This is another story of a misbegotten adventure with the thrill of danger, the glory of triumph and the agony of retreat.
Why the mountains called us, I don’t remember, but in the spring of our senior year in 1966, five of us crowded into John Morris’s 1952 battleship-gray Dodge and headed toward the Chimney Rock. John called it the “Woodie” like in the Jan & Dean song “Surf City” but it was as far from a Woodie as a car can get. We called it the “Tank” because his car was as close to a WWII Sherman tank as a car could legally be.
John was driving, Chuck rode shotgun and I was in the spacious but lumpy back seat with Lane Powell and a friend from Rock Hill, Tommy Goforth. Our internal compasses were set on adventure and mountaineering was calling us.
The Blue Ridge Mountains at that time were less commercial and there were lots of little tourist houses that local folks rented out to travelers. On Highway 74, we spotted a small rental house with a screen porch view of Chimney Rock. We knocked at the house next door and an elderly lady answered. She looked a little reluctant but we convinced her that we were good guys, (we were) and that we would not be drinking or bringing in girls (only partly true, John had his Mogen David wine stowed in his bag. We could only wish there were girls with us.)
Chuck was the cook for the group and he didn’t disappoint. His mother raised him by herself and he would regularly cook his lunch and often dinner. We found out the next morning as we crawled out of our respective sleeping bags that he could sling a great egg, any style, and make perfect bacon.
After breakfast we sat on the porch and set our course for the day’s adventure. We could look up and out and see Chimney Rock and the flag on top. Stoked with the bravado of youth, we decided to visit the park…not by the road but up the side of the mountain.
Remember, these were the Appalachians, not the Rockies. Most of the approach to the top was a steep scramble up through a hardwood forest. Chuck, a bit wiser and recovering from a recent illness, decided to stay and enjoy the mountain air from the porch.
We carried light packs stocked with Vienna sausages and crackers for lunch and Band-Aids and Ace bandages for accidents. Everyone, of course, carried a WWII aluminum canteen and packed a hunting knife to cut his chosen walking stick. We crossed the creek that would become the Broad River as it gained water and momentum on its way into South Carolina, and followed a feeder stream up the mountain.
The stream kept us on target. As its path snaked down the mountain, we wound our way up. When the stream bank was steep or a cascade poured its water into a pool, we walked the woods. When we could, we walked the edge of the bank. There was no leader. At various times any one of the four of us would walk in front.
I was in the lead when I heard the buzz. It was like having a hive of bees right at my ears. I was standing on a rock beside the water and on the other side of the bank a shelf of rock overhung part of the stream. In a cut of that rock something writhed…no, many things writhed. I was speechless so when John came up beside me I could only point toward the den of rattlesnakes. How many, I don’t know. There could have been thirty or one hundred; there was no way to tell. There were plenty of rattles in the air.
We were momentarily frozen in our tracks. It was hard to convince ourselves that every step would not land us on one of those deadly rattlesnakes. They were across the creek but with so many snakes there, there had to be others hanging around.
We were slowed but not deterred. With a few minutes of recovering our nerve, we started our climb again. All the way up the mountainside, beautiful little waterfalls cascaded into clear pools from rocky outcroppings. Finally, an hour after we stopped for lunch, we could see the rail that marked the trail around Chimney Rock Park. There was a problem. There was a rounded bulge of sixty feet of bare rock between us and the rail. If someone slipped while scaling this rock, he would have plunged over 100 feet before hitting the tree line.
Three of us were fine with declaring a victory and going back down the mountainside. Not Lane Powell. Lane was wiry and by far the most coordinated of us. After a few minutes of surveying the situation, Lane found a narrow crack in the rock that he believed he could use to climb to the rail. We just nodded as he took a rope from my pack. (I was overly cautious and had a Boy Scout “Be Prepared” mentality.) Looping the rope over his shoulder, Lane began the climb.
This was not a vertical rock face but was rounded enough so that he would not fall backward. He just had to avoid sliding off the rock. The climb went smoothly until Lane jerked his arm out of the crack. He had put his hand on a snake. Luckily this was a small, non-venomous snake and Lane pulled it out and dropped it below. After a few minutes more, Lane pulled himself over the safety rail and stood at the top.
Our climb was easy with the rope to keep us safe and soon we were on the trail sporting big, proud grins as regular people marveled that we had climbed up the side. Lots of oohs! and aahs! were interrupted when the ranger appeared. One look at his face and our admirers scattered like quail.
“This is private property,” he explained. “You need to pay the entrance fee to come here and you need to use the road. You boys are trespassing and I can have you arrested.”
We didn’t feel quite so brave when we heard the word “arrested”. At that point we all recognized that begging was our best defense. We explained that we didn’t know that we were trespassing and that we would leave and go down the rope and be no more problem to him.
“I can’t let you go back that way,” he said. “It is too dangerous and we would be liable if one of you fell.” (I think the word “idiots” crept into the conversation here and there.)
“I am going to walk you through the parking lot and then you can go back into the woods and I don’t ever want to see you again.” He told us.
Heads down, we followed him down the trail to the upper parking lot and he pointed us to the woods. “Stay off of the road,” he said. “Go back the way you came up.”
We all “Yes Sir’d” him over and again and faded back into the woods like baseball players into a cornfield.
Walking down a steep incline is not easy. Our descent would get faster and faster until we could grab a tree and slow down or stop. Tommy was leading, with Lane following him. John and I were ten or so yards behind. Once, to stop himself, Tommy grabbed a middle-sized sapling and immediately regretted it. Lane was beside Tommy when he started swatting the air around his head. For a moment we didn’t know what was happening and then Tommy yelled, “Hornets!”
If I were truthful, I would put several more exclamation points and some terrible language here but let’s not belabor that point. Tommy and Lane sprinted down the slope, both swatting furiously. John was smart enough to tell me to stand still and I was scared enough to listen. When things calmed down we gave the nest a wide berth and circled past it. Fifty or so yards down the slope we met Lane and Tommy. Lane had been stung a couple of times and Tommy had five or six angry red welts, two on his face.
There was nothing to do but make our way back down to the the stream and then the road. We emerged from the woods to see Chuck sitting on the porch in a rocking chair enjoying a cold iced tea. If they made an action figure of Chuck, his accessory would be a glass of tea. We were jealous of his comfort level but never would one of us have traded the adventure…not even Tommy. We put tobacco on the stings (standard Southern treatment) and after a rest, ate a pretty good meal. Chuck’s cooking justified his remaining behind and he was soon back in our good graces. He made a great audience for our stories.
Our adventure ended, we started home the next morning. The excitement was not quite at an end. We started down the long grade from Asheville and John was slinging us around in the back seat by taking curves pretty fast. We asked him to slow down but he had a hot rod soul in a lunker of a car. When we final made the bottom of the grade after much tire squealing and back seat complaining, he and Chuck broke into nervous laughter.
“John told me the brakes were bad halfway down the grade,” Chuck said. “He told me to hang on and then said, “Don’t tell Mike!”
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