Almost There: A Path Quite Different

By DP Turner

"Do you want to hike the Appalachian Trail again?" he asked. Although DP Turner had hiked 1,500 miles of that trail during his adolescent years, that question from an unlikable classmate in high school led to a return forty years later. Thinking he was a hiking expert, Turner would find that a return would be quite different.

       Turner presents a trek fraught with hardships, beginning with a fall that breaks his ankle nearly two miles from help. And yet a glimmer of hope and wisdom shines through.  The trail's culture and path had changed. Backpacking technology had passed by him. But along the way, that unlikable person would become a close friend and hiking partner. 

       Come on a journey on a path full of danger, wonders, and remarkable people with stories needing to be told. Discover how hiking philosophies and generations had changed in four decades. Go on a quest as he tries to finish a forty-mile gap in Virginia that had haunted him all during his adult life. Along the way, he rediscovers personal growth that had lain dormant since his teenage years and what it really means to be ‘Almost There.'"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645844532

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Almost There

A Path Quite Different

DP Turner

Copyright © 2019 DP Turner

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2019

Almost True Trail Tales

While the events I describe are true, I have changed most of the first names and a few key details to protect the privacy of those who unwittingly shared some of their path with me.

ISBN 978-1-64584-452-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64584-453-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

There are three things:

to walk,

to see, and

to see what you see.

—Benton McKaye

Father of the Appalachian Trail

Cover photo: My friend Rocky climbing Silers Bald in the Nantahalas of North Carolina as described in Chapter 25, September 2017

Introduction

How much of the Appalachian Trail have you hiked?

That was the first question people always asked when I mentioned that I once hiked there. I simply answered that I had walked fifteen-hundred miles or about two-thirds of it. When they asked where I had hiked, the answer wasn’t so simple. My series of short hikes had left many gaps along the way. I wanted to claim that I had hiked from Georgia to New Jersey, a distance of 1200 miles, but it wouldn’t quite be true. I needed to complete a forty-mile gap in the middle of Virginia before I could truly make that claim.

I abandoned the goal of hiking the entire Trail more than forty years ago. Life’s demands steered my mind away toward other pursuits. Health issues and weight gain made the thought of hiking again seem impossible—or more like work than fun. I found other hobbies and had better things to do than hike forty miles to complete a boast. I could just as easily lie and say that I finished the entire Appalachian Trail—and often did.

My life was like a mosaic. I didn’t consider that the Trail was one of many mosaic tiles that I had firmly cemented into my life’s picture. A first girlfriend was another such tile. While they represented pleasant memories, I couldn’t move on until I planted them firmly into their place. Some tiles were so painful that I allowed them to gather dust. My high school experience was one of them. I lost two of my college friends. No matter how hard I tried to ignore them, I had to accept that those tiles had become a part of my being.

Something made me dust off that Appalachian Trail tile whenever someone mentioned hiking. And yet for nearly forty years, I refused to step foot on any unfamiliar parts of the Trail. Then I seized upon a chance to fill in that forty-mile gap—perhaps my very last chance.

Chapter 1

The mountains are calling and I must go.

—John Muir

JudyAnn started the car, turned around, and stopped. She noticed that I had taken my boots and socks off. She saw the extent of the swelling and damage to my ankle and grimaced.

Do you need to go to the emergency room?

During the entire hike, I never thought about the possibility of going to a hospital. Perhaps I was still in shock from trying not to die on that damn trail.

No, I want to go home.

JudyAnn drove a slight detour to buy crutches, and I hobbled to our room at a motel in Blacksburg, Virginia. The next morning I woke up to an even greater swollen ankle, and again I couldn’t put weight on it.

I didn’t know bruises came in so many different colors, she noted.

I still want to go home to Florida, I replied.

As I sat in the car on the all-day ride home, I relived the ordeal of that previous day over and over again in my mind. I refused to acknowledge the deep-seated fear of the cast and therapy lurking in my future. I hiked twenty-four miles so easily the previous weekend, so anything was possible—even finishing the entire Appalachian Trail. A week later, I fell. Rather than focus on a painful ankle and injured psyche, I wrote down every detail of that last hike.

And then I hiked back in my memory to write down details of more hikes.

Think of the Appalachian Trail as a path along the spine of the United States east of the Mississippi River. It is a daunting challenge to hike all of its nearly 2200-mile length from Georgia to Maine. Completed in 1937, thousands of people each year attempt to hike the entire length in one year, starting in Georgia before spring and following the seasons northward to Maine. Only a fraction of those through-hikers reaches their goal by late fall.

Thousands more are section hikers. They may take as long as a lifetime to hike the entire Trail. As a teenager, I hiked sections totaling about fifteen-hundred miles of the Trail one to ten days at a time. Seeing myself as a section hiker, I used parts of seven summers to hike those miles.

A slackpacker is a cross between a through-hiker and the section hiker. Like a section hiker, slackpackers try to hike as much of the Trail as possible as day-hikes between road-access points. When possible, they carry daypacks instead of backpacks. Some hiker hostels and motels near the Trail offer shuttle service for their lodgers. Slackpackers receive the advantage of a mattress to sleep on at night instead of a tent on a bed of rocks. Cabin hosts often cook fresh food for dinner and breakfast using fresh meat and produce, a luxury that through-hikers can’t pack.

Like a through-hiker, most slackpackers are purists who try to hike the Trail in the same direction and in sequence. They highlight a map with one solid-yellow line and have no problem answering how much of the Trail that they’ve hiked because there are no gaps in their progress. On the other hand, section hikers aren’t purists and don’t hike in sequence. My map is highlighted with yellow dashes as well as lines that show gaps in my succession toward completing the entire Trail. Those marks were like my personal Morse code with the message that I have gaps in my progress to fill in. I chose different directions of travel—most often choosing one that would finish at a more convenient pickup location.

Several hiking clubs and various agencies of the federal government maintain the Appalachian Trail under the umbrella of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (or ATC, successor to the Appalachian Trail Conference.) Those helpers also maintain a string of shelters along the Trail. People in good shape, like I was when I was a teenager, usually hike to a shelter for lunch, and then on to the next shelter for the night. Most shelters are sturdy, three-sided structures that offer more protection from the elements than a simple lean-to or shed can provide. A few of the older shelters are cabins, like the stone shelter on Blood Mountain in Georgia built in the 1930s. However, the cabins don’t often have a door to shut out animals or insects.

Shelter designs have evolved over the years. In the 1970s, many shelters had a dirt floor, and backpackers laid their mattress pads and sleeping bags on a wire mesh fastened to a wooden frame. I had to be careful that a stray wire didn’t puncture my air mattress. Shelter-makers took out all the wood frames and mesh and replaced them with a wood-plank platform. Many built picnic tables into the shelter’s structure. Larger shelters might have an upper level of decking that provides either shelf space or a second level for sleeping. Shelters usually offer a water source and a privy nearby.

Northbound through-hikers are affectionately called NOBOs. Each year a few hundred southbound through-hikers, or SOBOs, make the journey, but they wait until the snow melts later in the spring in Maine to begin their hike. SOBOs try to reach Georgia before any snow in December. JudyAnn, my wife, insists on calling both groups thru-bees.

When I hiked in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I noticed that SOBOs and NOBOs didn’t always get along with each other when they shared a shelter or campsite. One would think that they would swap stories of what lay ahead and could appreciate the fact that they had collectively through-hiked the entire Trail. Instead, their interactions would often lead to quarrels. The NOBOs bragged that they had hiked more miles of the Trail and informed the SOBOs that they had barely started. SOBOs countered that they had hiked the most difficult part of the Trail in Maine and New Hampshire and the rest of the Trail would be a cakewalk. Both of them made valid points, except that most of the Trail south of Vermont was not a cakewalk even if it was mostly easier than the Trail in Maine and New Hampshire.

Those SOBOs also had to deal with the black flies that infested the Trail from Maine to Pennsylvania in the spring. Those nasty insects would have their fill of hiker blood and mostly disappear by the time the NOBOs arrived. In those days, the only effective repellent was a product called Ole Time Woodsman, but it didn’t work all the time. It had the texture and smell of turpentine. Ole Time Woodsman was hiker’s cologne; all hikers wore it. After a few sweaty days on the Trail without a shower, they needed it.

Several times I saw hikers dressed like beekeepers with clouds of flies swarming around them. More effective insect repellents would later contain DEET. I used DEET even though I had seen it melt a plastic camera case. I kept telling myself that bugs would do more short-term harm than the long-term harm caused by my skin’s exposure to DEET.

SOBOs tended to be hard-core hikers. Not only did they face black flies, but their hike also began in the Hundred-Mile Wilderness without an easy way to bail out if something happened. Many SOBOs slogged through bogs with knee-deep water from freshly melted winter snow. Back in the 1970s, the lack of public roads made it difficult to evacuate in an emergency. Hikers waited days to flag down passing logging trucks to get out of the wilderness. Years later, an eye toward a profit motive opened some private logging-roads to hikers, hunters, and other adventurers. Cheap pay phones never existed there. That, and cell-phone service, would likely always remain unavailable due to the remoteness of that part of Maine and economics.

Six months before that ankle-breaking hike, a high-school classmate talked me into hiking the Trail again with him in Georgia even though I had told him that I had hiked all of it before. My hikes with him had helped me gain enough confidence to branch out on my own. A week before Father’s Day, JudyAnn and I drove all day from Florida to Virginia so that I could finally hike the first six miles of my forty-mile gap that had lurked like a vulture over me for nearly forty years. Those six miles were easy, and it was the first time in all those years that I hiked alone. That hike went so well that I couldn’t wait to return again to mark more of that remaining thirty-four miles on the map. JudyAnn understood that.

The following weekend, JudyAnn offered to make the all-day trip to Virginia again with me as a surprise Father’s Day gift. She planned to wait for me at the other end of the Trail section. I looked forward to seeing her nestled in a folding chair while reading a book by a creek. Even though a recent car accident made her unable to hike with me, I was happy to see her being in nature too, enjoying the remoteness of that part of the Trail.

That fateful hike required a two-mile descent from Rocky Gap to Johns Creek that should’ve taken less than an hour. Then I planned two more hikes from the top of Big Mountain. Those hikes involved a 1500-foot descent on Saturday and a 2000-foot descent on Sunday. Roads to the top of Big Mountain and Rocky Gap gave a rare opportunity to enjoy three consecutive days of hiking with no climbing. Thirteen miles of hiking on a level or downhill Trail spread out over three days should’ve required little effort. I couldn’t wait to begin the easiest set of hikes ever.

It rained all day when we reached Virginia even though the weather app on my phone predicted a 20 percent chance all day. The rain wasn’t that heavy, but it was enough to make everything wet. A two-mile hike only needed the rain to stop for one hour.

Some experienced hikers preferred to hike a steep trail uphill, sometimes hiking out of sequence to do so. As I faced a descent of 1200 feet, I ignored their philosophy. A descent was not only a strain on the knees, but the risk of falling was also greater than going uphill. Also, every machine at my gym seemed to be designed more for climbing mountains than going down them. I never trained at a gym when I was a teenager. Gyms weren’t as popular then, and I would’ve had to go to the YMCA. I didn’t want to work out with intimidating football players or creepy older men. I got in shape by mowing over two acres of grass each week with a push mower. Because I hadn’t mowed a yard in forty years, I couldn’t think about hiking again without working out at a gym.

I turned left onto the dirt road to Rocky Gap and made our steady ascent as we drove along a well-used rocky road.

I really need to make the hike today, even in the rain, I told JudyAnn while looking at the wet landscape. While it’s possible to add this hike to the hike I plan for Sunday, my knees can’t handle thirty-two-hundred feet in descent in one day. The two hikes need to be spaced apart.

I really don’t think it’s a good idea to hike in the rain, she replied.

I’ve hiked lots of times in the rain, I answered confidently. That’s what a poncho is for. Hiking today will allow us to head back home to Florida that much sooner on Sunday. I know what I’m doing.

If you say so, she said cautiously.

You’ll likely see me waiting for you by the time you reach Johns Creek by car. The hike can’t possibly take more than an hour.

Don’t make it a race.

After parking the car at the top of Rocky Gap, I showed her where we were on a map and where I would be hiking. I walked outside and immediately stripped down to my underwear to put on rain pants.

Think anyone’s coming? she asked, a bit surprised at my immodesty.

Not this late in the day, I answered.

Even though rain pants would limit my movement more than shorts, I certainly could deal with baggy pants for an hour. I didn’t change my T-shirt. Since the rain had saturated the canopy of trees overhead, I knew that droplets would fall on me anytime the wind blew. My T-shirt would get wet, but I hoped that the rainwater would cool me off. Maintaining a body temperature within certain limits should be an essential part of safe hiking.

Think you’ll see any thru-bees? JudyAnn asked while I was quickly putting on my boots.

I’m on a one-hour hike on a two-mile trail at five o’clock in the rain, I replied. That’s too small a section on a twenty-two-hundred-mile trail to see any thru-bees.

How long before I should come looking for you? she asked, like she always did.

Even though I told you an hour, allow me two hours before you send a posse, I joked. In less than five minutes after I parked the car, the long-awaited moment arrived to finally fill in more of my original forty-mile gap. But first, I stopped to take a picture of the path ahead.

The rocky path started fairly steeply downhill through a thick waist-high growth of wet underbrush on both sides. In some places, the plants concealed the pathway. Even though I tried to avoid brushing against those wet plants, I felt the slight tug of a prickly thorn against my pants. I realized that if I were wearing shorts, my legs could’ve gotten torn up—or stung.

Stinging nettles were usually found all over the Trail that time of year, but that was the first time in forty years that I had seen them. I gloated over my decision to wear rain pants to avoid their sting. Beneath the nettles, the nearly invisible path was rocky and the rocks were wet and slippery.

I was only about 200 yards down the Trail when my left foot began to give way on a rock. However, my trekking poles provided the balance needed to prevent me from falling. The Appalachian Trail rarely followed smooth, graded pathways. True to form, I found natural stairsteps made from rocks and tree roots that required a climb up or step down. The rocky stairsteps weren’t often level, so I took care not to slip on them.

Like a sieve, tree roots collected small pebbles carried by rainwater and made a level stairstep going uphill. However, as I hiked, I saw that the downhill side of the tree root had eroded to bare rock creating a step down as much as six inches or more. Usually the rock on the other side of the root was sloped downhill as the mountain was sloped downhill. With trekking poles, I planned to put more weight on the arms when stepping down. Soon I faced a hundred yards of those sloping stairsteps. While stopped for a moment at the top of the first eroded step, I noticed two NOBOs headed my way. I stepped aside to let them pass.

Those men were about thirty years old and wore dark shorts. One wore a brown T-shirt, and the other one wore a camouflage T-shirt. Each one had whiskers that showed that they had left Pearisburg two or three days before, a distance of thirty-four miles. I could tell that they were serious hikers, not weekenders. They had well-worn, streamlined packs that showed at least a month and a half of dirt and wear. Their boots showed mud and other scars of their trek so far.

Almost there! I yelled out to them as they passed. It’s quite a ways to the next shelter. You could camp at the top at Kelly Knob if you have enough water.

We got enough water, thanks, they replied. They continued on without saying another word. Those NOBOs had likely been on the Trail a month and a half, so hiking was like a job to them. Intent on getting that day’s job done, they didn’t stop to chat. I knew that I had ground to make up, and that the longer I stopped to chat, the longer JudyAnn would be waiting for me. I picked up my pace down the rough steps down the mountain.

At the bottom of that set of sloping steps, my hiking plans for the summer took a tragic turn. In an instant, my left leg gave way on the downhill side of a tree root, and I fell. My trekking poles and boots didn’t prevent my fall. When my left foot slipped on that rock, I fell on my right side. If I had fallen backward, my daypack would’ve cushioned the impact of the fall.

At first I thought it was no big deal. I had fallen many times before on the Trail and never received more than a scrape, bruise, or sprained wrist. That time my hands were locked into the straps on the trekking poles, so I fell on my right elbow. Bushes on the side of the trail cushioned my fall. Thankfully, they weren’t stinging nettles.

I must’ve yelled out loudly when I hit the ground.

Are you okay? I heard from quite a distance behind me. Do you need any help?

I’m fine. I just tripped and fell! I yelled. Technically, I had worse falls than that before. I saw no blood and felt only a sprained ankle. However, a badly sprained ankle wasn’t a trivial matter. Ankle sprains had sidelined football players for weeks if not months. Did I have a high-ankle sprain, signifying a season-ending injury? Or did I have a low-ankle sprain that could go away if I walked on it carefully for a half mile? I couldn’t immediately determine which sprain I had. That little fall couldn’t possibly break my ankle. It wasn’t like I had fallen off a cliff.

I picked myself up and found that I couldn’t put weight on my left foot. My knees, my legs, and my arms were all unscathed. When I tried to take another step downhill, the ankle again refused to accept my body’s weight. I had to forget about first gear—it wasn’t available. I had to find my emergency survivor gear, a gear I never had to engage before. Survivor gear meant that I might have to crawl on my hands and knees.

Maybe I should’ve asked those NOBOs to help me after all. They were probably just thinking about how a person at my age or with my physique had no business hiking the Trail alone. I had too much pride to ask for help. Besides, they had made it a job to finish that part of the Trail, and they had just climbed for a mile and a half uphill. I couldn’t have them turn around to help me down and then make that climb all over again.

JudyAnn usually waited fifteen minutes at the drop-off spots before heading out. Each time she ignored me when I told her not to do it. Because I told her that I would be waiting for her at the bottom, I was sure that she had left already. Otherwise, the NOBOs could run up and catch her in time. However, that plan involved some risk. I’d have to wait for them to come back down and tell me if she were there. I couldn’t afford to sit those minutes with an ankle that was swelling more and more each second. If I kept moving, my mind wouldn’t be focused on my ankle. I thought that if I moved enough, my ankle might work itself well again.

JudyAnn later told me that those hikers passed her at Rocky Gap, so she assumed that everything was okay. At that moment, she drove down the road to meet me at Johns Creek.

I didn’t know that I had just turned my back on the easier way out.

Chapter 2

Never buy the same real estate twice.

—Gen. George S. Patton

US Army

I had hiked the Appalachian Trail alone as much as ten days at a time when I was between fourteen and twenty-two years old. I made many mistakes that derailed many of my hikes, but somehow I survived them. I had always been too self-sufficient and proud to ask for help. My parents often dropped me off in one state and picked me up a hundred miles away in another state seven days later. Cell phones didn’t exist to call my parents and tell them to allow an extra day. Before I could alter my hiking schedule, I’d have to find a pay phone. It was incredible that my parents trusted me to be on time—and I was. Only once in Maine did I fail to arrive on time after four days of hiking. That day I was a mile from finishing when I saw my father walking on the Trail toward me. Forty years later, I could be late again and see JudyAnn instead.

It was later than most people usually hiked and I wouldn’t likely see more hikers. I faced spending the night on the Trail without a flashlight or crawling on my hands and knees on wet ground for a mile and a half. Dark and cloudy skies could bring an early night. I began to panic. I had to figure out how to get down.

And then I thought about my trekking poles. I could put my wrist through the straps and use my upper arm strength to make a crutch—at least enough to bear most of the weight. But could I do that for a mile and a half, 3000 steps? I turned to look at the root step that caused my fall. From henceforth, thou shalt be called tree dams! I shouted out loud. Tree dam, tree dam, tree dam. That felt better.

Guessing that I had to be slightly more than a half mile from Rocky Gap, the climb back would be nearly impossible without help. It would be like using only my right foot to jump up on each step of a twenty-story building. Instead of a handrail, I only had two trekking poles to keep my balance. Gravity caused my problem, and I’d have to fight it going up.

Furthermore, JudyAnn would’ve gone on to Johns Creek by the time I hobbled up to Rocky Gap. If it were earlier in the day, I could’ve hoped to hitch a ride on that road. The three-mile road didn’t have any tree dams, but the distance was too far. I didn’t have the extra time to walk it before JudyAnn would be hiking up the Trail to look for me. She had my keys, so I wouldn’t be able to get into the car to use its horn to get her to turn around.

I was a mile and a half from the bottom on a downhill trail. Gravity would help me down. Furthermore, I didn’t want to waste a trip to Virginia or even that day. Doing more harm to my ankle wasn’t as important as coloring in those two miles on the map with a highlighter. That was real estate that I wanted to conquer and not leave hanging over me. If I returned someday, I’d have to see where I fell and be forced to relive that moment. The option to never return to that place was the most important reason why I chose to continue onward.

I checked my cell phone. As usual, I had no reception. It didn’t matter because I checked beforehand and knew that Johns Creek was off the cell-phone grid as well. Sometimes on top of a mountain I might get reception, but I was on the wrong side of the mountain.

I hopped a short distance downhill with my right foot using trekking poles to keep my balance. After putting all my weight on my right foot, I slid my left foot next to it. I began to count my hops to keep my mind away from how much my ankle hurt but calculated that I might need as many as 8000 of them. I tricked my mind into counting my hops and yet not paying attention to the impossible number that I had to reach. Every three hops I took would be one less step that a rescuer would have to take.

I soon reached another tree dam. It wasn’t much different from the one that caused my fall. I clumsily turned around to hop backward. After jumping down onto a slimy rock with the good foot, I brought the other foot down. The pain was nearly unbearable, and my balance and footing was treacherous. I regained my balance and clumsily pivoted on my right foot toward the front again. Then I began to second-guess my decision to go downhill.

But I had another problem. I was putting a lot of my weight on my left wrist through the strap on my trekking poles. My wrist was sore from countless falls during a long lifetime. I used my thumb to hold on to the pole. I broke that thumb thirty years earlier at work and three screws held it together. Putting weight on my thumb 8000 more times could redamage it. I felt the strain on my wrist and thumb with each jump.

As I continued downhill, I didn’t find any more tree dams. If I had slowed down at those last two tree dams, I wouldn’t have fallen and could’ve had an easy hike the rest of the way. I squandered a rare opportunity to glide down a mile of the Appalachian Trail.

After about fifteen more minutes, I began to see Johns Creek valley below through an opening in the trees. It was like being on the observation deck of the Empire State Building looking down at the street below. Shaking my head at the absurdity of the task ahead, I was too much in shock to cry or think of anything else but getting down.

I only need to go—there, I said to myself out loud as I pointed with my right trekking pole. If I bushwhacked a shortcut straight down to the valley, then I’d have a level road to walk. A ravine could provide a way to slide down on my butt. My rain pants were waterproof.

When hiking alone, one should never leave a trail. Rescuers might never find hikers stuck or passed out. I thought about Geraldine Largay. She