Cold Mountain, North Carolina. Elevation 6030 feet. This mountain is in Pisgah National Forest, between Waynesville and Brevard. Not far from US 276 which goes between the cities. US 276 does Pisgah like US 441 does the Smokies. Goes right over the top. The Big East Fork of the Pigeon River flows out of there. A lot of the hit series “Hillbilly Blood” starring my friend Spencer “Two Dogs” Bolejack was filmed near there. You can get up there on the Art Loeb trail from Brevard. Or you can go straight up the side of the mountain, which we did.
Bill Hall, myself, and a buddy I had gone to camp with we’ll call Jim decided to meet at a small place called Cruso near the base of Cold Mountain at the beginning of spring break. Jim was at Duke preparing to enter medical school. I was an English major at Sewanee and Bill was already out of school, so it was mid-70s.
I fancied myself a bit of a seasoned backpacker at this point. In looking at the topographic map of Cold Mountain it appeared that rather than hike all the way from Brevard we could head up the mountain from Cruso. There appeared to be trails that would get us to the top and we would save time. Coming from Brevard would have taken us over Pilot Mountain which was nice but not what we were looking for.
Cold Mountain was popularized in a 1997 book of the same name by Charles Frazier, and a movie with Renee Zellwegger. The story line is excellent. It seems to have a bit of an apex when the protagonist, named Inman, encounters three Union combatants on the side of the mountain and ends up dispatching two of them with a LeMats, a crazy sidearm with two barrels, one shoots a slug and the other shoots shot, like a shotgun, but is reluctant to kill the last one, a young boy, who…..don’t want to give it away. But it’s kill or be killed. Worth reading.
We met up and started out on a trail that according to the topographic map seemed to lead to the top. The problem is the topo map had been last updated in the 1940s. As we headed up at a pretty steep incline, and it being Holy Week, the week preceding Easter, I couldn’t help but think of Jesus carrying his cross up Calvary. This thought was simultaneously comforting and distressing. I didn’t know what was to come.
About two miles up, the trail began to peter out. And it went from a forest of mixed hardwoods to more of a scrubby, rhodedendron landscape. As we went higher there was no trail at all. And there was more rhodedendron and less anything else. So we were effectively bushwhacking, and we still had perhaps another two miles to go. Straight uphill.
In the Smokies, the rhodedendron thickets are called “hells”. The Cherokee went nowhere near them, unless they were hiding. A rhodedendron bush is about five feet high, relatively clear near the bottom but incredibly thick with nearly unbreakable branches farther up. They catch everything in sight. Hard enough going through by oneself, but with a backpack attached to catch branches makes it nearly impossible. The best way through is to crawl.
As it turned out, Jim had a heart murmur, which started bothering him on the way up. He slowed down to a crawl. He was packing a Camp Trails “Moose” pack which was about half again larger than their normal pack. It extended up beyond his head. Talk about a rhodo-catcher! It became obvious that Bill and I were going to have to take turns carrying his pack. Through a rhodedendron thicket.
I figured out how to let out his shoulder straps enough so that I could fit his pack over top of my pack and carry both of them on my back. This was awkward and difficult, but manageable. After awhile, it was Bill’s turn. He had a Kelty pack which was configured a little differently and for some reason made it nearly impossible for him to fit Jim’s pack over his. So he finally resorted to carrying the pack like a suitcase, first on one arm and then the other. On top of this he was getting angry. I guess I was a little angry too but I had gotten back on the Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary line of thinking, which was helping. Sort of.
After probably three and a half hours of this we reached the ridge, near the Shining Rocks. And there was the Art Loeb trail. The bracing early spring wind felt nice up there. It was pretty obvious that Jim was unable to keep hiking, so we got him back down to his car. Bill and I hiked a couple of days more, then we went down to Franklin, NC to visit his old friend Duffy Shuford who was a true mountain craftsman and worthy of mention in one of the Foxfire books. His wife Barb fixed us lunch once in the summer and served us eleven different vegetables from her garden.