Memorial Day Weekend

This past weekend I escaped to the Great Smoky Mountains and the headwaters of the West Prong of the Little River. If you hike up Bote Mountain trail just past the intersection of Lead Cove trail you can hike off trail down the east side of the mountain to the river and find yourself in a wilderness which seems a million miles from all civilization. Following the stream past the lower and upper Chestnut Falls you eventually reach the spot where people must have lived in the 1930s when this section of the Smokies was last logged. The only signs of people which remain are a few broken pieces of an old cast iron stove. There is no trail, no foundation, no campsite, no people, no plastic. There is only a relatively flat spot in a narrow valley filled with eighty year tall Tulip Poplars and marked by three branches tied with bright orange surveyor's tape. An hour further wading through the rhodedendron, the stream and the bramble you arrive just a half mile further upstream and the wilderness is then pristine. The creek cuts a narrow straight path through the deep forest running down a steady hill among green moss covered stones.