Nothing Like a Good Night’s Sleep - Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN
There's Nothing Like a Good Night’s Sleep
Dear Kate,
Good thing you weren’t with us on our trip to the Smoky Mountains. You would have hated it. Not because of the bugs or the dirt or the long, hard days of hiking. No, it’s because you wouldn’t have gotten a lick of sleep. I barely did and you are thrice the insomniac that I am. More than most others, I think you will appreciate my nocturnal adventures on the trail.
On our first day, we had a gentle, uphill hike. At about lunchtime, we stopped to rest at a clearing alongside Big Creek. The water tumbled by over mossy rocks. Brilliant blue butterflies danced in the sand. A small band of horsemen approached on the trail, waving as they clopped by.
"Is that thunder?" I asked. Jen, one of our hiking companions, looked up at the sky, which was blue.
“No, I think that was an airplane.”
I heard the sound again. Admittedly, it was difficult to discern over the burbling brook. “Seriously, I think that’s thunder.”
This time our friend Carol chimed in. “Yeah, maybe that was thunder….”
Suddenly, “BOOM!” The air turned into a waterfall. We were drenched before we could even get our raingear out of our packs. The butterflies floundered. The horses trotted back the way they’d come. We plodded onward, bent against the rain, along a trail that had become a rushing stream. Ironically, we were hiking in a thunderstorm through an area that had been ripped apart by a tornado just a couple of years earlier. The driver who dropped us off at the trailhead told us it was one of only two tornadoes ever recorded in the park. “When was the other?” I asked him. It was just five years ago or so. An example of climate change?
Anyway, the rain eventually stopped and we sloshed the last couple of miles in water-saturated boots (waterproofing doesn’t do much good when your socks pull an insider job and wick the rain in), reaching our campsite at around four. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, we heard distant thunder, but when nothing ever happened, we simply ignored it. Just the sky crying “Wolf!”
Our next day’s hike on Gunter Fork trail would involve six stream crossings, and we’d heard the first was the worst. Julie and I hiked about a mile to check it out. We didn’t like what we saw. To cross it “properly,” upstream at a 45 degree angle, we’d have to brave some rough water. Or, we could cross at a calm spot, but then have to negotiate a pile of wet, mossy boulders to get to the trail. My adventuresome streak was ready to try it (or maybe it was not wanting my brand new water shoes to go to waste), but Julie was skeptical.
On the way back, it started to rain again, but only lightly and it stopped by the time we reached camp. We ate dinner, and had just finished cleaning up when there was another crack of thunder and another sudden deluge.
Our instinct was to dive into the tent, but first we had to hang our backpacks. See, the bears in the park are very smart. They could grub around the woods all day and come up with nothing more to eat than tiny tart raspberries, bitter acorns, and slimy salamanders. Or, they could walk into campsites and steal delicious Snickers bars right out from the noses of pale-faced humans (every hiker we saw was white). So the rules were that you had to hang your food, and the park service even provided a cable system for that purpose. We had been told by our driver that we shouldn’t just hang our food, though. We should hang our whole pack because bears have a sense of smell that is something like 70,000 times more powerful than a human’s. That means your pack smells like food to a bear, even if there is no food in it.
As the rain poured down, Julie and I quickly stuffed everything not already in the tent into our packs, covered them with plastic bags, and hoisted them onto the cables so they hung some ten feet overhead, out of the reach of even the tallest black bear. Then we clambered into our tent. Carol and Jen, set up nearby, were doing the same.
This was a brand new tent for us, an ultra light two person made by Big Agnes. We knew it would be snug, but this thing was so tight that our two pads filled the entire tent except for a few inches at our heads. Once in the tent, there was no room to move around and do something like, say, get out of our drenched clothing. At least no way to do it without pressing the walls of the tent into the fly, which would just cause water to pour inside.
So Julie and I laid on our backs side-by-side, fully clothed and soaking wet, while the rain pounded down. Despite the storm, the air was stiflingly hot and I could feel the sweat oozing out of my pores into my clothing, the only clothing I had to wear for the next five days.
I thought it might be nice to read, but I realized I’d forgotten to get my headlamp out of my pack. It was as inaccessible to me in this storm as it was to the bears.
“Hey, look what I found,” Julie said, and held up a chocolate fiber bar. “It was in my pocket.”
“Aaah! You can’t have that in here!” I cried. “It will attract bears!” If a bear will tear open a tent for an empty backpack that once carried food, a chocolate fiber bar was an invitation to disaster.
“Bears won’t be out in this,” she said. Thunder cracked overhead as if in agreement.
“How do you know? Bears live out here in this ****. This is normal to them. Don’t open it,” I begged, as Julie ripped open the wrapper.
“Stop worrying so much. Want a bite?”
“OK.”
The rain went on and on. Every time I thought it couldn’t rain any harder, it rained even harder. Hot, wet, cramped, and worried about marauding bears craving chocolate fiber bars, I slept only fitfully.
Despite my inadequate slumber, the next day I felt surprisingly chipper. But we had a decision to make about the day’s route. After six million gallons of overnight rain, we figured the iffy crossing of last night would now be an unmanageable torrent and that it would be safer to take a different trail. Luckily for us, such an alternative existed. The Swallow Fork trail was two miles longer than Gunter Fork, so instead of a six mile day, we had an eight mile one, most of it uphill. But it got us to the same place in the end, Laurel Gap shelter.
When we arrived, weary and footsore, we found it was already inhabited by a lone gentleman named Toby. I barely paid him any attention since there was a bright patch of sunlight illuminating the field in front of the shelter. It was the first sunlight we’d seen all day, having been deep in the woods, and I wanted to get my wet clothes, boots, sleeping bag, and pack into it’s warmth as soon as possible. Julie and Jen put up a clothes line to hang the tents.
Toby mentioned that he had a hammock and was disappointed that he wasn’t allowed to use it at shelter sites. “Toby, I don’t care if you use your hammock. I’m not a ranger” I said. So he set up his hammock between a couple of trees down the hill and left the shelter to the four of us which was very nice of him. We had the place to ourselves, since there were no other visitors.
The shelter was actually quite nice in many ways. Benches and tables in front provided a place to sit, cook, and eat while still providing the cover of a roof. There were three walls around the sleeping platforms in back; the rest was open. The platforms stretched from one end of the shelter to the other on two levels and could hold up to twelve people. The top level was maybe four feet high and the bottom three. A handwritten sign warned of a snake that lived under the platform and which sometimes came out to visit. “I don’t like snakes,” Jen said, and put her gear on the top. Carol and Julie joined her. I took the bottom because I knew I’d have to pee in the middle of the night and didn’t want to fall down a ladder doing so. Unfortunately, with so little headroom, I was bound to bash my head. Better that than breaking my ankle, I figured.
It rained again that night, another thunderstorm, and I was glad to have a roof over my head. But that did not outweigh the unpleasant aspects of the place, primarily the lack of privacy. Every time any of us shifted, the shh-shh-shh of nylon sleeping bags rubbing against plastic pads echoed through the shelter. I heard every snort, snore, sigh, and scratch made by the other three occupants. And it all kept me awake, and lying awake gave me time to think. I like to say that I am a positive person: I’m positive something bad is going to happen. And laying around in the pitch black dark surrounded by the cacophony generated by my compatriots’ bodies was the perfect time to reflect on all the possible ways things could go wrong.
For instance, the snake living under the platform hadn’t worried me until I remembered that there are poisonous snakes in the Smokies: copperheads and rattlesnakes. I told myself that snakes don’t come out at night because they need warmth. But night is when the mice, their food source, start scurrying around the shelter, so maybe they did brave the cooler darkness. Once that fear embedded itself in my mind, every slithery interaction between bags and pads reminded me of snakes, and I huddled atop my tiny pad, trying to keep my assorted limbs up off the floor so I wouldn’t accidentally kick a snake and be bitten in retaliation, or have my big toe mistaken for a delectable baby mouse.
I finally drifted off, only to have my bladder wake me. “No,” I told it, “you have to hold on until morning.” It cramped in response. “Please? Really, I don’t want to have to get up. It’s dark out there. And wet.” My bladder had no mercy and I couldn’t deny it any longer. Peeing in the middle of the night when camping is a lot different from doing it at home where I can stumble, half asleep, to the bathroom, and still be half-asleep by the time I get back in bed. On the trail, I have to find my headlamp, put on my shoes, gather my TP, shuffle out to some spot preferably not right next to the shelter because that is just rude, position myself so I don’t urinate on my feet, get back to the shelter, wash my hands with Purell, take off my shoes, get back into my bag, take off my headlamp… all without waking everyone else. Needless to say, I was wide awake by the time it was done and I stayed that way worrying about the snakes some more, and whether the mice might chew through something important, and how ****** I’d feel tomorrow if I didn’t get some sleep!
Dawn woke me. I knew it was dawn not because of the light, but because the birds had started singing. I lay around for awhile and then decided to change out of my sleeping clothes while Toby was still in his hammock. I had my shirt off and was about to put on my bra—in other words my boobs were exposed—when the beam of a flashlight played over the grass in front of the shelter. Toby was not still in his hammock after all. Like I said, there’s no privacy in a shelter.
Carol and Jen woke up perky. They’d slept great. That’s because they took Benadryl. “You should, too,” they told me. “And wear earplugs.” But I didn’t want to do either because if any animals came around in the night, I wanted to know about it. I really, really wanted to see a bear.
Our third night was at Campsite 44. We arrived in the late afternoon after a day consisting of four miles on a steep downhill followed by four miles of a steep uphill. Julie got there first. When I trudged up a few minutes later, she was standing on a slope overlooking the campground. “We should set up here,” she said, indicating an area that was semi-level.
“That’s too slanted,” I complained. “Look, the tent pads are down there where it’s nice and flat.” “Down there” was at the bottom of a bowl of hills.
“If it rains, that will flood,” Julie pointed out, which I agreed was true, and after two consecutive nights of extreme thunderstorms, she was absolutely right to be concerned. But I was adamant. I didn’t want to be sleeping at some crazy angle. As I stood on the pads, checking them out, Jen and Carol arrived. Jen, an experienced camper, looked at the spot Julie had been eyeing up on the slope.
“We should camp here,” she announced. “If it rains, it will flood down there.” She indicated where I stood. Carol readily agreed and that’s how they ended up with the most level spot on the entire slope. Julie glared at me as we searched for the second-most level area, though really, using the word “level,” no matter how modified, while describing our final resting place is a crime against language. Our feet pointed downhill, and I spent the night alternately dreaming of falling and fending off Julie as gravity pulled her onto my side of the tent. I tell you, I didn’t need Julie’s body heat pressing all up on me because the tent was, once again, a steam bath. I thought mountains would be cooler at night!
Maybe Benadryl wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Too bad I didn’t bring any.
Oh, and it didn’t rain. Not a drop.
We were to spend night five at campsite 50, and then hike in the morning to Smokemont where our outfitter, A Walk in the Woods, would meet us, give Julie and me our resupply box, drive us to Newfound Gap, and take Carol and Jen back to their car so they could start their journey home.
Well, we walked right past campsite 50. We didn’t realize it until we came to a trail intersection with a sign that read “Campsite 50 .1 mi” and an arrow pointing back the way we’d come. Interestingly, the sign also said that Smokemont was just 1.2 miles ahead. We’d thought it was more like 2.5.
Given that it wasn’t even lunchtime, we had a decision to make: spend a lazy day at our reserved campsite, wake early, and hurry into Smokemont in the morning so we didn’t miss our shuttle, or sleep at Smokemont tonight and have a worry-free tomorrow?
Campsite 50 was a backcountry site, so it had tent pads and bear cables and, well, that’s it. If you were lucky there’d be a wet log to sit on. But Smokemont was “front country.” That meant it was designed for RVs and car-campers. When putting together our itinerary, I’d deliberately avoided staying there because it sounded noisy and unpleasant. Now, after four days of living in the wilderness, images of vending machines and Coke products tempted us back to civilization.
Jen and I dropped our packs and walked back to 50 to check it out. The site was quite pleasant, with a little stream and large shade trees. But what would I do all day? What did you say? Take a nap? Kate, you clearly don’t know me. I don’t take naps because then I can’t sleep at night. Yes, I know I already couldn’t sleep at night, but trust me. No naps were going to be happening.
I don’t know Jen’s reasons, but she agreed with me that we should hike on to Smokemont. We reported our findings and inclinations to Julie and Carol. Carol demurred. She’d rather stay here, but was willing to do what the rest of the group wanted. “Tell you what,” Julie suggested, “we can hike to Smokemont, and if we don’t like it, we can hike back here. It’s only a mile each way.” That’s Julie, the peacemaker. Middle child and all that, you know how she is.
The first thing I noticed upon our arrival at Smokemont were the trash cans. Carrying your trash around with you in the backcountry can get pretty disgusting. Rotting food bits and used toilet paper don’t smell good, at least not to me (a bear might think differently). And it was heavy—my garbage bag weighed close to a pound by this point. One of my incessant worries had been whether or not A Walk in the Woods would relieve us of our garbage or force us to carry it another forty miles. Now, the dual burdens of my worry and the trash were lifted from my back when I tossed the bag into the dumpster.
Then we saw the bathrooms. Flush toilets! Running water! A sink where I could wash my greasy, itchy hair! I’d been such a snob about being a backpacker. “How can they call car camping camping?” I’d sneer, looking at the twelve-pound tents and seven-pound cast iron frying pans sold in sporting goods stores like Cabela’s. Now, I gloried in the luxury of picnic tables. No need to balance my lunch on my knees while my bottom grew wet and cold from sitting on a mossy log!
Heaven, absolute heaven.
After lunch, Julie and I hiked down the road in search of the ranger’s office. When we finally found it, we presented our backcountry permit and explained that we wanted to stay in Smokemont instead of site 50. The ranger had never encountered a situation like this before. Backcountry permits cost about $4 per night, but front country tent pads are $20. She couldn’t decide whether to honor our permit, make us pay the difference, or demand the full fee. Finally she decided on the latter, and we paid, happily. She let us choose our own site from the many that were available. Each had a gravel tent pad, a little bit of lawn, a fire ring, a picnic table, and maybe a tree. And a paved area to park the car, of course. We picked a site at the far end of a row, where we had greenery along two sides.
“Are there vending machines here?” I asked.
“No,” the ranger told us, “but there are some at the stables.” She pointed to the location on a map.
“How far is that?” I asked.
The ranger realized we couldn’t drive there and got a concerned look on her face. “It’s quite a long walk.”
“Like, how far do you think?” I pressed, aware that a “long walk” wasn’t the same to everyone.
“I don’t know, maybe half a mile?”
We retrieved our friends and dumped our packs at our very own picnic table. Our first order of business was the vending machines. The walk to the stables was nothing to us, especially without packs, and though we were disappointed at the selection, slamming down a cold cola felt wonderful. We sat for awhile in the little shed housing the vending machines and watched the horses in their stalls. Jen bought some firewood, and Carol built a fire and Julie read her book and it was all quite wonderful. When it was time to go to bed, I lay down, tired and relaxed, ready to drift into slumber… but the caffeine from my RC Cola kept me awake.
The next day we began the second half of our journey. A Walk in the Woods shuttled us up to Newfound Gap, where we bid goodbye to Jen and Carol, packed our new supplies, and started hiking the infamous Appalachian Trail. It seemed quite a bit more strenuous than the Benton McKaye trail had been, though perhaps five nights of inadequate sleep was impacting my strength. (I like that story better than that I’m a wimp).
For our first night on the AT, we stayed at Mount Collins shelter. The building was identical to the Laurel Gap shelter. One distinguishing characteristic of this shelter was its proximity to a road with a small parking area less than one mile away. We didn’t think anything of it as we hiked past.
Our only shelter mate was a guy named Randy who was very friendly and considerate. He told us about staying at this same shelter years ago, when some college kids parked at the road and walked in with beer and a boom box. We agreed with him that this was a Terrible Thing, but didn’t think anything more of it.
Julie and Randy went to bed before it was even dark and I read until dusk made it too difficult to continue. I drifted off rather quickly for a change, but was soon awakened by voices.
“Shh. Someone’s there already.” I opened my eyes to utter blackness. Then a beam of light cut through the dark and someone entered the shelter. The voice of a whiny child elicited another “Shh!” from a male adult. He held a flashlight in his mouth and flipped open a sleeping bag onto the bottom platform on the side opposite me.
“Daddy…” the little voice started again.
“Shh!” He threw down some pillows, and a second sleeping bag as a blanket. “Get in there,” he whispered and I saw a little boy in a onesie crawl between the bags. “Now, stay here, Daddy’s got to pee.” He stepped outside of the shelter and shone the flashlight all around, but he was careful not to shine it on any of the “sleeping” inhabitants. Suddenly the little boy was running out toward him.
“Daddy!”
“Shh!” Daddy walked the little boy back and helped him back into “bed.” “Stay here. Don’t move.” Then he went out again. His light was no longer visible. I could hear the little boy shuffling nervously. He lasted maybe three minutes, then he got up and ran out of the shelter into the woods.
“Daddy!”
Luckily, Daddy was nearby or the little boy might have become lost. I sure wasn’t going to go looking for him.
“Shh!” He herded the little boy back into the shelter and into bed, and then crawled in himself, face first. There were more murmurings and shh’s, but eventually everything quieted down.
Well, by that point I was wide awake. Later, I thought I heard a bear snuffling around the shelter, but it turned out to be Daddy snoring.
In the morning, I saw Daddy’s feet hanging off the edge of the platform, shoes still tightly laced. I wonder how well he slept.
The next night, at Double Spring Gap shelter, I got the least sleep of any night on the journey to date.
When we first went to bed, the wind was strong and a malicious tree kept tossing chestnuts onto the metal roof of the shelter at irregular intervals. “Plonk… Plink. Plonk plonk… BANG!” It didn’t actually bother me that much and I fell asleep to the scurrying of a little mouse around the top platform, up where Julie slept.
Later, the fog was thick when I woke to the sound of something large just outside the shelter. Snorts and the sound of tearing were all I could discern of the beast. I considered turning on my light, but knew the fog would only throw it back at me, and maybe scare the animal away. Finally, after eight nights of refusing to plug my ears, I was getting to experience a wild animal in the wild. I listened happily as the creature, which I decided must be a wild boar, rooted around in the grass just fifteen feet from where I lay.
I woke again, later still, to an another odd sound. A mouse, clearly, but what was it doing? Whatever it was, it was quite noisy. Well, since I was awake anyway, and the pig had apparently moved on, I decided to get up to pee. With my headlamp on, I could see that the strange noise had something to do with my water filter, because it was bouncing.
On the trail, you have to filter your water, otherwise you run the risk of getting some nasty bug that will give you the runs, and I promise you, you do not want the runs when you are backpacking. I use a gravity filter, which is quite a bit easier than a pump filter. It consists of a “dirty” bag, into which you scoop the contaminated water you wish to purify. A tube connects this bag to the “clean” bag, and in between the two is the filter. You just hang or hold the dirty bag higher than the clean bag, and gravity does the rest.
That night, I’d hung the dirty bag full of water from a nail on the rafters, and put the clean bag on a bench below it. Now something was making the empty dirty bag dance up and down. I assumed a rodent was chewing on the handle straps, but when I got closer I saw that a little deer mouse was trapped inside the bag. Its futile attempts to scurry up the slick plastic to freedom were causing the noise.
“Oh you silly thing,” I whispered. “How did you get in there?”
I carefully let the mouse out on the floor of the shelter and it tottered off drunkenly into the grass. It occurred to me that there were a lot of chestnuts out there for it to eat and it might do better out of the shelter than in.
Back in my own bag, I felt proud of having done such a good deed. But remember, I’m a positive person, so that good feeling didn’t last long. Soon I was imagining a fox capturing the little mouse, and seeing it flattened by one of those kamikaze chestnuts. Oh dear, far from saving the mouse, I’d actually condemned it! I should have released it back onto the platform, next to Julie, so it could continue it’s nightly rounds by her head!
In the morning, I discovered Julie’s night had been about as restful as my own. “That damned Chinese water chestnut torture kept me up all night!” she complained. “And a mouse kept skittering past my hair. You’d think it would realize that nothing to eat had been there the last ten times it came around, so maybe it should look somewhere else.” We decided this had been the same mouse that had been trapped in the water bag since her hair had remained unmolested after I set the mouse free.
“Oh, and don’t let me stay in bed so long,” she added. “I wake up a cripple.”
My biggest animal adventure was yet to come. We were at Derrick Knob shelter, and it was packed. The shelter itself wasn’t—we shared it with just two other guys, but there were three other groups tenting nearby and when it came time to pee in the middle of the night, well, there weren’t a lot of places to go that offered privacy. I ended up hiking down the trail. Now, I’d been out at night many times by then and had no fear of the dark. I picked my spot, and was getting ready to drop my pants when I heard some rustling down the trail from me, behind some bushes. I shone my headlamp down that way, but didn’t see anything except swaying branches. Something was definitely down there. Something big, by the sound of it.
I’d read and heard about how to handle an encounter with a bear. Not that this was necessarily a bear, but I figured I should treat it as such. Rule number one is “don’t run.” A bear will chase something running away from it, same as a cat will. You aren’t supposed to turn your back, either. Instead, back away slowly. So, that’s what I did. For about three steps. Do you know how hard it is to walk backwards on a twisty trail covered in rocks and roots in the dark surrounded by dewy branches that you don’t want brushing up on your nice, dry night clothes? So, with some trepidation, I turned around and walked about twenty paces back up the trail toward the shelter. Standing about as close as I could get to the shelter without being visible by somebody (as if anyone was up and looking), I stopped. I checked behind me. Nothing. No animals. No noises. I decided it was safe and did my business. As I returned to the shelter a “CRASH!” erupted behind me as a large animal charged through the bushes.
I ran. No thought was involved, just reflex. As soon as I reached the shelter, I stopped, as if being under a roof would protect me. I turned and shone my light into the woods, but saw nothing. Whatever it was had been escaping me, not attacking.
I climbed back in bed and just shook for a couple of minutes. I had no idea what kind of animal I’d almost encountered except that it was a big one. It could have been a bear, or a boar, or even just a deer. I decided it was probably just a deer and dropped into sleep when my adrenaline rush finally wore off.
In the morning, John, one of the two Englishmen who’d been sharing the shelter commented about the ruckus in the night. “I heard the kinds of sounds bears make,” he said, “and a little while later I heard someone running into the shelter. Was that you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I heard that noise behind me and I just ran. If a bear ever charged me from behind, I’d be dead meat.”
“Well, I could be wrong about it being a bear,” he said. “You know how things get in the middle of the night, time gets kind of woo-woo-woo,” he waved his hands about his face to illustrate. “But, really, I think it was a bear.”
Kate, I still see you sitting across from me at Red Rosa’s, asking me why on earth I’d go backpacking again after I made it sound so horrible in my previous blogs. Well, I do it because it is an adventure! Sure, there’s hardship and discomfort, but I’m not likely to get chased by a bear in Minneapolis, am I? If two weeks of sleep deprivation are the price to pay for that experience, I’m happy to pay it and would do it again.
Though hopefully next time my pants won’t be down when it happens.
See you soon,
Michele