Backcountry Bachelor
When, three-and-a-half days into our weekend, a stranger asked me “what is this, just a fishing trip?”, it got me to thinking. What was this trip? Sure, almost all of us had fishing rods. True again, we were choosing to only camp right beside streams that we knew to have trout in them. It should have been an easier question than it was. Meant as an innocent inquiry, her words had me stumped… We were a mix of acquaintances, longtime friends, business partners and siblings. Some of us had known each other for mere minutes when we began our hike on that overcast morning at Lake Fontana on the southern periphery of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We were all armed with an assortment of hiking boots, wading sandals, 45 to 75 liter backpacks, freeze dried gourmet meals, jerky, moonshine and cigars. Why were we here? To have a good time I suppose; to commune with nature, have a “guy’s trip”, hike, fish, sure, all of the above. So why then, was I so thrown off by that query posed to me on that anonymous section of the Benton MacKaye Trail? I didn’t want to oversimplify our trip as it was everything of course. If you removed one of those aforementioned elements the whole expedition fell apart. The whole could not exist without its parts. What was our trip? It was a fishing trip into the backcountry to see and explore new mountains and rivers. It was an excuse for ‘the guys’ to get out of town for a few days. It was a test to see whether we were the men we perceived ourselves to be. Maybe I’m thinking about this too much… it was a bachelor party.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a (or perhaps, the) defining portion of the southern Appalachian mountains. The peaks in this park tower over their neighbors in all directions around. They dominate the skyline and, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, have created one of the most biologically diverse temperate zones on our planet. The streams here are full of native brook as well as wild rainbow and brown trout. Salamanders, frogs and toads seem to to be everywhere near the waterways of the Smokies. Eagles soar overhead and heron stalk the banks with their long, gangly legs. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most heavily visited National Park in the U.S. system. It may surprise visitors to learn this but the Park sees millions of visitors on an annual basis visiting from all across the world. With the Park’s relative proximity to major U.S. cities, a quick visit is an easy sell for many people. As is typical in most parks though, nearly all of the visitors stay very close to the roads and parking lots. With just a hint of effort you can find yourself in beautiful, scenic areas with no competing crowds.
The Smokies, as they are colloquially known, are traversed by several hundred miles of hiking and pack animal trails. The Appalachian, Benton MacKaye and Mountains-to-Sea trails all wander through the misty mountains of the Park. Using these trails and a collection of smaller, local footpaths, a willing hiker can see miles of backcountry rarely seen by the general public.
As our time was limited to just two and a half days of hiking and as some of my companions were on their first backpacking trip, we decided to use the Fontana marina ferry to shuttle across the lake to the mouth of Hazel creek. We would plan to hike up and down this stream and its tributaries before heading to Eagle creek and then eventually back to the Fontana dam where we had left one of our vehicles to serve as a shuttle. We estimated that we would hike roughly 20 miles with gear and another 7-8 with just fishing gear. With our plan, we hoped to explore as much water as we could all while hiking as few miles with our full packs as possible. This would hopefully help us avoid some pain and any unnecessary work as we could make camp and then wander our way upstream with only fishing gear in tow.
My brother and I hiked 14 miles over Cheoah Bald on Friday and then met up with our companions that evening by the lakeshore. We camped at a wedding venue and made final preparations before venturing into the woods. Gear was distributed, water was filtered, food was packed and then we conked out so as to be ready for our early morning shuttle. The next day came quickly and we found ourselves sitting on the marina’s pontoon ferry eager to hit the trail. Our group was the perfect size, six strong. Between the lot of us we had enough experience in the backcountry to know what to expect and how to prepare for it. All of us had camped, hiked and fished before even if we hadn’t all necessarily done it from a backpack over the course of a long weekend. By the end of our sojourn, I think that even the least experienced among us may have found a love and appreciation for living out of a backpack in the mountains.
As we disembarked a the mouth of Hazel creek we walked through the remains of the logging boom town of Proctor. Like many of the reservoirs throughout the country, when Fontana dam created the lake of the same name, it drowned some of the surrounding small communities. Of course these areas were cleared of their residents before they were inundated but it remains fascinating to me to see what was left behind when they were forced to leave. Old gravel road beds are still visible crawling throughout the hills and escarpments near the creek. Foundations of cabins and homes, the ruins of old bridges and much more remain the legacy of this short-lived mountain community. While walking alongside the remains of Proctor I couldn’t help but feel as though I was being given a brief window from our modern world into the mists of our oft-forgotten past. The simplicity of this community was evident but so too was the ingenuity that clearly must have been employed to build a thriving town in such a remote place as even back then only one small road connected Proctor to the greater world around it. It’s amazing to think of the inhospitable places our ancestors managed to build their lives. Lacking modern materials and industrialization, they carved their lives from the mountains and left their indelible impressions.
The hike up from the mouth of Hazel creek is as easy as they come. We followed a maintained gravel road as it meandered alongside and over the water on its way down from the mountains. The water looked extremely fishy and it was killing us not to stop and fish it. We worked our way upstream until we reached our campsite for the evening at location 85. With three hammocks and two tents, we occupied the prime spots right beside the rushing water and a well-used fire ring.
Finally, with camp assembled and some sandwiches in our bellies, we were ready to rig up! We fished right at the campsite to start and actually managed a few hookups on our hopper dropper rigs. Jeremy put us on the board first with a beautiful and scrappy, 8 inch rainbow trout. I missed a few myself before we decided to travel upstream to a high elevation tributary. The hike remained just as easy as before as we climbed further and further above the lake. Hemlocks and evergreens stood tall and shady deciduous trees danced with the breeze coming off of the lake. It was a spectacular day with a high of around 78 degrees and a low of around 50 at that higher altitude. At one point near Sugar creek we noticed a large metal cage with a sliding trap door, a boar trap! We ended up seeing several more of these throughout our weekend but never saw the quarry they were intended for.
We fished one of the mid-elevation tributaries until it reached an old cabin built in the 1880’s. This long-abandoned structure stood sentinel over water that was brimming with eager rainbow and even a few brown trout that we caught. Hopper droppers were the key and I made good use of a small Chubby Chernobyl and a CK nymph dropped off below it.
After hiking back downstream to our camp for the evening we partook in an epic feast around our campfire. Collin had cubed some choice sirloin steak as well as bell peppers and onions and we spit roasted them atop the open flames of our fire. This was truly one of the most delicious meals I have ever had in the woods and I will always remember how it felt so ‘right’ to be on my bachelor party, fishing, with my best friends, roasting meat on an open fire and drinking moonshine beside the dying coals.
The next morning was surprisingly bright and cheerful, the morning cloud cover which the Smokies are famous for did not appear that day. We ate freeze dried meals and prepared for our hike to nearby Eagle creek. We fished our way through a few lower pools on Hazel while making our way back through what was once Proctor. Our easy downhill hike now became a wandering, sometimes overgrown, footpath that meandered through small bogs and tall patches of undergrowth. The mosquitoes made themselves known and even when my fellow hikers became tired we chose never to rest too long in the muggy sections of the sheltered trail. We passed ruins of old cars and older buildings as we trekked along Lakeshore trail. We passed small streams and springs but kept pushing so as to make camp at a reasonable hour. When we passed over some of the larger ridges of our hike we came into a pleasant breeze that swept the humidity off of us sweaty hikers. The descent was long but enjoyable and the sounds of rushing water greeted us as we came back into another river valley.
As my companions pushed the next 1.6 miles to our campsite, I waited behind to fish this lower stretch of the small river. I bushwhacked through dense, overhanging rhododendron and crawled on my belly to the water side only to eventually be skunked in more than an hour’s worth of determined fishing. Talk about disappointing as I had figured my hard work to access difficult water would be rewarded with less-pressured fish, oh well! I grabbed my pack and continued up trail to find my companions setting up camp at the confluence of two streams. We rested here a bit and roasted a summer sausage over a small fire to dull our appetites. This was a trick that a friend of ours had taught my brother and I on the Appalachian Trail. Cheap summer sausage was an excellent protein while hiking as it required no refrigeration and is high in the salt and fats that hikers crave. Accompanied by the delicious aromas and sound of sizzling meat, it’s a delicacy to a famished hiker. Again, we were men! Consuming meat cooked over a fire of our own creation far out in the bush; this was why we were out here.
Collin and Chad called dibs on the main body of the Eagle while I endured another bushwhack through the overgrown tributary coming in near our camp. In an hour and a half of fighting rhododendron, log jams and a silty stream bed I covered maybe a quarter of a mile. A paltry distance compared to what I would normally expect to cover on a stream like this. Worse though, I just wasn’t being rewarded with the fish I expected to find. On a stream that’s this difficult to access I figured the fish would be coming hand over fist and… they weren’t. I had six bites and three landed rainbow trout as well as myriad scratches and bruises for my troubles. When I made it back to camp I figured I would hear that Collin and Chad had caught plenty of fish. This wasn’t the case as my boon companions had only managed one solid bite and failed to land anything other than creek chubs, dang! I don’t know what accounted for the poor fishing on Eagle but it threw us all off. Our weather was great, if still a little hot, but the water looked good and was plenty cold after the recent hurricane’s rains had helped cool the region. We were fishing remote streams that certainly see some fishing pressure but not nearly so much as some of our creeks back home. With limited time at our disposal though, the only conclusion we could draw was that the fishing was just not as good here as at Hazel. Live and learn, this was a backpacking expedition and not just a dedicated fishing mission.
After sharing stories and jokes around the fire I found myself the last to retire that evening. The dark was closing in on the failing light of the embers and I found myself thinking of how lucky I was to be where I was with who I was with. This was what I had wanted. This was my bachelor party. Maybe a little off the norm but that’s kind of how I think of myself any ways. We were here because the mountains and the woods called to us. We yielded to that atavistic beckoning of the wilderness, that ‘call of the wild’. Our trip was what it was meant to be; a group of men communing with nature and living, just for a slight moment, in the footsteps of our forebears. As I reminisced on our trip, the patter of rain on my hammock’s tarp put me to sleep.
