April 2012 Backpacking Adventure

View from the top of Shining Rock 

Watch all the way to the end, where the best views are.

At ranger station before the hike

Our campsite first night at Investor's Gap
Our second night campsite was at Shining Rock, the ridge in the background
The horse trail we hiked out on in the middle of the night can be seen in the gap.

We had an adventure late in April that we don't hope to repeat.  I will try to shorten it, as the story is very long: 

We decided to backpack for three days in the Shining Rock Wilderness in North Carolina.  Alan had been there on many other successful backpacks in the past, so we expected no trouble. The first day of hiking was wonderful; we hiked over Tennent Mountain at 6,040 feet, with beautiful but cool weather.

The first night we camped at Investor's Gap, which was at the intersection of a horse trail and the Art Loeb Trail, which we were hiking on.  There wasn't much level ground for a tent, so we stayed at a campsite that had been used and abused a lot.  That night, we hung our food in a tree, using approved bear-proofing methods, hung our empty backpacks on a tree staub, and went to sleep.  In the middle of the night, we woke up with the sound of a bear at our campsite.  Alan went out to find a bear taking off with his empty backpack.  He yelled at it, threw some of the huge rocks you can see in the foreground of the picture, banged my hiking sticks on trees, eventually convincing it to drop the pack and run away.  Not being the hero type, I cowered in the tent.  Amazingly, the pack cover only had a few claw holes in it, so we hung the packs with the food and tried to sleep the rest of the night.

The next day, we hiked to Shining Rock, which you can enjoy in the video above. It is a lovely quartz outcropping at the top of a mountain.  That night, we hung our backpacks in a tree, again using normally bear-proof methods.  We did gather a bunch of baseball-sized rocks, in case there was another encounter.  Like an idiot, I took a sleeping pill because I was exhausted from getting no sleep the night before and from hiking for two days with a backpack.  About midnight, while I slept blissfully, Alan heard the plop of our backpacks hitting the ground.  He goes to investigate, and a bear has just disappeared into the brush, again with his backpack, which now had our food in it.  Again he throws rocks, yells, hits on the trees with my hiking sticks, while the bear retreats through the brush.  He pursues it using his headlamp as his only light. Scary stuff, chasing a bear you can't see but you can hear rustling in the brush ahead of you.  Finally, it drops the pack, and Alan retrieves it.

Alan comes back to the tent to find me still asleep.  I had slept through the entire encounter. He could have been killed, and I wouldn't have known it until morning! After he woke me up, we had to decide what to do.  We couldn't sit up and defend our packs from bears all night, and we couldn't suspend the packs as we have always done.  The bear or bears had learned how to chew through the lines that attached the suspended packs to the trees--new behavior we had never encountered before.  So we decided to hike out that night, retracing our path to Investor's Gap, then taking the horse trail, which was much more level, to get back to our vehicle.  We got back to the truck about 4:30 a.m.  I hiked in an Ambien haze for about the first two hours.  The night was beautiful though, and we could see the Milky Way and a lovely crescent honey-colored moon.  At some point, another bear crossed our trail in front of us.  It scurried on when we yelled at it.  I actually participated in the bear-scaring tactics that time.

When we got to the truck, Alan was so hyped up that he decided to just drive home.  We got back about 7 a.m.

I guess we will be buying a bear canister before our next backpacking trip.  We will be opting for car camping until then.