Up Moses Creek: The Last Trail
In 1994, Henry Kornegay helped his father build trail with his toy bulldozer. Burt Kornegay photo
When I told Becky on New Year’s Day that this was going to be my last trail, she laughed, “You said that three trails back.” She was thinking of the Spring Creek, Sourwood, Open Woods, Deer Point and other trails I’ve built over the years in the woods around our house. Becky likes walking the trails as much as I do.
She’s on them daily. It’s the heavy labor to build them that is not her thing. I remembered a moment years back, when, trying to wrestle an old tree stump out of the route of a new trail, I sensed someone near, and looking up through the sweat, saw Becky standing there with a quizzical look on her face: “You really like doing this, don’t you?”
I first felt the urge to build a trail in 1984. We were newly married, renting in Cullowhee, and I wanted a path up the low ridge behind our rental. It’s the ridge where Western Carolina University has a big concrete water tank. The trail was a simple “manway,” to use a Horace Kephart term, trimmed out straight up the slope. The next year we bought a small fixer-upper on Caney Fork, six miles from town, and, after we moved there and fixed the house, I built my second trail. This one went up a ridge, too, a high one, but I angled it on a long, carefully dug grade that was comfortable to walk, then looped it back down by another route. Henry would follow me with his Tonka bulldozer to “help Dad move dirt.”
For a dozen years after that I satisfied my trail-building urge by helping to construct the 80-mile-long Bartram Trail through the Nantahala National Forest. Then, in 2001, we bought land up Moses Creek, a tributary to Caney Fork, and, after building the house that we still live in, I turned to trails for us again.
The end point for this last trail is the top of our land. But getting up there has proven to be tough — up a slope so steep I’ve begun to think of it as “Mount Sisyphus.” Sisyphus was a hero in Greek myth who was condemned to push a big rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down to the bottom, for Sisyphus to push up again. One difference between the Sisyphus of myth and real-life me is that he had to push his rock forever. What I’m pushing is 75.
I do like to think that Sisyphus and I have one thing in common: we’ve both had rocks give us the middle finger. I had it happen again last month when I came to a rock squarely blocking the route. It was a boulder so big I named it “Sumo,” after the Japanese wrestlers that weigh in at 400 pounds. First, I tried prying Sumo out of the way with a rock bar. He didn’t budge. So I dug the ground out from under him. That didn’t work either. Finally I hitched a come-along to him and cranked it until I could crank no more. But Sumo didn’t come along at all. I was starting to think I’d have to re-route the trail around the obstinate thing when, without warning, Sumo moved of his own accord — and pinned my right middle finger against another rock. It’s the still-stiff finger I’m typing this article with today.
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My New Year’s resolution is a work in progress. Twenty minutes of uphill hiking brings me to the spot where I stopped the previous day — an unfinished piece of raw clay, roots and rocks. Tools are propped here and there looking tired from the day before. Ahead lies a tangle of dead mountain laurel and snags that cling to the thin-soiled slope — vegetation that died during the drought of 2016. But because of the dieback, the view out is far and fair.
Thinking back over the roughly three miles of trails I’ve built for us over the years, I figure the average progress in a two-hour work session, which is all I’m good for, has been 15 feet of new trail. One day’s racing 20 feet will be followed by a day of creep. If I divide that average into 15,840 feet — the number of feet in three miles — it comes to around 1,000 work sessions. That’s equivalent to a year of work weeks. In “Walden,” Thoreau writes: “the cost of a thing is the amount of life required to be exchanged for it.” If the thing is a trail, then for me both the building of it and the pleasure it gives as a winding way through our steep land make for value-added life.
CrossFit advertises itself as “the path to better health.” I say, build a real path. If you don’t have your own land, volunteer with the Bartram Trail Conservancy or with Friends of Panthertown. After a session of saw and chop and dig and push and pull, you’ll be 15 feet closer to better health. You’ll be shaping up in beautiful wild country to boot. And when you walk back out on trail you’ve built and that you and others can enjoy for years, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment that no workout can provide. That’s ConstructiveFit.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the second week of each month.)
