Solo Hiking the Foothills - Part 3

This is part three of a three-part blog recounting my experiences solo-thru-hiking the 76.2-mile Foothills Trail along the North Carolina/South Carolina border

On my third morning, I packed up my dew-covered tent, force-fed myself oatmeal pleading for extra water I didn't have to spare, and dressed my feet in an entire pack of moleskin, all before the stars rotated beneath me. My first few steps felt like I was walking on legos - a sensation I would come to accept for the rest of my journey - and my mouth was dry as cotton - like my oatmeal, also begging to be saturated with water. I navigated through low-hanging shrubbery that painted water streaks across my face guided by the beam of light coming from my headlamp. The finger and arm-esque roots that reached out of the ground were harder to avoid in the barely lit tunnels I tiptoed through and within my first mile, a pointy manicured finger ripped a gaping hole in my right hiking boot. Not long after, I lost a half hour trying to find the trail that seemed to have just disappeared. It wasn't until the sky turned from black to midnight blue that I could see the trail again, completely covered by a 100-foot fallen pine that lay vertically in its path. With my 40-pound pack and 1.5 hiking boots, I climbed through the bouncy limbs to come out on the other side looking like a tree monster - oozing sap and covered in pine needles.

Sharp uphills and sharp downhills filled the hours that passed. Outside of reminding myself to breathe and the occasional "you got this Haley, keep going", pre-occupying my mind became an interesting task. I started by playing silly, made-up games like finding shapes in the leaves or counting steps between blazes. My favorite game was the poking game - let me explain: my hiking poles are pointy on the bottom and as I used them, they collected leaves like skewered meat. For some reason, my right pole was gathering tens of leaves at a time but my left pole wasn't, so I engaged them in a duel of "what pole can poke the most leaves?" The dexterous movement on my left side was a D+ at best, and the left pole lost every battle. Riveting! When the games grew old, I sang to myself in tones that spontaneously combusted the birds - an exploding piñata of baby blue feathers. The playlist of the trip, in no specific order, was:

1. The Addams Family theme song

2. Landslide - the Dixie Chicks version

3. The Harry Potter theme song

4. This Will Be (An Everlasting Love) - Natalie Cole and last but not least 

5. Hypnotize - The Notorious B.I.G.

Next to my bellowing trail-antics, the sound of my footsteps shook the dirt beneath me. I am a loud hiker - so loud that the weight of each step sounds like it belonged to a woman three times my weight, a woman who also happens to grunt unapologetically enthusiastically. As I approached trees and hollows, squirrels ran away like their tails were on fire and the birds notified their forest friends that I was arriving through high-pitched singsong. In the midst of one of these sing-song eruptions, it came to me, and it hit me like falling rocks. The search for a trail name was over, Loud Foot, I announced to no one but myself in a wide-mouth grin with Biggie playing in the background.

During my last two days, I wandered into the belly of the forest, thick and deep with trees that curled up and in, only leaving a tiny circular skylight at the crown of the canopy. My vision was distorted by the tightly packed pines dizzying my eyes like a fish-eye lens. Those two days were my hardest days. I was waging a one-woman war, a war that chipped away at the walls that barricaded my spirit. A single tear kept wallowing in the corner of my eye and I would brush it away before it had the chance to rinse my cheek of dirt and sweat.

When the stream of lighthearted singing and game-playing turned into a slow trickle, the quiet rode in on rapids. I was lonely in the woods which kept my companionship limited to the silent echo of my friends' footsteps that walked alongside me in spirit. The beautiful moments were exceptionally beautiful and the low moments were exceptionally low. No emotion was experienced in mediocrity - they were each powerful and consuming of the mind, body, and spirit. Perhaps it is not one or the other, escapism or realism, that brings people into the wilderness - it is both. Escaping the augmented, superficial curtain that weighs heavily on our cities and suburbs and inviting the realism that bleeds from experiencing the unadulterated, desolateness and aliveness, cruelness and kindness, darkness and lightness of the wilderness.

Though infrequently, as I passed other backpackers, I asked them what drew them to the trail. Some answers were funny. "I backpack to escape my husband." "I backpack so I can eat 5,000 calories in a day." Other answers were more premeditated. "I backpack to test my fortitude." "I backpack to experience the beauty of the mountains and make lifelong friends." After I've had some time to answer my own question, my response is this, "I backpack so I can deepen my ability to connect with my surroundings and my ability to love when the circumstances are uncontrollable."

Within 6 miles of the parking lot where my Subaru was waiting for me, the landscape took a drastic turn. Healthy tree trunks morphed into broken, burnt bodies. The scorched limbs scattered the ground, dying on top of the earth they were born in. There were no birds or bushy-tailed squirrels; even the wind seemed to die here. For miles, I wiggled over, under, and through the bodies that covered the trail, just barely noticing the baby green shoots that popped up through ashen soil. The duality of this experience was metaphoric - it was a place that was concurrently a graveyard and a ground for new life and growth just as this adventure was concurrently the death of old ideals and beliefs and the birth of new ones.

When I saw the thinning tree line and the parking lot come into view, the numbing pain that hammered my feet disappeared. My hands hit my knees and my body bent in half, my face burst into a smile and my eyes burst into tears. A tsunami of relief and gratitude washed over me at the same time I felt a pang of sadness, I wasn't ready for it to be over quite yet.

As I walked to my car, two thoughts ate at me while I sang to myself:

1. I can't wait to wash my face

2. Where am I going next?

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious spooky, they're all together ooky the Carolina Mountains. Dun-na-na-na *snap* *snap* Dun-na-na-na *snap* *snap* Dun-na-na-na Dun-na-na-na Dun-na-na-na *snap* *snap*

This blog concludes my three-part series, thanks for following along with me! Talk to you next week and Happy Thanksgiving. May your tummies and turkeys be stuffed.