I hiked Cold Mountain last Saturday with Charles Frazier’s novel tucked into my pack. The novel is fiction, but the 6,030 foot mountain is very, very real. I experienced firsthand “the contours of mountain wilderness ... undulating as the great ocean after a tempest” that Frazier described in Cold Mountain. And I felt beneath my blistered feet “the wild and broken terrain of scarp and gorge” that the novel’s hero traversed.

Cold Mountain traces the journey of Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier who deserts the war and walks hundreds of miles back to his Cold Mountain home and to Ada, the woman he loved there years ago. Though my 20-mile day hike would not be as epic, I wanted to see the Cold Mountain landscape as Inman described it ... “the fading rows and ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks, each a shade paler and bluer until the ridgeline faded into sky...” For a few hours, I wanted to inhabit “that knotty country where there was room for a man to vanish, where the wind would blow yellow leaves across his footsteps and he would be safe from the wolfish gaze of the world, where he could live a life so quiet he would not need ears.”

I tried to convince my wife to tag along, but dark, drizzling skies kept her at home. So I started alone at the East Fork trailhead off U.S. 276 – the Wagon Road that led to Ada’s farm near Cold Mountain. I hiked a leaf-littered trail that followed “the fall of water down a roaring fork of the Pigeon River” for a few miles, then turned sharply north and began climbing Old Butt Knob. All of the trails leading to Cold Mountain are part of the Shining Rock Wilderness, where there are no trail markers, tree blazes or signposts. This was “wild, unmolested country ... a world of scarp and crag, ridge after ridge fading off blue in the distance.” Without map or compass, I would have to wander like Inman — “lost and befogged” — toward Cold Mountain.

Climbing the rock-pimpled cheek of Old Butt, I passed beneath groves of second-growth beech and poplar. I imagined the ancient trees Inman must have seen — old-growth oaks and “tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end.” Overhead, chinks of sunlight broke through a wall of gray cloud, so I shed my long-sleeve shirt. I topped out along Old Butt’s crack — a wind-swept meadow hairy with sedge grass — then continued climbing up toward “the shining rocks.”

Atop a 6,000-foot mountain, these white quartz outcroppings shimmered like giant mirrors in the sunlight. Inman’s Cherokee friend claimed that the shining rocks were portals to the spirit world: they were “a healing realm ... a place where all scattered forces might gather.” As I perched myself on a quartz boulder and looked across the 18,000-acre Shining Rock Wilderness, I knew he was right. Heaven was below my feet as well as above it. This was wilderness as raw and wild as Inman viewed it: “Rags of cloud hung in the valleys below Inman’s feet, but in all that vista there was not a rooftop or plume of smoke or cleared field to mark a place where man had settled. You could look across that folded landscape and every sense told you that this was all the world there was.”

I teetered in the wet wind. Thirty-mile-per-hour gusts sounded like waves crashing against the mountain. “Wind swept down off Cold Mountain, and all the world quivered in it.” In 30 seconds, I went from bare-chested to long-sleeves and gloves. But as soon as I climbed down, I was sweating again beneath a sunlit sky. I “reckoned it was going to be a day of just every kind of weather.”

Laurel thickets and berry patches choked the footpath heading north toward Cold Mountain. I popped a few ripe blueberries in my mouth, but then I thought about the bears — hunted and hungry and denning up soon — and left the rest for them.

Slanting rain lashed down on my way to Stairs Mountain, a rocky knob shivering in the shadow of Cold Mountain. I footslogged through the flooded trail, slipping on wet leaves and sliding over slick rock. It reminded me of Inman’s dreary hike home. For weeks, he trudged through wet and mud, eating tree bark, watercress, and occasionally feasting on wild mushrooms. The rain kept falling, and “Inman wandered with little enthusiasm, wet as an otter, his body gone dead.”

Fortunately for me, blue patches of sky opened up by the time I reached Deep Gap, at the foot of Cold Mountain. I recalled Inman’s words at the very beginning of the novel: “to live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail.” I had only been in the wilderness for half a day, but I was already starting to notice the little things: rainwater glistening on cinnamon-brown beech leaves underfoot, flycatchers ticking in the trees, raccoon tracks in the mud. I spied a harvest of walnuts on the forest floor and remembered how Inman carried a handful in his backpack his entire journey but never ate them: “He reckoned the work it would take to break them open would overbalance the sustenance he would get from them, each one holding no more meat than the joint of his forefinger. Yet he didn’t throw them out, for he worried that if you put all of life to such a test it would not seem worth living.”

My hike to Cold Mountain passed the walnut test, despite the last three miles of lung-burning, leg-cramping climb from Deep Gap to the summit. The only indication that I reached the top of Cold Mountain was a circular metal benchmark — about the size of a silver-dollar — pressed into a granite boulder. I paused there and admired 360-degree views of the mountains’ fall foliage. Autumn’s artist had used all 128 crayons in the deluxe Crayola box — even the burnt sienna and magenta in the back row. The trees were “a mottle of color,” just as Ada described it: “[they] changed day by day, and if you watched closely you could follow the color as it overtook the green and came down the mountain and spread into the cove like a wave breaking over you slowly.”

I felt lightheaded and giddy on the way back. My ears popped on the steep descent to Deep Gap, and again when I dropped down Shining Rock Mountain and Old Butt Knob. The sun was sinking behind the mountains when I finally heard the gushing East Fork below me. My hike was only a small portion of Inman’s journey through the mountains. But as I rock-hopped across a creek less than a mile from the trailhead, I felt the same “growing joy” Inman experienced as he approached Cold Mountain: “He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on his skin.” I loved the squilch in my shoes, the ache in my calves, and the jaw-dropping beauty of the wilderness all around me. But after a long, lonely day in the woods, I couldn’t wait to get back to my Ada.

(Will Harlan writes about the outdoors and can be reached at wharlan@hotmail.com)

 

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