Next time you hike a trail, pause a minute and give silent thanks to the legion of trail volunteers who have taken up arms and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the forest, hacking back the undergrowth and clearing obstructive logs.

Volunteer trail crews devoted 28,000 hours of labor in North Carolina’s national forests last year. It often seems like an uphill battle, with the earth constantly trying to reclaim the zigzag of footpaths cut through mountains, but so far crews are holding their own.

“The trails, I think, are really in good shape,” said Mary Gollwitzer, a hiker in Haywood County.

Before Gollwitzer leads a hike for her club — known as the Leisure Hikers — she makes a practice of scouting the trail ahead of time.

“I don’t like to all of a sudden lead a hike and never have gone on it myself. I stay away from that because I don’t know what to expect,” Gollwitzer said.

She might revise the hike plan if the trail is too steep or has large boulders to scramble over, but she’s never ruled out a hike for the club because of maintenance issues.

Volunteer trail crews make sure the cumulative mass of fallen limbs and downed trees don’t eventually overwhelm trails. They build back washed out bridges, repair eroding trail beds, fix soggy sections by diverting water from the trail, and cart out lots and lots of trash.

There are more than two dozen volunteer groups in the mountains that lend their sweat and muscle to take care of trails. The biggest is Carolina Mountain Club, which runs six volunteer trail crews that comb the mountains several times a week fixing problem spots on the trail.

“Our primary mission is to promote hiking in Western North Carolina, and of course, that means we need trails to hike on,” said Marcia Bromberg, president of Carolina Mountain Club.

Carolina Mountain Club logged 17,344 volunteer hours for trail maintenance in 2011, covering about 400 miles of trail.

Carolina Mountain Club is a stickler for detail when it comes to their trail work, approaching their maintenance reports with a level of notation and specificity you would expect from a NASA shuttle launch.

Some trail volunteers pack their handheld GPS unit, able to catalog the exact trouble spot.

“I observed a dead fall at E 36404, N 3946090 whose removal will require a later trip,” crew leader Wayne Steinmetz reported on a trail scouting trip.

Or, “I observed that ice covered the trail at E 365491, N 3946623 (WGS 83 horizontal datum).”

Their trail maintenance log from 2011 goes on like this — for 190 pages — detailing the who, what, when and how of more than 1,200 volunteer work outings held last year by their various trail crews.

“Hiked in from Sunburst on FS 97 and 97H. Cleared several simple downs, repaired tread at two wash locations and lopped rodies and beech sprouts along uphill side of trail,” Paul Dickens wrote in his report of a workday in the Middle Prong Wilderness in Haywood County last January.

Most trail reports are highly clinical in nature, but you can always tell when Becky Smucker’s come through. She can’t resist throwing in a line about the weather and her botanical findings of the day.

“We did a spring scout of Shining Creek Trail …We removed downs, lopped some, fixed some drainage, reworked one major tread problem, removed some fire rings and carried out a little trash. It was a gorgeous spring days, and giant Vasey’s trillium was in bloom,” Smucker wrote in one report from a workday near Cold Mountain in Haywood County last May.

Strength in numbers

Several volunteer trail groups have sprung up to take care of trails in a very specific area, such as Friends of Whiteside Mountain in Highlands, or of a particular trail, like the Bartram Trail Society or Benton MacKaye Trail Association.

One of these hyper-local groups is the Friends of Panthertown in the Cashiers area of Jackson County — a group united by their love for the place known as “Yosemite of the East.”

The idea of small-scale, local groups taking care of their own little slice of trails is a model the forest service would like to emulate in its quest to build a larger volunteer base, said Jason Kimenker, the director of Friends of Panthertown. The group, which numbers 350 members dedicated to the protection and preservation of Panthertown, has about three dozen trail volunteers who turn out for regular workdays.

In reality, a relatively minute percentage of hikers actually volunteer to work on trails. But adding more volunteers to the mix isn’t a simple solution, Bromberg said. Orchestrating trail crews is complicated and time consuming.

“There are various skill levels, everything from trained sawyers and people like me who go out with my loppers and that’s about the best that I’m going to be able to do,” Bromberg said.

While hikers constitute the vast majority of volunteers working on trails, mountain bikers have upped their presence considerably in recent years. Several mountain bike chapters hold regular trail workdays. They concentrate their efforts in popular mountain bike destinations, like Tsali, Bent Creek and DuPont State Forest.

Horseback groups have historically been the least represented in trail maintenance circles but have been pitching in more in recent years.

Where the forest service can’t keep up, “friends of various stripes have come in and taken a piece of the burden off them,” Bromberg said.

The Wilderness Society last year launched a trail crew to focus on maintenance specifically in national forest areas designated as “wilderness.” Wilderness areas are a challenge when it comes to trail maintenance because power tools aren’t allowed, which means no chainsaws.

The Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards uses a combination of volunteer and paid trail crews, with the help of a grant from the National Forest Foundation.

“It was birthed to take some of the pressure off the trail clubs, which found they couldn’t support more wilderness designations if they couldn’t take care of their trails,” said Brent Martin with The Wilderness Society’s Southern Appalachian field office in Sylva.

The annual fall hike in the Town of Waynesville’s 9,000-acre watershed took place on Saturday Oct. 29. Around 25 stalwart hikers showed up despite the cold, wet and windy Friday overnight and socked-in, iffy-looking conditions Saturday morning, to see and learn a little about this marvelous resource that the town has preserved through conservation easements.

Dr. Peter Bates, natural resources professor from Western Carolina University, and I led the hike. Bates has been involved with the watershed easements from the beginning and has helped lead a team of biologists and scientists in creating the town’s watershed management plan. I highly recommend that anyone interested in learning about the past and present condition of the watershed landscape and/or the philosophy and science regarding the town’s management plan join one of Bates’ hikes.

For my part, I’m there to try and help people see and appreciate the native flora and fauna of the watershed. My trips are “ambles,” not hikes. We may stop to track down a warbler that sang from the treetops or to examine a wildflower or turn a stone alongside a stream bank to see what we can see.

My group, last Saturday, was shuttled in to where Allen’s Creek empties into the reservoir and hiked back out to the treatment plant. It was a relatively easy, mostly flat (for the mountains) hike of between two to three miles. We were greeted by a few snowflakes at the beginning of the hike, but it was short-lived and the clouds gave way to sunshine. The wind, however, buffeted us most of the day, filling the air with colored leaves. There were a few places during the hike, where we could see the mountaintops, covered in hoar frost and gleaming in the sunlight.

We saw some outstanding fall color up close and were able to gain a little appreciation for the subtle differences that can create dramatic red on one maple and golden yellow on another almost side by side. Most wildflowers were spent but it was easy to identify goldenrod, ladies’ tresses and others by the spent flowers and remaining stems. A few asters were still blooming. We saw heart-leaved aster, white wood aster and one large purple (lavender) aster that I immediately thought was New England aster because of its size but in retrospect could have easily been late purple aster, Aster patens. We also found one lingering gentian.

While there were no binocular-toting birders on the trip, aside from yours truly, there was a general interest. I was surprised at some of the lingering migrants we encountered, including Swainson’s thrush, pine warbler and palm warbler. There was also a group of about a dozen blue-winged teal on the reservoir and the juncos and golden-crowned kinglets had already found their way down to the lower elevations.

Despite the cool temperatures, a little stone turning near one of the creeks in the watershed turned up a two-lined salamander. It’s one that I call Eurycea wilderae, the Blue Ridge two-lined salamander, although, I think the whole group (northern two-lined, southern two-lined and blue ridge two-lined) is still in flux as to what may be species, sub-species, races etc. Another amphibian we encountered was a small (this year’s) American toad.

These watershed hikes are always a wonderful way to get outside. And getting outside in these mountains is always an enjoyable experience. If you are a Waynesville resident, these hikes allow you an up close look at this outstanding resource the town (you) owns. The town is charged with protecting its outstanding water quality and that will always be its focus. The town is also cautiously and carefully exploring the future of this watershed and as an informed and engaged resident of the town of Waynesville you owe it to yourself and future generations to learn about the watershed and be a part of shaping its future.

Now to start rumors, I understand that next spring’s hike may offer a brand new option, but the cat’s still in the bag for now.

(Don Hendershot is a writer and naturalist. He can be reached a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park boasts the largest backcountry in the Eastern United States, yet for backpackers hoping to take in a slice of that wilderness with an overnight trip, finding a park ranger to help with logistics can be elusive.

Even seasoned backpackers tackling new terrain in the Smokies are bound to have questions. Where’s the closest water source? What’s the elevation gain? How likely is snow in April?

Yet the so-called Backcountry Information Desk is staffed for only three to four hours a day, and by volunteers at that.

“That phone is constantly busy,” said Melissa Cobern, backcountry manangement specialist with the Smokies. “That’s where we get a lot of complaints, where people have to call and call and call to try to get through.”

Cobern said the Smokies needs to beef up the backcountry desk with fulltime rangers, whose sole job is to help backpackers plan their routes.

It’s not that the volunteers don’t know their stuff. Most are members of the 900 Miler Club, an elite group who have hiked all 900 miles of the park’s trails.

“You are going to get good information when you get on the phone with them,” Cobern said.

But there just aren’t enough of them to keep the desk staffed all day long or handle the volume of calls, not when you consider each call takes 10 to 30 minutes.

The park hopes to hire rangers to staff at the backcountry information desk, as well as hire more rangers to patrol the backcountry. But to do so will take more money, and that has prompted the park to consider charging backpackers for overnight camping.

A meeting to hear from the public on the plan will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 16, at the Old Oconaluftee Visitor Center at the park’s main entrance outside Cherokee.

Unlike front country campgrounds with picnic tables, bathrooms and running water, backcountry sites are usually miles from nowhere, scattered across the park’s vast half a million acres and some embedded so deeply in the wilderness it takes three days to reach them from the closest trailhead.

Backpackers in the park have to camp at one of 100 designated backcountry sites, intended to limit impacts on the wilderness.

“The rest of the park is so dense and so steep, you can’t just throw down anywhere. The park would be a mess if people did that,” said Bob Miller, a spokesperson for the Smokies.

The backcountry sites have no amenities other than a fire ring and cables to hang food out of reach of bears.

The Smokies is hardly plowing new ground. All the big parks out West — Glacier, Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite, Denali and so on — charge a fee for backcountry camping.

But the plan to charge for backpacking here could hurt “the common man,” said Tom Massie, a fisherman who frequents the Smokies.

“In these tough economic times there are families that can’t afford to go to Myrtle Beach or a big vacation somewhere else, so they take their vacations fishing or camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Massie said. “The park systems have already been bought and paid for by the citizens of this country, particularly this park. What we are doing is making people pay to use their own national park.”

Whether to charge, and, if so, how much, is one thing the Smokies rangers want to hear from the public.

The park has floated a few options to jumpstart discussion. At the high end: $5 per person per night plus a $10 reservation fee covering the entire group no matter how large or how many nights. At the low end: just $4 per person per night with no reservation fee.

Unless the fee plan goes through, the park isn’t willing to reallocate existing rangers to backcountry assignments.

“Front country has always gotten more attention than the backcountry,” Miller said of the Smokies.

While the Smokies is the most visited national park in the county with around 9 million visitors, only a small fraction come to backpack.

In 2010, there were 33,000 backpackers and a total of 79,480 backcountry nights — meaning each of the 33,000 backpackers averaged 2.5 nights in the woods.

Overnight backpacking is down from 20 years ago, but has started to climb back up in the past five. There were 92,000 backcountry nights in 1994. It dropped to a low of 70,00 backcountry nights in 2006, and is now back up to 79,480.

All the park’s backcountry sites have limits on how many people are supposed to camp at them a given night, ensuring the wilderness experience backpackers are expecting and limiting human impact.

About one-third of the park’s more popular backcountry sites already require reservations to prevent overcrowding. Those are currently taken over the phone, and can be equally frustrating for backpackers trying to get through.

The rest of the park’s backcountry sites require simple self-registration. Backpackers pause at a registration box found at each trailhead, fill out a slip and drop it in the slot before being on their way.

There’s no way for park rangers or other backpackers to know how many people ahead of them or behind them might also have plans to camp at that site.

“A lot of those self registration sites aren’t that popular, but you could certainly end up in the situation where there are a lot of people at that site and there would be more people than you find comfortable,” Miller said.

A more formal reservation system would solve that problem. But it could also complicate matters for the last-minute backpackers, those who live in nearby communities and want to make an overnight jaunt to their favorite trout stream.

Under the new system, they would either have to go online before leaving the house and print out their permit, or get in the habit of planning trips in advance so the permit can be mailed to them.

Their only other option is make a trip to a staffed visitor center that can issue backcountry permits, which would be out of the way for backpackers heading into outlying areas like Cataloochee or Fontana.

Along with beefing up the backcountry information desk, Cobern said the park equally needs more backcountry presence and ranger enforcement.

While backpackers are supposed to get reservations for the more popular sites, some don’t with little threat of being caught.

This frustrates those who have actual reservations, who arrive at the site to find there isn’t enough room, Cobern said.

The most serious problem, however, is there aren’t enough bear cables for everyone to hoist their food off the ground, and that leads to bear problems, Miller said.

A recently published study in Proceedings, an online medical journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that regular aerobic exercise like walking or hiking can improve the brain’s memory function and perhaps lessen the risk of dementia. As humans age, the hippocampus — the part of the brain involved in memory forming, organizing, and storing — tends to shrink, leading to impaired memory and increased risk of dementia.

The study published in Proceedings took 120 older adults with no dementia and separated them into two groups of 60. One group participated in a stretching program and one group participated in an aerobic exercise program for a year. Magnetic resonance images were collected at the beginning of the program, at the six-month point and at the end of the program. Those images showed that the stretching group demonstrated a loss in volume of the left and right hippocampus of 1.40 percent and 1.43 percent respectively. The group that participated in regular aerobic exercise, on the other hand, showed an increase in the left and right hippocampus of 2.12 percent and 1.97 percent respectively. According to the study, “… we found that, in the aerobic exercise group, increased hippocampal volume was directly related to improvements in memory performance.”

The study goes on to state — “In sum, we found that the hippocampus remains plastic in late adulthood and that 1 y [year] of aerobic exercise was sufficient for enhancing volume. Increased hippocampal volume translates to improved memory function and higher serum BDNF [brain-derived neurotrophic factor that helps support the survival of existing neurons and encourage the growth and differentiation of new neurons and synapses]. We also demonstrate that higher fitness levels are protective against loss of hippocampal volume. These results clearly indicate that aerobic exercise is neuroprotective and that starting an exercise regimen later in life is not futile for either enhancing cognition or augmenting brain volume.”

 

Need more reasons to take a hike?

A scientific study from the university of Rochester noted a 20 percent increase in energy for people who spent a minimum of 20 minutes a day outdoors as opposed to individuals who exercised indoors. The brain generates natural mood enhancers like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine when stimulated by aerobic exercise like hiking.

The study in Proceedings can be added to a long list of reports and research that point out how beneficial outdoor recreation is, in general to our physical, mental and spiritual well being. But this study concerning the reversal of memory loss may have special significance to many of us. Just think, a regular routine of walking/hiking 30 minutes or so, three times a week and soon we will no longer need to take that GPS with us so we can find our way back to the car.

(Don Hendershot is a writer and naturalist. He can be reached a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Backpackers who take on the challenge of hiking in the Southern Appalachian Mountains can attest to the fact that hauling a pack up a steep mountain trail is much more difficult than carrying one on level ground, and some Western Carolina University faculty members and students have put that notion to the test.

A study that involved volunteers carrying a pack while walking on a treadmill set on an uphill grade was used to test the “energy mile” theory first proposed by the late American mountaineering legend Paul Petzoldt. Overseeing the project was Maridy Troy, an assistant professor in WCU’s health and physical education program, and Maurice Phipps, professor of parks and recreation management, who also knew Petzoldt as a friend and mentor.

Phipps first met Petzoldt and found out about his energy mile theory in 1982, when Phipps, a young immigrant from England, went on a Wilderness Education Association training trip in Wyoming’s Teton Mountains that was led by the renowned outdoorsman.

Petzoldt first proposed his theory in his 1976 book Teton Trails to help backpackers plan trips and calculate their energy needs on mountain trails. “Petzoldt defined one energy mile as the energy required to walk one mile on the flat. He recommended adding two energy miles for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain, so a person hiking one mile and 1,000 feet upward would use the equivalent of three energy miles,” Phipps said.

Petzoldt’s energy mile theory was just a reflection of the mountaineer’s “gut feeling,” Phipps said. The theory had never been tested in a laboratory before the study began in WCU’s Exercise Physiology Laboratory in the spring of 2010, Phipps said.

To determine the validity of the theory, the study measured the energy cost and perceived exertion for walking on flat ground, with and without a 44.5-pound backpack, and up an elevation gain of 1,000 feet, with and without the backpack, through the collection of metabolic data, Phipps said.

Twenty-four student, faculty and staff volunteers, including 12 males and 12 females, went through four testing sessions as the research continued into fall semester of 2010. The study results showed that the additional energy cost for ascending 1,000 feet ranged from 1.34 to 2.02 energy mile equivalents, for an average of about 1.6 miles, compared to Petzoldt’s use of two energy miles for each 1,000 feet. The range revealed by the study was due to the “hikers’” personal weight differences, Phipps said.

“It is remarkable that Petzoldt’s energy mile theory is so close to the actual energy cost measured during our study,” Phipps said. “In the field of outdoor education, it’s important for leaders to include an estimation of energy requirements during the planning of hiking trips.”

Phipps said the energy required for hiking up steep mountain trails would vary for individuals and groups, and the variables of the trail would also factor in, but he recommends that backpackers stick with Petzoldt’s idea of adding two energy miles for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain when planning trips.

Petzoldt, the founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School who is considered to be the father of outdoor education in the United States, later amended his theory, stating that 1,000 feet of elevation gain is equivalent to four miles worth of energy for trail novices with expedition packs in the Tetons. Petzoldt suggested adding three energy miles — instead of two — per 1,000 feet of elevation gain in the North Carolina mountains when he visited the WCU campus to teach a WEA expedition course in 1987, Phipps said.

An article detailing the study titled “The Validity of Petzoldt’s Energy Mile Theory” has been published in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education and Leadership.

A little spring cleaning

It was a busy weekend and there’s a busy weekend coming up, so I’m going to use this week’s column to clear my desk:

Watershed hike

Saturday, April 24, was our annual spring pilgrimage into the town of Waynesville’s 8,000-plus acre watershed. Following protocol initiated for last year’s fall hike, the town offered two hikes this spring — an early (7 to 9 a.m.) birdwalk followed by the regular hike at 9 a.m.

The birdwalk was successful and problematic. We were greeted by a chorus of newly arrived migrants, alas, most were binocular-shy and good looks were hard to come by despite the fact that one black-and-white warbler nearly took my hat off as he buzzed the group to get a better look. I think we may add a little more time to the birdwalks in the future, and, hopefully that will let us get some better looks.

Some of the warblers we saw and/or heard included black-and-white, black-throated blue, black-throated green, northern parula, ovenbird, Louisiana waterthrush and hooded. Other migrants included blue-headed vireo, red-eyed vireo, wood thrush and scarlet tanager.

When we got back to the treatment plant at 9 a.m. to meet with the rest of the hikers, rain was looking imminent. But the mayor showed up and the skies parted, and we hiked off into a wonderful spring morning. Both hikes were once again at or near capacity, attesting to the keen public interest in the watershed.

This year’s hike pointed out a fact that many of who live and hike in these beautiful mountains sometimes take for granted. One doesn’t hike very far or very long in these mountains without going uphill. Most of the watershed hikes are out – uphill on moderate grades on old logging roads – and back downhill. One of this year’s participants with a mild heart condition found the uphill a bit too strenuous for his comfort.

On the town’s website where you sign up for the hike it states, “Each hike is moderately strenuous and will be up to 5 miles in length and 5 hours in duration.” Please be sure you’re accustomed to a 5-mile stroll in the mountains before signing up for the hike.

Bear time

With the greening of the mountains every spring comes the waking and stirring of sleepy hungry bears.

Last Friday I was in the Harmon Den area of the French Broad District of the Pisgah National Forest locating bird survey points. I was deep in the forest on a Forest Service road paying more attention to my GPS unit than my surroundings when some movement in the forest caught my eye. About a hundred yards to my left, mamma bear was herding her two cubs out of harm’s way.

The bears had nothing to fear from me, but, of course, mamma didn’t know that. The point is that hungry bears foraging are sometimes not as alert as usual and the chances of you getting a little too close for comfort are increased. So if you’re out there remember to keep your head up and if you need a little bear etiquette reminder check out http://www.yoursmokies.com/blackbearsinsmokies.html.

Birding for the Arts

Ah, the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd! Toss those scripts and we’ll ad lib our way across the mountains seeking out returning neotropical migrants and year-round mountain birds from Canada warblers to Carolina chickadees. This annual Haywood County Arts Council benefit is great fun and fills up fast. Tomorrow is the last day for registration. For more information visit the

Haywood County Arts Council office, 86 N. Main St., call 828.452.0593 or visit www.haywoodarts.org.

Scot Ward isn’t a missionary, but he does have a burning message. An experienced thru-hiker who carries a copy of Peter Jenkins Walk Across America in the retrofitted box-truck he calls home, Ward wants people to hike the Mountains to Sea Trail for exactly the reason they aren’t doing it now.

“It shows you everything the state has to offer. On the Appalachian Trail, you see the woods no matter where you are,” Ward said.

The nearly 1,000-mile Mountains to Sea Trail runs across North Carolina from the Tennessee border to the Outer Banks, but only about 500 miles of footpaths, mostly in the mountains of Western North Carolina, already exist. The rest of the walk involves road hiking, which has prevented the trail from attracting the number of pilgrims it needs to earn a reputation.

Ward believes the Mountains to Sea Trail lays the soul of North Carolina bare to the people that hike it, and he wants to open up that experience to a wider range of people. He recently produced a comprehensive trail guide for the Mountains to Sea Trail on a shoestring budget, and last week he visited Osondu/Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville and City Lights Books in Sylva to push his product.

While there are other trail guides out there, Ward’s 100-page version is accurate to the 1/100 of a mile and obsessively lists information like water resources, fire locations, campsites, and food options. None of the other trail guides have dealt with the actual details of thru-hiking the Mountains to Sea Trail in this kind of detail.

The 35-year-old self-described nomad was living in Hawaii when he heard about the Mountains to Sea Trail and decided he had to see it for himself. Having hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2003, the Long Trail in 2004, and the Colorado Trail in 2005, he was looking for another challenge.

“I’m trying to answer the question that every thru-hiker on the AT asks when they peak Mt. Katahdin,” Ward said. “What now?”

Ward hiked the Mountains to Sea Trail for the first time in 2007. Last year he became the first person known to have “yo-yo’d” the trail. He walked it eastbound from Clingman’s Dome to Jockey’s Ridge State Park, then turned around and walked the 965 miles back.

The purpose of the trip was two-fold. For a hiker who goes by the trail name “T.A.B.A” (short for There and Back Again), the mission held a special kind of satisfaction. But more importantly, Ward’s first experience as an out-of-state hiker on the Mountains to Sea Trail showed him clearly why more people weren’t thru-king it.

“If you want to bring people to the trail to hike it, then you have to have places for them to sleep,” said Ward.

Ward set out to fix that problem by figuring out a way to hike the trail and sleep on it. Along the way he convinced 20 churches and eight businesses along the road portion of the trail through the Piedmont to agree to allow hikers to camp on their property.

Still, overnight camping is prohibited on much of the public land on the trail –– including the portions that follow the Blue Ridge Parkway and some of the state parks.

Ward drew the ire of some Mountains to Sea Trail advocates when he posted the best ways to camp illegally on his Web site last year.

“I’m not trying to start trouble,” Ward said. “I’m trying to fix a problem.”

Ward understands his methods can be misunderstood, but he doesn’t have time for hand-holding.

“I’m the kind of guy that goes the opposite way in a mosh pit,” Ward said.

Scot Ward’s singular spirit can in part be traced to his genes. His grandfather Eddie Ward, a member of the Flying Ward family, performed all of the vine-swinging stunts for the original Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weismuller. In short, he comes from one of America’s most celebrated circus families.

But he owes his traveling bug just as much to his own life experience. His Miami area neighborhood was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. A recent high school grad, Ward hopped on his bike and road to New York City. Since then he’s ridden over 40,000 miles of America’s roadways on a bicycle. He’s also been a professional in-line skater, a skydiver, and a limousine driver in Beverly Hills.

Scotty’s World, as he sometimes calls it, isn’t like your world. But he insists anyone can experience what it feels like if they have the courage to get out of their cars and take to the trail.

“Walking and riding a bicycle across America, you’re putting yourself in people’s environment,” Ward said. “You stop at a store and you hang out there, and people start to look at you and then they ask questions. They want to know why you’re there. When you’re in your car, you’re still in your own environment.”

This month, Ward will receive recognition from Friends of the Mountains to Sea Trail for his there-and-back-again hike. He’ll also travel from bookstore to bookstore along the route with his new trail guide.

“Now we’ve just got to get the park service on board to let us camp in the woods,” Ward said.

To learn more about Scot Ward or to find his trail guide go to www.thru-hiker.us. Or to learn more about the Mountains to Sea Trail visit www.ncmst.org.

Jennifer Pharr Davis says she never set out be a speed hiker.

When she first hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 2005 at the age of 21, she was mostly looking for an excuse not to get a job right after graduating from college.

But she soon found she had a natural proclivity for hiking fast.

“I have this inner thing where I just love going all day on the trail as hard as I can,” Davis said. “I just really, really like the hiking part.”

Some people write journals on the trail, others linger at trail shelters over a game of cards with fellow hikers. But for Davis, an Asheville resident, it was all about the hiking: the physical act of moving through the woods and covering ground.

Three years later and with several other long-distance trails under her belt, Davis returned to the AT to hike it once more, this time at a record-setting pace for women.

Davis, who lives in Asheville and was born and raised in Hendersonville, completed the 2,175-mile trail in 58 days — just five days behind the men’s record and 30 days faster than any other woman. Only five men have done the trail faster.

To make that kind of speed, Davis had help, of course. Her husband shuttled her gear between trailheads, meeting her each night at points where the trail intersected with roads with food, water and tent and clean clothes. Her devoted one-man support crew allowed Davis to drastically lighten her load compared to the average AT hiker. She carried a small daypack or some days just a hip pack packed with the barest essentials. She was also freed from housekeeping details like setting up and striking camp, restocking groceries or doing laundry.

“Trust me, I am paying him back, probably for the rest of my life,” Davis joked.

Plotting meet-up points often meant relying on backwoods forest service roads, which sometimes led to confusion. Occasionally, she would arrive at the designated spot only to find he wasn’t there. Perhaps she had arrived early, making better time than expected. Or maybe she arrived late, and her husband had gone ahead to the next meet-up point looking for her.

On one occasion, the road was washed out and Davis’ husband had to load gear into a pack and run in to find her. Another time, the road they pinpointed on a map didn’t actually exist.

Expecting these missed connections, both Davis and her husband carried surveyor’s tape and a Sharpie to leave messages.

The thought of her husband waiting at the trailhead, often playing the guitar while he waited for Davis to show up, was one of the strongest motivators pulling her along the trail each day. The two had been married just days before embarking on the trip.

“I was crazy in love with my husband. I wanted to get to him as quickly as possible,” Davis said.

Of course, Davis also looked forward to the food he had waiting. At Davis’ record-breaking pace, she burned 4,000 calories a day, which meant she had a lot of consuming to do.

“If you are eating that much every day it becomes a job,” she said. “Honestly, I got sick of chewing.”

Davis defends her fast hiking to critics who question how much communing with nature one can honestly do at that pace.

“People say you didn’t appreciate it, you didn’t stop to smell the roses, you didn’t see the same things that people see when they hike slowly,” Davis said. “That’s not true.”

Davis ran some, but mostly just walked fast. She averaged 3 miles an hour, still a brisk pace considering the terrain and the inevitable bathroom breaks.

But by striking out at dawn and hiking through dusk, and moving quietly without companions, she saw more wildlife on her speed hike than three years earlier when she hiked at a standard pace — including 30 bears, compared to none on her 2005 hike.

Her final days on the trail became a whirlwind, however. Her husband, Brew, is a middle school teacher in Asheville and had to return home for the start of the school year. So two veteran AT hikers pitched in as a support crew in the final days. One of the trail greats enlisted was David Horton, the men’s record holder on the AT who completed the journey in 52 days after four tries. The other was Warren Doyle, who has thru-hiked the AT 15 times, more than anyone else.

She covered 205 miles her last four days, largely due to a perhaps overly encouraging support crew.

“What I remember is getting to the meet-up point just to see them drive off and say see you at the next road,” Davis said. She got in the car after finishing the trail and promptly fell asleep.

Davis doesn’t discount the possibility of another record hike, perhaps even going after the men’s record. Once the AT is in your blood, it’s hard to shake, she said. Not that she didn’t try after her first hike back in 2005. When she’d reached the summit of Mount Katahdin, which marks the end of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, she vowed never to repeat it.

“I climbed up that mountain and said ‘This has been a good experience. I am glad I did it, but I am never going to do it again — not even an overnight.’ Maybe a day hike but that was it,” Davis said.

She got a job doing marketing and special events at the Ash Lawn-Highland museum home of James Monroe, the fifth president, in Charlottesville, Va. But she soon found the trail calling.

“I was missing the simplicity of it. I was missing having everything I needed just on my back. I missed the self-reliance, looking to myself and depending on myself to make it through every day,” Davis said.

Davis, who graduated from Samford University in Birmingha, Ala., and played college tennis, also realized how much multitasking was involved in normal life.

“On the trail all I had to do was hike. It was so simple and I missed it,” Davis said.

Over the next three years, she hiked Mount Kilimanjaro, the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, the 600-mile Bibbulmun Track in Australia, the Inca Trail in Peru, and the 272-mile Long Trail in Vermont.

She worked in between trips but always with the next hike in mind.

“I just worked to hike and worked to hike,” Davis said. “Obviously by this point it was becoming an addiction.”

By Josh Mitchell • Staff Writer

The bad economy may be good for business along the Appalachian Trail.

The AT typically attracts recent college grads, young people taking a break from their jobs, and a growing number of retirees. This year another group is hitting the trail — laid-off workers.

Every year at this time hundreds of hikers pour through Western North Carolina as they make way their way to the end of the trail.

Last Thursday The Smoky Mountain News caught up with dozens of hikers in Hot Springs, which the trail runs directly through, and talked to them about their journeys.

Doug McPherson of Sylva said when his employer told him to take a hike he did, literally. McPherson was employed by Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, and as soon as he was laid off he seized the opportunity to take on the trail.

Andy Crow of Pennsylvania had enough of college and needed a break. He didn’t want to take the typical route of graduating high school, going to college and getting a job.

Crow, who was majoring in geology before dropping out, said his parents were “cool” with his decision to hike the Appalachian Trail and put his conformist future on hold. Other hikers agree with Crow, saying hiking the AT represents another life experience they can rack up before they die.

Hiker Kim Morley was sitting down with her friends from New Zealand and ordered up a Trail cheeseburger at the Smoky Mountain Diner after being on the trail the past few days.

Morley, an employee with an environmental consulting company in Atlanta, plans to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine for a total of about 2,200 miles.

Morley’s New Zealand friends had gotten six-month visas so they could hike the entire trail, but they are bowing out due to an injury.

The New Zealand couple, Merryll Burr and Ron Burr, said hiking the trail is more difficult than they thought it would be. They first became acquainted with the trail about 15 years ago when they were in the area for a conference and hiked part of it.

At that time they decided they would try and do the whole thing one day. They were on their way until Ron sustained a shoulder injury that precludes him from being able to carry his pack.

Poor weather conditions have beaten down hikers this year as they battle through snow, wind, hail and freezing temperatures in the Smokies. When Morley gets back on the trail it will be four or five days before she reaches the next town.

Two other hikers, Alan Sloe and Kyle Fiasconaro, don’t have much money, so they were earning their keep at a hostel by moving timber.

Fiasconaro, from Long Island, N.Y., was working as a chef when he left everything behind to hike the trail. Hiking the trail seemed like the right thing to do rather than get “sucked into a career,” Fiasconaro said.

Sloe, from Greenville, S.C., said he didn’t have a career and agreed that hiking the trail is a good way to meet interesting people and see the mountains. The two met the first day on the trail.

While they were working they had a small tape player emitting music as their Pabst Blue Ribbon beers rested on cinder blocks.

Fiasconaro bemoaned that he has only $1,000 to make it to the end of the trail and said earning his keep at hostels by doing odd jobs is the only way he’ll make it.

Their mantra is to stay positive despite dramatic highs and lows that the trail brings, like the 2- to 4-foot snowdrifts they ran into. Luckily, they were able to stay overnight in a friend’s condo in Gatlinburg to get through that night.

All of the hikers have a trail name that gives them a separate identity from the one they have in the modern world. A hiker log at the Hot Springs Post Office lists hundreds of different trail names that have come through over the years including Hippie Chick, Grizzly, and Chaos.

Rob Phillips, from Lehman, Penn., goes by the trail name Tank, which is appropriate seeing that he’s endured rain, snow and thunderstorms so far. Many of the hikers on the trail are either recent college graduates or retirees.

Phillips said he wanted to take a year off school and hike the trail before returning to get his master’s degree. He was hiking out of Hot Springs on the way to Erwin, Tenn., which is the next town and 70 miles away.

Hikers do the trail for different reasons. Keith Hubbard, who goes by the trail name Huck Finn, said he simply loves the outdoors.

“I’m not trying to find myself,” he said.

Hubbard just graduated from college in Indiana where he earned his degree in physics. His parents are very supportive of him hiking the trail and putting the real world on hold, he said. Family members keep up with how he is doing through a blog he updates at libraries when he comes into trail towns.

The camaraderie of like-minded people on the trail and the beauty of the mountains make hiking the trail worth it, even on bad days, said Hubbard.

With only $1,000 he is on the low end in terms of how much money is needed to hike the trail. He didn’t engage in much preparation for the journey; he basically put on a backpack and started hiking. In his pack he carries a one-man tent, sleeping bag, rain jacket, lightweight pants and shirt, stove and a fuel can.

The northeast is the part of the trip he is looking forward to the most since he has never been to that part of the country.

Inside the Hot Springs library, Michael Given of Maine sat at a table looking through an Appalachian Trail book. He said he was abandoning the trail, but his 65-year-old mother is continuing on to the end.

He said hiking with his mom part of the way was his way of showing her that he supported her in her journey. Being on the trail was a great adventure, said Given. “It was like going to a different country,” he said.

Surviving the trail is 90 percent mental, he said. He and his mother were hiking 22 miles a day, although, “mother and I are pretty tough Mainers.” His mom has run a marathon on every continent, he said.

Getting through the trail requires organizing mail drops at post offices along the way to replenish supplies, he said. He and his mother were getting their water from creeks after cleaning it with water purifications pumps, he said.

He was a much faster hiker than his mother, which meant he would get far ahead of her and then have to let her catch back up with him. This earned him the trail name “Leap Frog.”

John Conlin and his friend, Bert McAdam, were sitting down to eat at the Smoky Mountain Diner, exhausted from hiking and hungry for a hearty meal.

“Don’t mind the odor, but I’ve been out in the woods for five days,” said Conlin.

Conlin and McAdam didn’t know each other prior to hiking on the trail but now seem like they’ve known each other a lifetime. Both men are from Florida and plan on hiking the entire trail as they now have the time being retired.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for 30 years,” said Conlin. “I retired a year early so I could do this.”

Hiking the trail can give one a voracious appetite, Conlin demonstrated as he ordered up a double cheeseburger and a grilled cheese sandwich.

The Appalachian Trail represents a personal challenge that Conlin and McAdam want to overcome. They recalled the deep snow near Gatlinburg, and how 17 people were trapped under a ledge during a snowstorm. Several had to be treated for frostbite, Conlin said.

Conlin, being a Floridian, goes by the trail name Gator, while McAdam goes by Rusty, which, he says, is a comment on his physical shape. Both men are 65 and said taking on the trail is an adventure that gives them a sense of accomplishment.

Conlin commented that he has the financial resources to do the trail while some of the younger hikers are operating on a shoestring. He has given some of them food. To prepare for the journey Conlin said he researched the trail over a year and lost 12 pounds.

Hikers drop many pounds on the trail as they eat granola and hike 20 miles a day. As Conlin sat at the diner’s table, he said coming into trail towns is great because it means high-carb, high-fat meals to be washed down with iced tea and milk.

“You dream of getting here,” he said.

After hiking 14 hours a day for the past few days, McAdam and Conlin said they will take a “zero day,” which means they will stay in town to rest, do laundry and get supplies.

By Danny Bernstein

For the past year, I’ve kept a trail map of the Smokies and the trusted manual Hiking Trails of the Smokies, known affectionately as the brown book, stashed in the seat pocket of my car.

The telephone number for the road conditions is on my speed dial and I am on a first name basis with several rangers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

With my all-consuming endeavor to hike every trail in the Smokies now complete, I have become the 248th member of the 900 Miler Club. Though the club is called 900 Miler, there are now only 800 miles of maintained trails in the park, as shown by the GSM Trail Map. But you need to walk a lot more than 800 miles to do them all — some say 1,500 miles.

For all that effort, I only got a patch to sew on my pack — and bragging rights, of course. Logistically, it’s the most complicated hiking challenge I’ve done but physically it was not difficult. The Smokies are so well maintained that you can get really spoiled. Mile for mile, the Smokies trails are easier than the surrounding national forests.

When I moved to WNC, I had already done the 71.4 miles of the Appalachian Trail that traverse the park and knew how beautiful the trails were. I was thrilled to live so close to the Smokies. I then hiked a lot of easy miles, most on the perimeter of the park — what I call the top of the pops: Ramsey Cascades, Little Cataloochee Trail, the Deep Creek/Martin Gap/Indian Creek loop, Hemphill Bald and all the Mt. LeConte Trails.

I then did some obscure and fascinating hikes that only a 900-mile aspirant would do, like Brushy Mountain with its good view of Gatlinburg, Grapeyard Trail with its train engine remains and up to Gregory Bald from Twentymile Ranger Station. About that time, I finished the South Beyond 6000 which gave me the Balsam Mountain Trail. I went to the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont several times and got a lot of pesky miles off Little River Road. One year, they organized a long shuttle from Clingmans Dome on the Sugarland Mountain Trail. Part of the challenge is to find other obsessed hikers so you can set up shuttles.

The two watershed backpacks were from the Fontana Marina, probably the most remote part of the park: the first was Eagle Creek and down Jenkins Creek. The second was a long loop involving Cold Spring Gap Trail, up Welch Ridge and down Hazel Creek. To me, those were the big challenges; I felt that if I could get those out of the way, I would finish.

But after those backpacks, I looked at the map yet again and the goal seemed even more impossible. I set up backpacking trips and people canceled. It rained and others canceled. Then I realized that I could do 18-plus miles a day by myself and it was no big deal. The last three months, I hiked 120 new miles. I had to repeat many more miles to reach the inner trails. For example, to reach Pole Road Creek Trail between Deep Creek and Noland Divide Trail, I had to rewalk seven miles.

I finished on the Indian Creek Motor Trail, a minor trail out of the Deep Creek entrance; it was important for me to finish on the North Carolina side. I will never know the park as well as I do now. So why did I do it?

• To really understand the park and how all the trails are connected. Before I moved to Western North Carolina, the Smokies to me was the Sugarlands entrance from Gatlinburg.

• Because it was there and the next obvious hiking challenge. It’s important to keep hiking little-known Smokies trails or the park may decommission them.

Like any challenge on the trail or in life, it’s not about physical strength or stamina. Hiking all the trails in the Smokies is all about perseverance, organizing and keeping your eye on the goal. But finishing any hiking challenge is bittersweet — grateful I’m done and sad that I don’t have to get out there anymore.

But now my husband caught the Smokies 900 bug and he has 200 miles to go. So I’m back in the park to help him.

Danny Bernstein, a hike leader and outdoor writer, is the author of Hiking North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Heritage (2009) and Hiking the Carolina Mountains (2007). She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

What’s a hiking challenge?

There are a host of hiking challenges that trail hounds in WNC can tackle. The 900 Miler Club, the endeavor to hike every mile of trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is one of the longest running. But there’s a few others.

• South Beyond 6,000, or SB6K: hike to the top of all 40 peaks in the Southern Appalachians that’s over 6,000 feet.

• Pisgah 400: hike all 400 miles of maintained trail in the Pisgah National Forest. About 120 trails.

• Lookout Tower Challenge: Hike to 24 fire towers in WNC.

• Waterfall 100: Hike to 100 predetermined waterfalls and cascades in WNC.

For details on the hiking challenges, go to carolinamtnclub.org and look for “challenges” on the left hand side.