Blame It On Bobby! Our imaginary hiking buddy we cursed to survive 4-days in the Smokies
My friend and I just got back from four days and 45 miles in the Great Smoky Mountains, chasing another chunk of our “900 Miler Map.” For the uninitiated, that’s a delightfully ambitious goal of hiking all 900 miles of trail within the park. I’m currently sitting at about 35.4 percent complete, which either means I’m making solid progress or that I have a very long relationship ahead of me with these mountains. Both, no doubt.
I picked the dates. She picked the itinerary, a beautifully efficient route stringing together 14 different trails with zero backtracking required. No orphaned little segments left dangling in the middle of nowhere for us to come back and awkwardly stitch together later. It was, on paper, brilliant.
Somewhere late afternoon in the rain on day one, we invented “Bobby.”
Bobby is our fictional hiking companion who, as far as we’re concerned, is single-handedly responsible for choosing these dates and this itinerary. Every single thing that went wrong on this trip got loudly, dramatically blamed on Bobby. Thunderstorm rolling in? Thanks a lot, Bobby! Trail disappeared under three feet of brambles? Bobby’s fault. It became our running joke and our comic relief during some hard and sketchy moments. I’m not sure Bobby will be invited on future trips. Bobby has a lot to answer for!
Bobby put us through a delightfully fun living hell.
We gained nearly 14,000 feet of elevation over four days and 45 miles. We got hit with thunderstorms and most of the trail was so overgrown with brambles that any exposed skin came away looking like I’d lost a fight with a herd of angry cats. And in true Smokies fashion, a lot of the trail bed itself was eroded, which meant the overgrown briars reaching out to shred you were also actively trying to push you off the edge while they did it. Multitasking.
Somewhere in the middle of all that bushwhacking, the forest reached out and claimed a casualty. My trusty trekking umbrella, (the one I wrote an entire love letter to a few months back!), got yanked clean out of the side straps of my pack and was never seen again. I didn’t even notice until later. One minute it was there, faithfully riding along, and the next it had been quietly reclaimed by the wilderness somewhere along Sugarland Mountain Trail. RIP, umbrella. You served me well.
The wildlife showed up in full force. We saw deer, a timber rattler, and five bears, which is more than the number of humans we saw on trail. Backcountry trails are famous for inconspicuous spiderwebs strung across the path every few steps, and ours did not disappoint. The gnats were relentless in a way that makes you question every life choice that led you to this exact moment.
But none of that held a candle to the bees…
From the second we arrived at our backcountry campsite on day two until the sun went down, and then again starting at first light, we were under siege by a swarm of honey bees. I counted 16 on my pant legs at one point. Sixteen. They followed us to the water source. They followed us around camp. I had a couple dozen of them patrolling the space between my tent’s inner mesh and rain fly until dark, buzzing like they were guarding something tremendously important that neither of us could identify. They weren’t aggressive. No stinging, no attacking. Just a determined, unrelenting campaign to get up our pant legs and into every nook and cranny available to them. We never figured out what they wanted. We still don’t know. It remains one of the great mysteries of this trip.
Oh, and did I mention the humidity?? I am fairly confident it hovered somewhere around 452 percent the entire time. I was soaking wet from the moment we hit the trailhead until the moment I walked back through my front door four days later. There was no in-between state. There was only wet. Add in a healthy dose of confusing trail signage, and you have the full flavor of this trip.
And now for the part where I own my mistakes… because this gal should know better…
I made a last-minute gear swap that I deeply regretted almost immediately. I hike in boots with socks and liners 99% of the time and never have an issue. But the forecast called for rain the entire trip, so in what I can only describe as a moment of temporary insanity, I decided my lightweight trail runners would be a smarter choice.
They were not the smarter choice.
I ended up with blisters, rubby spots, two black toenails, and an ankle I rolled so many times I am currently sitting with it iced and elevated as I write this. I made a couple of other last-minute swaps too, nothing quite as catastrophic as the shoe decision, but enough to remind me of a lesson I apparently need to relearn on a semi-regular basis.
If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!
My tried and true systems work because I spent years painstakingly figuring out what works for my body, my feet, and these very mountains. And then, moments before a challenging trip, I decided to go rogue and experiment. Lesson very thoroughly learned.
Bobby, I know we blamed you for the weather and the bees and the brambles, but the shoe thing is totally on me.
Despite the bramble scratches, the black toenails, and the swarm of bees that never revealed their secret intentions, this trip was everything I needed it to be. Hard, funny, humbling, and amazing in the way long walks in the Smokies always are. Another chunk of the 900 map is behind us, my friend and I have a new inside joke that will apparently live forever, and I have been thoroughly and appropriately reminded to trust the systems I already know work. And somehow, despite every scratch, blister, and black toenail, we were already talking about our next trip before we even reached the trailhead parking lot.
See you out there, Bobby. Try to pick an easier route next time, will ya?!?
