weekend in the north carolina mountains- cataloochee
not edited- just giving thea and anyone else a chance to read if they like while I have signal.
Weekend at Cataloochee
Rolling into Maggie Valley after eight years not much seemed to have changed but for a few more closed tourist traps and a handful of new ones. On the events field, a small sea of white tents marked the folk festival and signs throughout town read “Welcome Bikers.” All up the strip, the same chainsaw-carved bears, the same cartoon profiles of bonneted “Maggie” in her green dress and yellow apron, and the same onslaught of “authentic Cherokee” this and “Hillbilly” that. It’s a massive tourist trap born of the combination of Cherokees who escaped the Trail of Tears and the mountain folk who were evicted and their houses burned when the national park was formed, its perfect.
A right turn at “Ghost Town in the Sky” puts us on the road up to Cataloochee. Ghost Town, should you be wondering, is a very 1960s-style Wild West attraction with gunfights, saloon, and shows. It is accessed by a monumental ski lift and sits atop a steep mountain. Cataloochee sits in a high, pastured valley at the end of a 3 ½-mile, transmission-eating mountain road. Tracing a rushing stream past cabins, larger homes, and a couple WWII trucks once used in logging, the road peaks next to the riding stables before descending down a small cabin-studded hill to the ranch house. The Cataloochee Ranch was begun by Tom and Miss Judy Alexander in the late 1930s. Tom had lost his logging job (in the future Great Smoky Mountains National Park) due to the Great Depression. In lieu of the back pay his bankrupted employer couldn’t afford, Tom asked for and got the outfit’s backwoods camping gear. Transforming the logging camp into a fish camp, Tom made such a reputation for himself as a guide and outdoorsman among tourists that when the national park took shape, he was encouraged to lease a parcel in Cataloochee Valley where he and Miss Judy set up a ranch based on riding, fishing, and hiking while still being a working farm. By 1938, the Alexanders outgrew their valley land and bought a cattle farm on nearby Fie Top, the present ranch location. By 1939, they had turned the old fieldstone barn into the main guesthouse, added a horse stable, fencing, numerous outbuildings, a fishing pond, and a ski slope.
Sixty one years later and the place is going strong. Our check-in at the ranch house involved picking up riding liability forms and the keys to our cabin, named “Chestnut.” There are still rooms in the main house, though the Alexanders and their children added numerous cabins and multi-units to the property. All suit the landscape well, being of log or rustic clapboard. Chestnut is a two-room log cabin with a front porch and a bathroom carved from the back of one room. The larger of the rooms is about twelve by twenty feet and includes a full size bed and a fieldstone fireplace. When we were here last, every fireplace at the ranch came equipped with a stack of firewood and a little cast iron kettle and graniteware ladle full of kerosene wood chips. Now they all have ceramic logs and a power switch marked “FIREPLACE.” Ah, progress. Ok, I’ll admit it is amusing watching a blazing hearth spring up from nothing at the flick of a switch, but I miss the woodsmoke smell and the even the work. More than that, after an hour I put my hand on the mantel stones and they were cold as ice. May as well have the fire on the tv. Oh yes, there are tvs now. Back then there were no tvs except for a game room in the big multi-unit called Silverbell. Now every cabin has a little satellite dish stuck artlessly to it and a small set inside with a “Direct TV” box next to it and an unfathomable remote that seems to prefer we watch pay-per-view. In the end, it remained turned off. At least there still are no telephones, but then they are more obsolete than the televisions that just squeeked in. Besides the modern “niceties,” there are three tall end tables with tapered legs, a splay-legged coffee table, striped love seat, and wooden ladder back armchair. The offending idiot box perches on a shaker-like hutch with four shelves behind doors with a toggle latch. The walls are a dark reddish brown pine or cypress vertical batten and the furniture is a dark and very mellow polished pine. Atop the bed lies a quilt; every bed on the property has a different one. Across the smooth-worn wide pine floor to the other room are two twin beds, an old glass-knobbed dresser (almost all the knobs match), and a tiny mini-fridge. Thankfully the bathroom took some of the fireplace disappointment away- it is sauna-like, lined with milled white pine boards that set off the white porcelain of the new fixtures. All the windows in the cabin have bright linen curtains that relieve the darkness and there are a few pictures on the walls, a folk art barn over the fire and a print of an Audubon-like bird nest. The big room also has a few little wall shelves in the corners with a selection of old books.
The book I picked up was “Jibby the Cat” from 1948. It is a kids’ book that begins with three kittens being drowned by a farmer. Two are dead but the last is rescued by a boy and set to suckle on a farm dog at his mother’s direction. “Nipple” in a kid’s book? How refreshing. According to author Salten, it is good and right to drown kittens if they can’t be fed but only if drowned with skill in a bucket rather than “cruelly” tossed in a river. At any rate, Jibby has a rewarding childhood dispatching mice until the prize bull dies and the distraught boy forgets himself and hits the attention-craving Jibby. The tiger cat, “childhood now over” takes to the fields and a life of devouring small birds in their nests and piercing the necks of unsuspecting squirrels. Eventually she takes to living in trees and feasting daily on a colony of pheasants where the game-warden fires a load of shot at her taking her for a marten in the moonlight. Jibby is forced into early retirement with a human, the boys school teacher as it turns out…
After a nap by the fake fire and some unpacking, it was time for the afternoon ride. Atop the hill, a group of seven or so gathered in the corral in front of the big fieldstone and grey wood Dutch barn. One of the wranglers flipped through the liability forms, trying to match rider sizes, weights, and experience to the horses. Generally, the less experienced or smaller the rider, the older the horse. The horses’ ages range from four to 30-something and include a dozen different breeds and types: Quarterhorse, Walking Horse, Shire, Percheron, Appaloosa, Paint, Mustangs, Arabians, Dutch Warmbloods, etc. Only a handful are full-bloods; this is a good thing as it takes the characteristics of several breeds to make a strong mountain horse. When my name came up, I was matched up with Littlefoot, a Shire or Percheron cross named for, yes, the “Land Before Time” dino. A big bay (dark brown) draft horse, Littlefoot is a kind but completely unimpressed four-year-old. Our group included Hank, Huckleberry, Trooper, Littlefoot, and Blackfoot as we checked girths and stirrup lengths and headed onto the road toward Hemphill Bald.
Riding up to Hemphill is, like most rides on the ranch, a steep trip along narrow trails and cobble strewn logging roads lined with mountain laurel and rhododendron. The first leg took us along the gravel road to the ski lodge giving a view of the valley and the road up to the ranch- or at least the few square feet that peeked through the canopy. The view here and on any of the balds and ridges around Cataloochee is incredible in mid-October when the fall colors are in full force, but even now, the depth of the valleys in their blanket of green is beautiful. Most of the ride threads slowly up the mountainside in hairpin turns that try, sometimes even successfully to reduce the climbing grade. It makes for a long time in the seclusion of the rhododendron so that emerging onto the bald is a revelation.
Balds like Hemphill are a natural and still unexplained phenomenon in the Great Smoky Mountains and one that is highly endangered. A bald is essentially a naturally occurring meadow on a mountaintop. At four or five thousand feet, the mountains are still below treeline, but for whatever reason, be it ancient fires, soil chemistry, or weather patterns, some wear a little alpine cap of succulent grasses and wildflowers. Overgrazing by livestock was once the biggest threat to the balds, but farmers have since adopted rotational grazing practices. A certain amount of grazing, once accomplished by deer and other herbivores and now by cows, helps keep saplings from taking over. Erosion is the primary factor in the destruction of the balds; topsoil on the mountaintops is thin and underlain with jumbled rock. Erosion’s greatest contributor is the wild pig. Wild pigs, boars, or Russian Boars were introduced on private lands in the late 19th century but soon escaped to interbreed with feral, ex-domestic hogs. Not interested in grass but in roots, the pigs turn over expanses of the balds, exposing the underlying rocks and providing strong rains with a wedge into the earth and sod. Each year the National Park Service hunters shoot around 500 of the pests.
Walking up Hemphill we saw no pigs, though there was abundant evidence that they had been there. All across the bald were fifteen- to twenty-foot crescents of disturbed soil, some two feet deep and full of scrape marks and little cloven hoof prints. As we pondered a tiny, forlorn little camper the size of a small bunkbed, our guide told us about the boars. The trailer, it seems, is used by ranch hands as a base to shoot the boars who usually only come out at night. Strangely, though they may kill several, they are left for carrion and not processed. It seems like a bad precedent to encourage the coyote population, but maybe one conservation effort at a time?
Hemphill Bald itself affords an incredible view of the surrounding ranges. Riding over it is a somewhat spooky feeling. Atop a horse, atop a high mountain, and yet with every step the ground rings hollow like the skin of a drum. The soil is thin and the jumbled stone beneath leaves many air pockets besides the undoubted presence of thousands of rodent burrows. It is a feeling somewhere between floating and breaking through and is weirdly exhillherating. More exciting to my aching rear at this point was that the Bald also offered us our midway stop where we could get off and stretch for a while.
The ride back down utilized a couple different trails but offered nothing really spectacular scenery-wise, only the peacefulness of the laurel and the occasional wild blueberry bush for a treat. The main diversions were a few of the ranch’s black angus cows whom we met munching off to the side. The cows are apparently the number one cause for false black bear sightings and unless someone spots a black shape in a tree, the guides don’t tend to believe them. Other than the cows, only our water stops drew special interest, at least from the horses, though the two or three stops per ride will usually include a pretty spring or interesting, hewn chestnut water trough. At the end of our three hours, we wound our way through a last gate and around a cattle guard into the barnyard where we dismounted and made our bowlegged ways for showers, naps, or other activities for a couple hours before 7pm mealtime.
Dinner was rung with a railroad spike on the hub of an old Model A Ford, an improvised bell that has been in service since the ranch’s founding in 1939. With the grill and buffet out on the edge of the porch, the cueing was heralded with a more melodic tune on a chunky, four-bar xylophone. Sometime between the first and second tone, the covers were lifted from baked sweet potatoes and cinnamon butter, succotash, collard greens, salad, and a grill-load of steaks and a throng of Tex Avery wolves wearing L.L. Bean and North Face stood there salivating. Excellent food, as always, though I fear I’ll never get used to collards. The sweet potoatoes were awesome and everyone soon fell to talking about the day’s adventures between bites.
After a massive plateful and a smaller mass of chocolate cake and fresh blackberries and blueberries, I wandered back into the main room of the lodge to recuperate. Climbing the old staircase out of the crowd, I turned past the ancient, bark-covered newell post to the old bookshelf at the top of the stairs. The titles ran the gamut from “The Client” to “Identifying the Mosses of the Northeast” from 1916. Scanning a few dozen faded spines, I spotted a thin, green book with a torn binding, “Tar on My Heels.”
Published in 1946, it is a collection of short editorials from the carreer of newspaperman… that cover life in North Carolina from the Smokies to the Banks. Curled up in a corner of a big beige leather chair in front of the lodge fire, I read about a time when no place on the Outer Banks had more than 900 residents and bears named Old Kettlefoot and Honest John terrorized the sheep farmers of the nearby mountains. In 1946, the idea of the future Route 12 was still turning around in legislators’ heads and Ocracokers had no need for license plates. The 1944 huricane season had uncovered dozens of long lost ships: the Carrol A. Deering, the Huron and a mysterious Elizabethan warship. At Nags Head, the dunes had just moved on to once more uncover a hundred year old cemetery, its turned fenceposts protruding from the sands alongside a bleached and blasted skull. At Kill Devil Hill, the grassy stabilization was deemed a technical success, though the still ambulatory dunes of Jockey’s Ridge were considered aesthetically superior.
In the mountains, the author had seen the rise of the crafts and folk arts movement as former mountain-folk turned to the tourist market and farmers turned from opportunistic rockhounds to entrepreneurial lapidaries. “Footprint-big-as-a-kettle” Old Kettlefoot, the killer black bear who roved the valleys seemingly killing for sport had finally been taken and weighed in at a disappointing 447 pounds. Honest John, a bear who only killed what he would eat- returning to clean up any leftovers, was still at large. Then so too were the feral descendents of the “Rooshans”, the Russian and European boars brought in by the Vanderbilts and other wealthy northerners to stock hunting preserves in the 1880s to 1900s. Some of these might grow to 600 pounds, a match for almost any bear in the mountains. I read the stories, thinking of the afternoon ride, the porcine destruction and all that had changed here in the mountains and down along the Banks in the intervening 62 years. Around me, teenagers and their young urban professional parents tapped away at laptops and phones before a roaring fire in a mass of fieldstone and hand-hewn logs and I dreamt quietly of a Buxton, Mann’s Harbor, or Ocracoke that never knew a mailman to come by land.
Every few minutes as I read, a little blonde youth of the painfully precocious sort would run in and announce to all assembled “the wolves are coming!” or “I think the wolfman is here!.” I had done a pretty good job of tuning this out, but when it became “The wolves are outside” I figured it was time to see if ignoring the boy further might provide some entertainment in the form of a mass mauling. Out in the parking lot, a half-dozen or more kids were baying in freakishly accurate imitation of a pack of wolves themselves. The wolves, it turned out, were safely inside a truck in the gravel parking lot. Yes, the wolfman was here.
A powder horn hung across the front of his peasant shirt by a leather strap and at the hip of fringed deerskin pants he wore a square sporran with a river otter head. Short and squarely built, his eyes and face were younger than the white-gray hair as began to tell us about wolves. Did we know that there had never been a single report of a wolf biting a person on record? That they never get fleas or ticks? That they don’t have a scent? (they still smell like a wet dog in the rain, though). Day-to-day, the Wolfman and his pack of two work at Ghost Town in the Sky teaching visitors about their lupine lives. He also takes his wolves (he has had up to six at once) to schools and other public venues and likes to tell the high school students that they are excellent drug sniffing animals and then when they ask to be excused, tells them there is a second wolf patrolling the lockers.
In a bit, a helper brought the wolves around to the porch. The “pup,” a rare, red-faced timber wolf was led up and hopped onto a round table while the Wolfman told us that he was approximately double the weight of other wolves his age and that he was expected to reach 200 pounds. As he stood, the red-faced one was comparable to a thin shepherd. Patience for his pedestal lasted all of about a minute and he was down on the flagstones hoovering any food he could come across; a large chocolate chip cookie disappeared in two bites. Timber wolves, he told us, only eat once a week or so, gorging themselves with each meal. Today he generally feeds them chicken thighs, which they eat whole, crushing the bones to meal in their jaws. He once had an agreement with a Cherokee grocer on the reservation to pick up past-date meat. At first sure he had been set up with steaks and tenderloin for life, the wolves quickly rejected their ground beef allotment as a textural affront and he ended up living on hamburgers while they had the steaks. The female, a big, beautiful, arctic timber wolf kept her distance on the lead of the helper, being excused as “too playful to be around children.” Everyone got to pet the male and he barely flinched among the flashing cameras and blinking cell phones as he continued to vacuum the porch floor.
Breakfast: oatmeal and brown sugar, fruit, bacon, scrambled eggs, orange juice, Earl Grey. Too tired to elaborate more and breakfast and the first ride of the day blended together. Devil’s Britches, the morning trail, took us along the base of Hemphill Bald without much to see, but it was a lazy and easy ride and all the better as it started out looking to be a wash as we rode out of the corral in heavy yellow ponchos under a steady drizzle. At lunch, I was greeted by 1/3 pound of angus, some nice swiss and potato salad but before the pain subsided in my knees it was time to ride again.
This afternoon, we climbed Hemphill from the opposite side, coming up behind and below the tiny hunting trailer. On this side, the camouflage gave way to a large mural of a long-legged, shovel-nosed black boar. Instead of coming over the Bald, we came across the side and passed through a gate in the split rail into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The park trail straddled the ridge for a mile or two, always within a few feet of the boundary and giving glimpses of the valleys on either side.
Just after we crossed into the park, we met some hiker who warned us of a yellow jacket nest “just past the Swag.” The Swag is small resort with a four or five star kitchen, a few log cabins, and an abundance of isolation. They discourage guests to bring children. Most who stay there are professionals or retirees who spend their time walking, birding, reading, or spotting wildflowers. Besides their food, the Swag’s real claim to fame is a grassy lawn just up the trail with a gazebo and a row of Adirondack chairs perched on the edge of everything. We pulled up at the hitching rails just across the split rail and took our break in the chairs, tried out the hammock in the gazebo, and stared out across several dozen miles of mountaintops. A little viewing platform surrounded by purple and yellow flowers held a sign that identified the peaks on the horizon- everything from the East Coast’s highest, Mt. Mitchell (6000+ feet) to the Cataloochee ski slopes and Gooseberry Knob where we stood. It wasn’t a minute after we were back in the saddle that several horses were bucking and jumping in and out of the brush with Blackfoot leading the rodeo as the yellow-jackets swarmed their legs and bellies. With nothing to do but get out of there, everyone rode hell-for-leather through the wasp gauntlet, arriving shaken but mostly unharmed a hundred feet back down the trail. On the way back, we dropped deep into the valley toward the waterfall and the base of the ski slopes, passing bushes of small bone-china berries with red stems, orange touch-me-nots, and purple asters.
A line was already waiting hungrily at the buffet when the four bar xylophone rang out the call to the races. Immediately a hundred stomachs ferried their humans and prospective plates past pans of green beans, okra, tomatoes, red potatoes, fresh salad, roast chicken and pulled pork barbeque. I ate out on the porch again, the ranch house and desert table to my pack, mountains to my right and campfire just past the railing and azaleas in front of me. By the time I finished my second plate and waddled over to the deserts, the table was semi-devastated, though I salvaged some carrot cake, cobbler, chocolate cake and cream pie. With the sun going down, the guests split between the indoors and out and hearth and campfire.
One by one lights were dimmed on the porch and a few families gathered around the singer at the campfire. While she played guitar and harmonica and sang Country Roads, they spread quilts over the damp grass and lay down to listen. Not too many took her up on the “sing-along” part, though there were choruses of American Pie and Cheeseburger in Paradise. In between, the singer told a little of the history of each song- things like: Willie Nelson wrote Crazy, but Patsy Kline hated Willie because he was forever getting drunk with her husband and it was total chance that they got her to do the one dub in the studio… There were a couple bluegrass standards and, in honor of the family reunion folks from Alabama, Skynnard. In an hour’s time, the natural light had all gone but down in Maggie Valley the folk festival was beginning its fireworks. None of us could see the bursts of color- they were behind and below the ridge- but each crack lit up the hills and put the distant peaks in bluish-white contrast. All the kids and most of the adults were gone back to their cabins now but a few seeming old romantics huddled close on their quilt. One of the group requested the Georgia Satellites “Keep Your Hands to Yourself “and the singer obliged, albeit without guitar, by belting out the lyrics with gravelly relish before moving on to play “Georgia on my Mind.” The last song of the evening “was originally a Cole Porter tune I think..but I got to love it hearing Cass Elliot sing it…” Eyes closed, I sung along to “Dream a Little Dream of Me” as the remnants of the fire quietly fell in on themselves.
Breakfast the next morning was the same: oatmeal, eggs, bacon, sausage patties, fruit salad, orange juice. I tried one of the sausage patties and had some hot chocolate instead of tea and today they brought out some grits so the oatmeal bowl served double. Marge and her husband Hersh (Herschel) from Indiana joined us at the table as they had at dinner. Marge is an RN who worked as a casino nurse in Reno, Nevada where she met her Hersh and now is the only registered nurse for a six school system where she lives. He is retired from tool and die work and now build furniture and keeps house. She likes nature and lots of butter and salt in her grits- but only if they’re made with milk or cream.
By close of breakfast, we were all full and the short rainstorm outside had let up. At 9:30 a small group converged on the soggy barnyard for a last ride. This being Labor Day Monday, most of the weekenders were heading home after lunch- myself included. As I stepped onto the stump and into the stirrup, Littlefoot gave a long sigh of either depression or profound boredom.
Weekend at Cataloochee
Rolling into Maggie Valley after eight years not much seemed to have changed but for a few more closed tourist traps and a handful of new ones. On the events field, a small sea of white tents marked the folk festival and signs throughout town read “Welcome Bikers.” All up the strip, the same chainsaw-carved bears, the same cartoon profiles of bonneted “Maggie” in her green dress and yellow apron, and the same onslaught of “authentic Cherokee” this and “Hillbilly” that. It’s a massive tourist trap born of the combination of Cherokees who escaped the Trail of Tears and the mountain folk who were evicted and their houses burned when the national park was formed, its perfect.
A right turn at “Ghost Town in the Sky” puts us on the road up to Cataloochee. Ghost Town, should you be wondering, is a very 1960s-style Wild West attraction with gunfights, saloon, and shows. It is accessed by a monumental ski lift and sits atop a steep mountain. Cataloochee sits in a high, pastured valley at the end of a 3 ½-mile, transmission-eating mountain road. Tracing a rushing stream past cabins, larger homes, and a couple WWII trucks once used in logging, the road peaks next to the riding stables before descending down a small cabin-studded hill to the ranch house. The Cataloochee Ranch was begun by Tom and Miss Judy Alexander in the late 1930s. Tom had lost his logging job (in the future Great Smoky Mountains National Park) due to the Great Depression. In lieu of the back pay his bankrupted employer couldn’t afford, Tom asked for and got the outfit’s backwoods camping gear. Transforming the logging camp into a fish camp, Tom made such a reputation for himself as a guide and outdoorsman among tourists that when the national park took shape, he was encouraged to lease a parcel in Cataloochee Valley where he and Miss Judy set up a ranch based on riding, fishing, and hiking while still being a working farm. By 1938, the Alexanders outgrew their valley land and bought a cattle farm on nearby Fie Top, the present ranch location. By 1939, they had turned the old fieldstone barn into the main guesthouse, added a horse stable, fencing, numerous outbuildings, a fishing pond, and a ski slope.
Sixty one years later and the place is going strong. Our check-in at the ranch house involved picking up riding liability forms and the keys to our cabin, named “Chestnut.” There are still rooms in the main house, though the Alexanders and their children added numerous cabins and multi-units to the property. All suit the landscape well, being of log or rustic clapboard. Chestnut is a two-room log cabin with a front porch and a bathroom carved from the back of one room. The larger of the rooms is about twelve by twenty feet and includes a full size bed and a fieldstone fireplace. When we were here last, every fireplace at the ranch came equipped with a stack of firewood and a little cast iron kettle and graniteware ladle full of kerosene wood chips. Now they all have ceramic logs and a power switch marked “FIREPLACE.” Ah, progress. Ok, I’ll admit it is amusing watching a blazing hearth spring up from nothing at the flick of a switch, but I miss the woodsmoke smell and the even the work. More than that, after an hour I put my hand on the mantel stones and they were cold as ice. May as well have the fire on the tv. Oh yes, there are tvs now. Back then there were no tvs except for a game room in the big multi-unit called Silverbell. Now every cabin has a little satellite dish stuck artlessly to it and a small set inside with a “Direct TV” box next to it and an unfathomable remote that seems to prefer we watch pay-per-view. In the end, it remained turned off. At least there still are no telephones, but then they are more obsolete than the televisions that just squeeked in. Besides the modern “niceties,” there are three tall end tables with tapered legs, a splay-legged coffee table, striped love seat, and wooden ladder back armchair. The offending idiot box perches on a shaker-like hutch with four shelves behind doors with a toggle latch. The walls are a dark reddish brown pine or cypress vertical batten and the furniture is a dark and very mellow polished pine. Atop the bed lies a quilt; every bed on the property has a different one. Across the smooth-worn wide pine floor to the other room are two twin beds, an old glass-knobbed dresser (almost all the knobs match), and a tiny mini-fridge. Thankfully the bathroom took some of the fireplace disappointment away- it is sauna-like, lined with milled white pine boards that set off the white porcelain of the new fixtures. All the windows in the cabin have bright linen curtains that relieve the darkness and there are a few pictures on the walls, a folk art barn over the fire and a print of an Audubon-like bird nest. The big room also has a few little wall shelves in the corners with a selection of old books.
The book I picked up was “Jibby the Cat” from 1948. It is a kids’ book that begins with three kittens being drowned by a farmer. Two are dead but the last is rescued by a boy and set to suckle on a farm dog at his mother’s direction. “Nipple” in a kid’s book? How refreshing. According to author Salten, it is good and right to drown kittens if they can’t be fed but only if drowned with skill in a bucket rather than “cruelly” tossed in a river. At any rate, Jibby has a rewarding childhood dispatching mice until the prize bull dies and the distraught boy forgets himself and hits the attention-craving Jibby. The tiger cat, “childhood now over” takes to the fields and a life of devouring small birds in their nests and piercing the necks of unsuspecting squirrels. Eventually she takes to living in trees and feasting daily on a colony of pheasants where the game-warden fires a load of shot at her taking her for a marten in the moonlight. Jibby is forced into early retirement with a human, the boys school teacher as it turns out…
After a nap by the fake fire and some unpacking, it was time for the afternoon ride. Atop the hill, a group of seven or so gathered in the corral in front of the big fieldstone and grey wood Dutch barn. One of the wranglers flipped through the liability forms, trying to match rider sizes, weights, and experience to the horses. Generally, the less experienced or smaller the rider, the older the horse. The horses’ ages range from four to 30-something and include a dozen different breeds and types: Quarterhorse, Walking Horse, Shire, Percheron, Appaloosa, Paint, Mustangs, Arabians, Dutch Warmbloods, etc. Only a handful are full-bloods; this is a good thing as it takes the characteristics of several breeds to make a strong mountain horse. When my name came up, I was matched up with Littlefoot, a Shire or Percheron cross named for, yes, the “Land Before Time” dino. A big bay (dark brown) draft horse, Littlefoot is a kind but completely unimpressed four-year-old. Our group included Hank, Huckleberry, Trooper, Littlefoot, and Blackfoot as we checked girths and stirrup lengths and headed onto the road toward Hemphill Bald.
Riding up to Hemphill is, like most rides on the ranch, a steep trip along narrow trails and cobble strewn logging roads lined with mountain laurel and rhododendron. The first leg took us along the gravel road to the ski lodge giving a view of the valley and the road up to the ranch- or at least the few square feet that peeked through the canopy. The view here and on any of the balds and ridges around Cataloochee is incredible in mid-October when the fall colors are in full force, but even now, the depth of the valleys in their blanket of green is beautiful. Most of the ride threads slowly up the mountainside in hairpin turns that try, sometimes even successfully to reduce the climbing grade. It makes for a long time in the seclusion of the rhododendron so that emerging onto the bald is a revelation.
Balds like Hemphill are a natural and still unexplained phenomenon in the Great Smoky Mountains and one that is highly endangered. A bald is essentially a naturally occurring meadow on a mountaintop. At four or five thousand feet, the mountains are still below treeline, but for whatever reason, be it ancient fires, soil chemistry, or weather patterns, some wear a little alpine cap of succulent grasses and wildflowers. Overgrazing by livestock was once the biggest threat to the balds, but farmers have since adopted rotational grazing practices. A certain amount of grazing, once accomplished by deer and other herbivores and now by cows, helps keep saplings from taking over. Erosion is the primary factor in the destruction of the balds; topsoil on the mountaintops is thin and underlain with jumbled rock. Erosion’s greatest contributor is the wild pig. Wild pigs, boars, or Russian Boars were introduced on private lands in the late 19th century but soon escaped to interbreed with feral, ex-domestic hogs. Not interested in grass but in roots, the pigs turn over expanses of the balds, exposing the underlying rocks and providing strong rains with a wedge into the earth and sod. Each year the National Park Service hunters shoot around 500 of the pests.
Walking up Hemphill we saw no pigs, though there was abundant evidence that they had been there. All across the bald were fifteen- to twenty-foot crescents of disturbed soil, some two feet deep and full of scrape marks and little cloven hoof prints. As we pondered a tiny, forlorn little camper the size of a small bunkbed, our guide told us about the boars. The trailer, it seems, is used by ranch hands as a base to shoot the boars who usually only come out at night. Strangely, though they may kill several, they are left for carrion and not processed. It seems like a bad precedent to encourage the coyote population, but maybe one conservation effort at a time?
Hemphill Bald itself affords an incredible view of the surrounding ranges. Riding over it is a somewhat spooky feeling. Atop a horse, atop a high mountain, and yet with every step the ground rings hollow like the skin of a drum. The soil is thin and the jumbled stone beneath leaves many air pockets besides the undoubted presence of thousands of rodent burrows. It is a feeling somewhere between floating and breaking through and is weirdly exhillherating. More exciting to my aching rear at this point was that the Bald also offered us our midway stop where we could get off and stretch for a while.
The ride back down utilized a couple different trails but offered nothing really spectacular scenery-wise, only the peacefulness of the laurel and the occasional wild blueberry bush for a treat. The main diversions were a few of the ranch’s black angus cows whom we met munching off to the side. The cows are apparently the number one cause for false black bear sightings and unless someone spots a black shape in a tree, the guides don’t tend to believe them. Other than the cows, only our water stops drew special interest, at least from the horses, though the two or three stops per ride will usually include a pretty spring or interesting, hewn chestnut water trough. At the end of our three hours, we wound our way through a last gate and around a cattle guard into the barnyard where we dismounted and made our bowlegged ways for showers, naps, or other activities for a couple hours before 7pm mealtime.
Dinner was rung with a railroad spike on the hub of an old Model A Ford, an improvised bell that has been in service since the ranch’s founding in 1939. With the grill and buffet out on the edge of the porch, the cueing was heralded with a more melodic tune on a chunky, four-bar xylophone. Sometime between the first and second tone, the covers were lifted from baked sweet potatoes and cinnamon butter, succotash, collard greens, salad, and a grill-load of steaks and a throng of Tex Avery wolves wearing L.L. Bean and North Face stood there salivating. Excellent food, as always, though I fear I’ll never get used to collards. The sweet potoatoes were awesome and everyone soon fell to talking about the day’s adventures between bites.
After a massive plateful and a smaller mass of chocolate cake and fresh blackberries and blueberries, I wandered back into the main room of the lodge to recuperate. Climbing the old staircase out of the crowd, I turned past the ancient, bark-covered newell post to the old bookshelf at the top of the stairs. The titles ran the gamut from “The Client” to “Identifying the Mosses of the Northeast” from 1916. Scanning a few dozen faded spines, I spotted a thin, green book with a torn binding, “Tar on My Heels.”
Published in 1946, it is a collection of short editorials from the carreer of newspaperman… that cover life in North Carolina from the Smokies to the Banks. Curled up in a corner of a big beige leather chair in front of the lodge fire, I read about a time when no place on the Outer Banks had more than 900 residents and bears named Old Kettlefoot and Honest John terrorized the sheep farmers of the nearby mountains. In 1946, the idea of the future Route 12 was still turning around in legislators’ heads and Ocracokers had no need for license plates. The 1944 huricane season had uncovered dozens of long lost ships: the Carrol A. Deering, the Huron and a mysterious Elizabethan warship. At Nags Head, the dunes had just moved on to once more uncover a hundred year old cemetery, its turned fenceposts protruding from the sands alongside a bleached and blasted skull. At Kill Devil Hill, the grassy stabilization was deemed a technical success, though the still ambulatory dunes of Jockey’s Ridge were considered aesthetically superior.
In the mountains, the author had seen the rise of the crafts and folk arts movement as former mountain-folk turned to the tourist market and farmers turned from opportunistic rockhounds to entrepreneurial lapidaries. “Footprint-big-as-a-kettle” Old Kettlefoot, the killer black bear who roved the valleys seemingly killing for sport had finally been taken and weighed in at a disappointing 447 pounds. Honest John, a bear who only killed what he would eat- returning to clean up any leftovers, was still at large. Then so too were the feral descendents of the “Rooshans”, the Russian and European boars brought in by the Vanderbilts and other wealthy northerners to stock hunting preserves in the 1880s to 1900s. Some of these might grow to 600 pounds, a match for almost any bear in the mountains. I read the stories, thinking of the afternoon ride, the porcine destruction and all that had changed here in the mountains and down along the Banks in the intervening 62 years. Around me, teenagers and their young urban professional parents tapped away at laptops and phones before a roaring fire in a mass of fieldstone and hand-hewn logs and I dreamt quietly of a Buxton, Mann’s Harbor, or Ocracoke that never knew a mailman to come by land.
Every few minutes as I read, a little blonde youth of the painfully precocious sort would run in and announce to all assembled “the wolves are coming!” or “I think the wolfman is here!.” I had done a pretty good job of tuning this out, but when it became “The wolves are outside” I figured it was time to see if ignoring the boy further might provide some entertainment in the form of a mass mauling. Out in the parking lot, a half-dozen or more kids were baying in freakishly accurate imitation of a pack of wolves themselves. The wolves, it turned out, were safely inside a truck in the gravel parking lot. Yes, the wolfman was here.
A powder horn hung across the front of his peasant shirt by a leather strap and at the hip of fringed deerskin pants he wore a square sporran with a river otter head. Short and squarely built, his eyes and face were younger than the white-gray hair as began to tell us about wolves. Did we know that there had never been a single report of a wolf biting a person on record? That they never get fleas or ticks? That they don’t have a scent? (they still smell like a wet dog in the rain, though). Day-to-day, the Wolfman and his pack of two work at Ghost Town in the Sky teaching visitors about their lupine lives. He also takes his wolves (he has had up to six at once) to schools and other public venues and likes to tell the high school students that they are excellent drug sniffing animals and then when they ask to be excused, tells them there is a second wolf patrolling the lockers.
In a bit, a helper brought the wolves around to the porch. The “pup,” a rare, red-faced timber wolf was led up and hopped onto a round table while the Wolfman told us that he was approximately double the weight of other wolves his age and that he was expected to reach 200 pounds. As he stood, the red-faced one was comparable to a thin shepherd. Patience for his pedestal lasted all of about a minute and he was down on the flagstones hoovering any food he could come across; a large chocolate chip cookie disappeared in two bites. Timber wolves, he told us, only eat once a week or so, gorging themselves with each meal. Today he generally feeds them chicken thighs, which they eat whole, crushing the bones to meal in their jaws. He once had an agreement with a Cherokee grocer on the reservation to pick up past-date meat. At first sure he had been set up with steaks and tenderloin for life, the wolves quickly rejected their ground beef allotment as a textural affront and he ended up living on hamburgers while they had the steaks. The female, a big, beautiful, arctic timber wolf kept her distance on the lead of the helper, being excused as “too playful to be around children.” Everyone got to pet the male and he barely flinched among the flashing cameras and blinking cell phones as he continued to vacuum the porch floor.
Breakfast: oatmeal and brown sugar, fruit, bacon, scrambled eggs, orange juice, Earl Grey. Too tired to elaborate more and breakfast and the first ride of the day blended together. Devil’s Britches, the morning trail, took us along the base of Hemphill Bald without much to see, but it was a lazy and easy ride and all the better as it started out looking to be a wash as we rode out of the corral in heavy yellow ponchos under a steady drizzle. At lunch, I was greeted by 1/3 pound of angus, some nice swiss and potato salad but before the pain subsided in my knees it was time to ride again.
This afternoon, we climbed Hemphill from the opposite side, coming up behind and below the tiny hunting trailer. On this side, the camouflage gave way to a large mural of a long-legged, shovel-nosed black boar. Instead of coming over the Bald, we came across the side and passed through a gate in the split rail into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The park trail straddled the ridge for a mile or two, always within a few feet of the boundary and giving glimpses of the valleys on either side.
Just after we crossed into the park, we met some hiker who warned us of a yellow jacket nest “just past the Swag.” The Swag is small resort with a four or five star kitchen, a few log cabins, and an abundance of isolation. They discourage guests to bring children. Most who stay there are professionals or retirees who spend their time walking, birding, reading, or spotting wildflowers. Besides their food, the Swag’s real claim to fame is a grassy lawn just up the trail with a gazebo and a row of Adirondack chairs perched on the edge of everything. We pulled up at the hitching rails just across the split rail and took our break in the chairs, tried out the hammock in the gazebo, and stared out across several dozen miles of mountaintops. A little viewing platform surrounded by purple and yellow flowers held a sign that identified the peaks on the horizon- everything from the East Coast’s highest, Mt. Mitchell (6000+ feet) to the Cataloochee ski slopes and Gooseberry Knob where we stood. It wasn’t a minute after we were back in the saddle that several horses were bucking and jumping in and out of the brush with Blackfoot leading the rodeo as the yellow-jackets swarmed their legs and bellies. With nothing to do but get out of there, everyone rode hell-for-leather through the wasp gauntlet, arriving shaken but mostly unharmed a hundred feet back down the trail. On the way back, we dropped deep into the valley toward the waterfall and the base of the ski slopes, passing bushes of small bone-china berries with red stems, orange touch-me-nots, and purple asters.
A line was already waiting hungrily at the buffet when the four bar xylophone rang out the call to the races. Immediately a hundred stomachs ferried their humans and prospective plates past pans of green beans, okra, tomatoes, red potatoes, fresh salad, roast chicken and pulled pork barbeque. I ate out on the porch again, the ranch house and desert table to my pack, mountains to my right and campfire just past the railing and azaleas in front of me. By the time I finished my second plate and waddled over to the deserts, the table was semi-devastated, though I salvaged some carrot cake, cobbler, chocolate cake and cream pie. With the sun going down, the guests split between the indoors and out and hearth and campfire.
One by one lights were dimmed on the porch and a few families gathered around the singer at the campfire. While she played guitar and harmonica and sang Country Roads, they spread quilts over the damp grass and lay down to listen. Not too many took her up on the “sing-along” part, though there were choruses of American Pie and Cheeseburger in Paradise. In between, the singer told a little of the history of each song- things like: Willie Nelson wrote Crazy, but Patsy Kline hated Willie because he was forever getting drunk with her husband and it was total chance that they got her to do the one dub in the studio… There were a couple bluegrass standards and, in honor of the family reunion folks from Alabama, Skynnard. In an hour’s time, the natural light had all gone but down in Maggie Valley the folk festival was beginning its fireworks. None of us could see the bursts of color- they were behind and below the ridge- but each crack lit up the hills and put the distant peaks in bluish-white contrast. All the kids and most of the adults were gone back to their cabins now but a few seeming old romantics huddled close on their quilt. One of the group requested the Georgia Satellites “Keep Your Hands to Yourself “and the singer obliged, albeit without guitar, by belting out the lyrics with gravelly relish before moving on to play “Georgia on my Mind.” The last song of the evening “was originally a Cole Porter tune I think..but I got to love it hearing Cass Elliot sing it…” Eyes closed, I sung along to “Dream a Little Dream of Me” as the remnants of the fire quietly fell in on themselves.
Breakfast the next morning was the same: oatmeal, eggs, bacon, sausage patties, fruit salad, orange juice. I tried one of the sausage patties and had some hot chocolate instead of tea and today they brought out some grits so the oatmeal bowl served double. Marge and her husband Hersh (Herschel) from Indiana joined us at the table as they had at dinner. Marge is an RN who worked as a casino nurse in Reno, Nevada where she met her Hersh and now is the only registered nurse for a six school system where she lives. He is retired from tool and die work and now build furniture and keeps house. She likes nature and lots of butter and salt in her grits- but only if they’re made with milk or cream.
By close of breakfast, we were all full and the short rainstorm outside had let up. At 9:30 a small group converged on the soggy barnyard for a last ride. This being Labor Day Monday, most of the weekenders were heading home after lunch- myself included. As I stepped onto the stump and into the stirrup, Littlefoot gave a long sigh of either depression or profound boredom.