By Beth Powis, Group Outing Chair

Los Angeles, CA

Ever since I’d read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson I’d been curious about backpacking the Appalachian Trail, as he had done and chronicled hilariously in his book. When this past October I discovered a Sierra Club chapter in Tennessee preparing to hike the trail at the peak of fall colors, I was off.

And so two weeks before Halloween I found myself soaking wet, slip-sliding up and down the AT in pouring rain, and yelling at a tree limb when for the third time one tricked me into thinking it was our much-longed-for trail shelter, only to turn back into a tree as I got closer. A walk in the woods indeed.

Of course unlike Bryson I wasn’t hiking the whole 2,100+ mile Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. We were traversing just half of the approximately 80 miles that straddle Tennessee and North Carolina, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

But the 12 miles we hiked that day were the longest miles I’d ever hiked.

"This was what one of my friends would call a ‘character-buildin’ day," said trip leader Katherine Pendleton in her friendly southern drawl after we were finally ensconced in Siler’s Bald trail shelter (Siler being one of the Southern Appalachia mountain folk who lived here before the Park Service kicked them out in the early 1930’s to create the park, and "bald" being an open meadow perched on a mountain). It was the third day of our six-day trip. With us were three friends of Katherine’s from Nashville; Nancy J, a kindergarten teacher, Nancy’s beau Jerry, a firefighter and emergency medical technician, and Nancy F., a recreational therapist in a long-term-care facility.

All of us were soaked to one degree or another, despite raingear. Damp clothes and gear decorated the rafters and every inch of the chain-link fence that formed a barricade across the front of the shelter. Meant to keep bears out, the fences turned the shelters into a perverse sort of reverse zoo. Each night we’d shut the gate and lock ourselves in by wrapping a chain around the gatepost. Inevitably I’d be awakened several hours later by the clanking of the chain and rattling of the gate when someone went outside to pee. We stayed at a different shelter each night, and never did see any bears.

We dried out from our drenching the next day. The rest of our days were a mixture of sun and the deep, misty fog that gives the Smokies their name. Hardwood trees with magnificent fall foliage grew in dense thickets right up to the sides of the trail. Damp leaves underfoot hid rocks and roots and made the steep trail slippery, sometimes treacherous. It wasn’t until the fourth day of our trip that we climbed high enough to escape the deep forest and have any sort of real view. Always we followed the ridgeline straight up – and down – the rolling hills until we reached our goal, that day’s shelter.

Made of stone with a tin roof, the shelters are completely open on one side (except for the fence). Despite this, it’s dark and dank inside most of them. Two large wooden sleeping platforms, one several feet above the other, stretch the width of the shelter, forming in essence a huge bunk bed with a roof. Each shelter sleeps 12, and ours were almost always full. However, one hiker we met said they packed 25 people into a shelter during one particularly nasty storm several years ago.

Each night we’d clip our food sacks to the bear cables strung up in the nearby trees and use a pulley to haul them safely aloft. Water came from natural springs, most with a lead pipe funneling the water into a shallow puddle. Not so nice were the "toilet areas" at shelters that didn’t have an outdoor privy. Basically a designated patch of woods, these areas were littered with toilet paper and sometimes unburied human waste. With more than 10 million people traveling through the Smokies each year, many of them on the Appalachian Trail, such impact is perhaps inevitable, but still deplorable.

The only person in our group not from Nashville, I was treated with warm Southern hospitality. Officially I was co-leader of the trip, filling in at the last minute. But this trip was more relaxed than official, and my trip-mates were quickly becoming friends. We traded stories of hikes and adventures, and they taught me the words to "Rocky Top," the fight song for the University of Tennessee. Named after a peak we’d hiked across on day two, it embodied perfectly the history and character of these mountains: "Ain’t no smoggy smoke on Rocky Top, ain’t no telephone bills…"

The shelters, crowded as they were, nevertheless turned out to be a great place to meet and study people. There was "The Jerk" who tried to hog two spaces in a full shelter until Katherine (who is also a park volunteer) shamed him into giving one to a thru-hiker who needed a spot. Then there were the five men from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado who drank, smoked and held a farting contest after the rest of us went to bed (note to self: bring earplugs!). We met a young couple, both environmental biologists, who were on a six-month road trip from Virginia to Mexico and who had stopped off to hike in the Smokies. And there was the pack of teenage Boy Scouts who forgot an entire box of honey buns when they left the next morning, much to our delight.

Our last day we met two thru-hikers on the trail, a man and woman. They had just gotten back on the trail after a few days washing up and resupplying in a nearby town. Somehow we never got their names. But we laughed as they told us how they became instant celebrities at their latest trailhead when people found out they were thru-hikers. "Everyone wanted to take their picture with us," the woman said, "even our cabdriver!" We politely refrained.

I spent the last night on the trail remembering entries people had written in the various shelter registers. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if it keeps on rainin’ my butt will rust," was one favorite. I drew pictures in the register of people rollerblading under palm trees on the Santa Monica bike path.

The sixth day of our trip we emerged, craving beer and pizza, at Newfound Gap, the spot where Teddy Roosevelt had dedicated the park in 1937. And then all too soon I was back on an airplane heading home, my walk in the woods completed, but new friendships just begun.