Change of Plans - North Carolina Hiking Trip Report
Most of surviving this life is about how well you handle change.
Speaking for myself, it’s not always the most graceful, but I am working on it.
About a month ago, my partner and I got a wild hair to plan a low-contact trip to Colorado and Wyoming to visit loved ones and play outside. Coronavirus cases were trending down at the time, we had done lots of research on how to do air travel safely, and we felt pretty confident that we would be within our risk tolerance. In the spirit of transparency, I will admit that I felt pretty uncomfortable about it - I have been so public in advocating putting off trips exactly like ours, so how would I be perceived if I broke my own rules? But then things changed.
They always do. It’s one of the few known quantities in our world right now: change. Whatever it is like right now, it might be totally different in a few weeks, days or even hours.
I’ve mentioned before that planning ahead is a huge part of slow travel. It can be a huge relief to make the big choices ahead of time, allowing you to be totally present in the moment and make other small adjustments based on mood, weather, and surprise opportunities. But when you add in the unpredictability of life in the time of COVID-19, planning ahead is infinitely more complicated. My partner is much more gut-driven when it comes to things like this, so he is less phased by changes, as we’ll see later.
When virus cases began to surge in our home state of Tennessee, plus the midwestern states we would be visiting, we adjusted our game plan. We cancelled our flights (thank you to Southwest for your flexible policies! [not sponsored]) and made new plans to play outside closer to home. We decided to drive over to North Carolina to hike around in the Blue Ridge area for a few nights. We’d split our time between HipCamp spots (again, not sponsored) and packing in to campsites in parks.
Let me preface what follows by saying that we were committed to #recreateresponsibly. This great coalition of folks encouraging smart outdoor excursions promote lots of research, planning, and an abundance of caution and care. My kind of people, for sure.
We made loose plans that left a lot of open space for adjusting based on crowds and weather. I wasn’t super jazzed about the “loose” plans, but I definitely could not have predicted how many adjustments would be necessary. Forget plan B, these days you need plans C-H.
As we reconfigured our itinerary over the last weekend in June, I kept saying we needed to be mindful of the holiday that would make parks and trails unavoidably crowded. The weather in the southeast did not comply with early-week crowd-avoidance plans, and we ended up backed into the corner of Thursday and Friday nights. This was less than ideal, but we believed it would be possible, through the help of apps like HipCamp, to find places where we could still be responsible. We booked an adorable off-grid shelter outside of Asheville for Thursday night, and planned to head up to my favorite state park on Friday: Grayson Highlands in Virginia. A return to the Pone Zone!
After we checked in on Thursday, we went on a casual hike along a nearby creek to cool off. It was gorgeous and refreshing - just what the doctor ordered in the full swing of southern summer. Definitely check out the Rocky Fork State Park the next time you’re in Asheville and want to get your feet wet. It’s technically back over the border into Tennessee, but much closer to town than some of the more iconic North Carolina hikes if you’re trying to stretch your legs before sunset, like us.
Our plan was to choose a technical, remote hike on Friday morning that we could pretty much count on being empty. We grabbed some breakfast at Biscuit Heads (delicious locally-sourced ingredients, and yes, they have gluten-free and vegan options!) and headed out to approach Horse Rock Bald via Woody Ridge Trail - widely regarded as the steepest trail on the East Coast. 2,800+ feet of elevation gain over 2.8 miles. Yes, your mental math is right: that’s one vertical foot for every step. On a 92 degree July day. I haven’t had my butt kicked by a trail like that in a long time. I’m not sure whether it was a consolation or a slap in the face that one of the 5 people we saw over 4 hours we were in the woods was a runner who completed 2 laps of the trail to our single push. The things we do for fun, huh?
About two hours in, I was struggling hard. HARD. My heart was pounding and I was grateful for my patient partner who encouraged me, waited with me, and plied me with water. But by that point, I had it in my mind that the faster we got through with this hike, the faster we could get to Grayson and hang out with the ponies. Carrots and sticks. So I pushed on to the summit (past a false summit that was, in my opinion, almost better than the grassy bald of the actual summit) and then, after a brief breather, did an about face and thundered back down the hill to get to those sweet quadrupedal ruminants.
We got back into cell range at the Woody Ridge trailhead and started getting the directions queued up. I was a little annoyed because our morning hike took longer than I expected and we’d probably be getting to Grayson a little later than I’d planned. (“HA! Planned?!! Nice try, kid,” saith the Universe.)
“Oo, we should check the website and see what the park hours are,” my partner recommended as we began to drive north. I pulled up the site and my heart sunk. We’ve hiked and camped at Grayson on the 4th of July before, but that was in pre-coronavirus times, and in the middle of the week. New rules state that you have to reserve your parking space in the backpacker lot more than 24 hours before you’re planning to arrive. Crap. In seeking to balance having a plan with leaving room for change, I had not followed through with that part of the preparation. I called the ranger’s office just in case there was space, but of course there wasn’t. It’s a holiday weekend. The weather is amazing. There are ponies. I could have seen this coming.
In fact, I did predict something like this, when I advocated for traveling earlier in the week. I just didn’t follow that thought one step further and actually check the Grayson Highlands State Park website to see if there was anything I could do to mitigate it. I take full responsibility for not following through on the planning, but that didn’t make my disappointment any less acute as we sat in a rural North Carolina gas station parking lot, trying to figure out our options to adjust our plans once again.
I was in full pout. The hanger-laced sullenness was palpable. Once I had a few snacks, I was able to vocalize my disappointment and say that there probably weren’t any make-up plans that would compensate for not being able to wake up to wild ponies. Options put forward by my patient partner included: hike out to somewhere nearby and camp off a trail, find a HipCamp nearby last-minute, or go home. These first two options didn’t account for the root of the problem: people out on a holiday weekend. There would be no campsite that would be uninhabited on a national holiday Friday night, when people’s primary recreation activities have to be outdoors due to a global pandemic; and nothing off the beaten path that we might find at the last minute that fifty other people didn’t think to look up last week. We made the difficult decision to cut our trip short and head home to sleep in our own bed.
And that ended up being exactly the right decision. We woke up well-rested on Saturday and got to spend time with each other and friends in town (outside, at a distance) instead of stressing out about maskless strangers in a park pit toilet or feeling anxious about folks crowding the wildlife. The ponies will still be there when I get a chance to head up to Grayson on a weeknight, just like the Wind River range will still be there when air travel is responsible again.
Those are things that are not likely to change. Plans, though, plans are going to change.
