When the steep angle of the ground subsided at last, the Boy walked into the ocean of sunlight bathing the top of the hill. The world around him was full of mountains, and he stood on top of the world.
The Smoky Mountains are home to a number of meadows commonly called grassy balds, unique expanses of habitat where geology seems to indicate trees have not ever grown. More than clearings, they are mysterious places whose existence and definition predate the last several ice ages. They exist at the very top of certain mountains in the Appalachian chain. They are home to many species of plant, animal and insect that cannot and do not live in the forested hillsides below.
How these areas came to be is unclear, as is why they exist on some mountaintops but not others. They aren’t so much clearings as they are bits of rich prairie elevated thousands of feet into the sky. The story of their origin seems to incorporate a variety of factors contributing across the eons, including the influence of megafauna like wooly mammoths and giant elk, as well as the geologically more recent influence of native humans using fire.
The Boy walked into the park-like setting and added his own measure of wonder. It fit well with that delivered by so many wanderers who’d passed by before. The hike up had been moderate but not especially challenging, and the sensation standing in the view that greeted him was sublime. This morning was a different sort from the one he’d experienced the day before. Andrews Bald is not Chimney Tops, after all.
A few days earlier, the Boy had taken a notion to do the most challenging hike he could find that fit within the boundaries of the time he had to hike it. His introduction to hiking as a Boy Scout had taken place on the trail from Rainbow Falls to Mt. LeConte. That’s a good tester for sure but, in the current case, he didn’t have all day. The steepest climb he could find that suited his needs led to Chimney Tops.
The Chimney Tops trail paralleled flowing rivulets and waterfalls, and it culminated in the sort of rock surface scramble that made his nerves tingle. In fact, assaulting the last 200 yards required several minutes of preparatory nerve-summoning. It was not technically rock climbing because there were no ropes or harnesses involved, but it absolutely wasn’t hiking either. The Boy later learned “scrambling” is the formal name for what he had done. Had he learned of this before the hike, he probably would not have gone, but he didn’t, so he did. It’s called “scrambling” when using handholds is an essential part of making progress. If he didn’t leave handprints in the handholds he’d used, it was not for lack of trying.
Standing atop the very pinnacle of the chimney formation at the peak of Chimney Tops amazed the Boy. It afforded the sort of view similar to those seen from the balds, but only after extracting a different toll for passage. Like so many of life’s truest difficulties, the Chimney Tops scramble extracted the sort of toll that can only be paid in person. So often, the Boy thought, the loudest mouths in any room advertise their ignorance by confidently declaring what they would do in a given, especially tough situation. The quieter mouths, generally those that are silent, include all the people within earshot who’ve actually faced such a dilemma and had to decide. Life, the Boy thought, is a twisting stream. Eventually, he knew, the confident loudmouths would likely be confronted by one situation or another that was no longer just theoretical. Only then, he thought, would they come to know who they really were. Afterward, they would remain silent in such discussions too.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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