Highpoint #6: Mt. Mitchell, NC (6684')

I got a late start out from Burnsville on the 6th after spending most of the morning writing blog posts. What with that and a few embarrassing navigational errors—particularly so since I’d already been to this place!—I didn’t make it to my base camp at Black Mountain Campground until noon. That campground, located a few miles east-of and 3000 feet below North Carolina’s Black Mountains in the Pisgah National Forest, is the logical entry point for those seeking their summits.  Rather than pay for an improved campsite with shower access (since I’d had that at the hotel last night), I drove a little further up the road to one of the free backcountry sites and staked my claim. Had I arrived any later (in the afternoon or in the season), I’d have been hard-pressed to find a site, but the few folks who spend their May weekends in these hills aren’t too prompt about showing up. In retrospect, this ought to have warned me of something… but I’d discover that surprise soon enough.

Spring had arrived here, a hundred miles south and several hundred feet below my camp at Mt. Rogers, but only just. The cold breeze chilled me as I emerged from my car, but the exertion of setting up camp and assembling my gear soon warmed me up.

It almost looks like it's May down here.

By the time I’d packed up my high mountain gear (the same stuff I brought up Mt. Rogers), pitched my tent, and backtracked to the trailhead just inside the campsite, it was 12:30. This left me with a little over seven hours until sunset: exactly the time in which I’d hiked this trail last summer. If I could replicate that pace, I’d make it back before dark; if not, I’d need to break out the headlamp. I set my phone’s alarm for 4:30—summit or no, I’d turn around when it rang—and headed up.

Hazy-Bordered Flashback Time

As the sun sails the high skies of summer, an old red Honda makes its way down I-81, the bumpy backbone of Appalachia. The car shoots across the Tennessee-Virginia line, then turns eastward and upward to climb over high green hills into North Carolina. Halfway to Asheville, it circles off the interstate and follows a series of mountain roads, each rougher than the last, deep into the dark narrow valleys of the Black Mountains. It stops at last, late in the afternoon, at a campground beside the South Toe River, here little more than a creek. Above loom densely forested foothills, mountains in their own right... and beyond them, Mount Mitchell, the pinnacle of the eastern United States.

Here the driver disembarks, pitches her tent, and waits out the night.

In the pale purple dawn, before light reaches over the eastern hills, she rises. Still sleeps the campground. She checks her pack once last, then trudges to the trailhead to begin her solitary climb.