just ahead of us is the most spectacular (and) rugged portion of the whole Smoky range ... The name is most apt, for the divide resembles nothing so much as the blade of a titanic saw, the teeth a succession of sharp peaks rising two or three hundred feet above the gaps between, all at an altitude of six thousand feet above the sea.

“For a long distance the crest of the ridge will average scarcely three feet in width with many places barely wide enough for a foothold. On either side, particularly on the north, the sides drop nearly straight down. But for the protection afforded by the dense bushes it would be a hazardous undertaking to attempt passage. Even as it is, the trip is not free of falling.

“The scenery from the Sawteeth is magnificant, the grandest we were to see, with the possible exception of the view of Mt. Guyot from Sharp Top. All along the way are outlooks giving a panorama stretching all the way from Mts. Mingus and Kephart to Laurel Top. Le Conte was a distant feature, we would catch occasional glimpses of Clingmans Dome and Guyot. Range ranked behind range until the misty blue of the distant mountains merged imperceptibly into the haze of the horizon. A wilder and more rugged country I never hope to see ...

“It was very dry on top, and this evening we had to descend more than a thousand feet on the south side (below Porters Gap) in search of water. Part of the way we involuntarily slid, for each of us had lost the heel off a shoe in the rough going of the day. On fairly level trails this would bother us little, if at all. But descending steep grades, where one depends on his boot heels for braking, one or the other of us was continually slipping and hitting the earth with a thud, usually dull and sickening, as all thuds in literature are supposed to be, with his pack on top of him. Then the whole tangled mess would roll down hill ‘till some friendly tree stopped him. Fully half the descent was made in this fashion. (They spend the night far down the mountainside.)

“JUNE 16, 1919. Any long climb under pack is bad enough, but facing it the first thing in the morning, before the strengthening effect of breakfast begin to show themselves is a discouraging prospect indeed. The steep pull back to Porters Gap this morning was a heartbreaking one. (Things get worse: Diehl swallowed a bug while eating breakfast and “developed a nausea and a burning thirst,” and their canteen springs a leak so that Fink has to scramble up and down the slopes time and again to find water for him.)

“JUNE 17-18, 1919. (As they are taking in the view of Mt. Guyot from Sharp Top, ‘one of the grandest views of a single mountain” Fink had ever seen, a violent thunderstorm drives them to seek protection under a tree, but their clothes are soaked. When they subsequently start a campfire to dry them out, a portion of their clothing placed too close to the fire is scorched. But they push on. On the 18th they “turned straight down the mountainside” headed home.) The descent was as steep as anything we had negotiated on the entire trip. Often we had to lower ourselves by clinging to bushes, and at times had to slide a short distance. To add to our discomfort, the two rains we had heard met overhead, and in a trice soaked us to the skin, for there was no sign of shelter.

“JUNE 19, 1919. Home by train and bus, via Newport and Greeneville, stopping for a shave, so the folks at home would recognize us. All a prosaic ending for the longest and hardest trip I had yet taken.

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com