Follow the Posteds

Last Sunday, our group of five plus three dogs made the short drive to Rumbling Bald Mountain on the perimeter of Lake Lure, NC. Though it's a beautiful area with both quaint and grand homes in the Hickory Nut Gorge, the only true, blazed hiking can be found on Chimney Rock. But, then again, there's little true hiking even there, all of the trails short and made easy for tourists willing to pay for the view and experience of being high. I went there in my first few months in the South when I was still getting my bearings as a hiker, and it wasn't enough for me.

So, Rumbling Bald. All we had to go on were prose accounts of the unblazed trail, which is really an old jeep road that starts at a water tower. We found it easily and set out on the muddy clay road that was to lead to the ridgeline, across three peaks, past an abandoned jeep and "Party" Rock, and over to Eagle Rock--a 7 mile round trip hike. We knew we were looking for a hard left and, after going too far up to a house that dead-ended the road, we tracked back to that hard left and kept our ascent. It was steep but not rocky and kept up until, high up over Lake Lure but still a distance from the ridge, the road ended, dissolved into leaf litter and limbs.

But none of my prose descriptions said anything about the trail being hard to follow; they all said you follow the road up to the ridgeline and across to Eagle Rock. Simple, though strenuous. Where was our trail? I pulled up the one semi-map of the road and tried to find our place, but all we could figure is we needed to go up. We explored to the west first, searching for any sign of a worn path, and then traipsed back to the road's end to try again. This time we decided if we could just get to the ridge we would be fine, so we dug our toes into the earth and climbed straight up several hundred feet until we were closer to the summit but saw no way to continue or head east from there. Grateful that, in late February, nature was largely still sleeping in the cold, we stuck our hands into leaf litter for leverage; in any warmer time we might have reached right down onto snakes or other creatures. At least bugs.

After resting and snacking at a leveler edge high up, we decided to head down and try up again on the other side of a gulley that was impassable from our height. Erica and I leaf skied down on our butts some of the way, the slope so steep. Back again at the road's end, we followed the "Posted" signs east along the side of the mountain, the Posteds saying we shouldn't trespass beyond that point on Nature Conservancy land. Over maybe a quarter mile we came upon a thin waterfall from the ridge. Jonathan was the first to climb up to it and find the little pool at its base. So close to the summit, Erica and I followed, essentially rock climbing at times and picking our way through briars. From the waterfall we attempted to keep going up, up, to climb the side of the mountain for a second time on our own path--but we reached a point with no foreseeable way higher and thus began the slow, careful, leaf skiing and rock maneuvering way down. The dogs, meanwhile, climbed and descended at will multiple times for our every effort.

Four hours into our hike, and we hadn't found the trail, and we hadn't summitted, but we had made our own fun and explored the mountain with our hands, with our eagerness for height. All the while, we could see the vivid teal of Lake Lure and the stretching mountains of West NC. Nick had been tracking our position through an app on his phone, so he led us on a short cut back down to the trail, bypassing a return to the road's end. We rejoined the trail about a quarter mile from the start and shortly came upon a spur in the road that took a hard switchback up the mountain, an angle that would have been that hard left in the descriptions we had. But somehow none of us had seen this spur so early in the trail, thinking that we had a ways to go before that hard left.

We laughed and promised to come back soon to take the actual trail, even though we'd had fun making our own. We do want to see Party Rock, after all, and the peaks of Rumbling Bald, and Chimney Rock from the other side of the gorge. And we want to do more hiking together before we run out of time, since several of us in our little group are about to move back to the Midwest.

Every view of and experience in the mountains is even more precious now that I know in just two short months I will no longer be within sight of an ancient ridge. I send little thank yous across the landscape to the peaks that have made me feel both small and larger than ever before. Truly, I feel larger in life than I ever had before, so full of purpose and meaning from my time in Spartanburg, with my dear friends and my dear peaks and my dear community. And full I will be as I return to Kansas and anticipate a skyline of grain elevators, a landscape of love.