"A Mile High And More, Hiking Atop The Roan," 1977

I walked into the house. Mom was there. I didn't live at home at the time. I had moved out some months earlier. I was a senior in high school and had just graduated a few days ago.

"I read your name in the paper," Mom said.

"Oh. On the honor roll list?" The local paper used to publish the honor roll lists every semester.

"In the Charlotte Observer." she said.

Weird, I thought. Why would the Observer publish honor roll students from Hickory High?

Mom then handed me the newspaper article. There was a big picture of me and Ginger on the Roan. It was entitled "Carol Hamby And Friend ...how far in one day?"

"Oh. Wow," I responded.

Some days before, I had met three ladies while hiking at Roan Mountain. We stopped and chatted as hikers do.  I thought it kind of odd that they took my picture. I hadn't realized they were from the newspaper. Perhaps they told me, but I didn't deem it significant enough to lodge in my brain cells.

They asked me if I wasn't afraid up there, alone. (Though I wasn't alone; I was with my dog.)

I told them, "No more than elsewhere. It's as safe or safer up here as down in the cities."

May, 1977. I had turned 18 years old in April.

~*~

A Mile High And More, Hiking Atop The Roan
By Dot Jackson
The Charlotte Observer, May 1977

Nowhere on the Appalachian Trail, hikers say, is there a place quite like the Roan.

So much of the trail, at least in Carolina, is through woods, its ups and downs and overlooks thickly veiled in green.

And then there is Roan Mountain.On the Roan you can see what looks like an endless trail ahead, topping endless hills, melting off into the horizon. It is the most beautiful, or the most depressing, depending on how much one loves to hike.

The Roan is bald. Or that is what they call it. It is really thick with grass as soft as a mattress, and in that grass the strawberries are blooming, and in July they will be red. People who do not like so much to hike will like to sit in that grass and pick strawberries to justify their presence on the Roan.

The huckleberry bushes, waist-high or more, like little trees, have bloomed and are thick with berries that will be ripe in late August or September. We wonder if the blackberries ever do get ripe before the frost. One is over a mile high on the Roan.

There are blackberry brambles. One finds them mostly when looking for a quick route to the ladies' room, which, the Roan being so bald, is hard to find and subject to incredible two-way vistas.

And there is always the wind, moaning, whistling, singing. The wind is a curse at zero, when the grass is glittering ice, and boots slip back two steps of every three, and a delight when the sun beats down with no shade for relief.

Some of us never trudge across the Roan, but we think of those 'leven hundred or so poor souls coming over Bright's Trace on their way to fight at Kings Mountain. (And we envy the devil out of them because lots of them at least were on horses.)

(There have been people on horses on this trail more recently than 1780. The evidence is hard miss more ways than one. We wonder how they get under the rail fence at Carver's Gap. The worst trouble a hiker meets is getting a loaded backpack over or under that fence. But it is worth it; it keeps out motorsickles.)

There is a special loneliness about that 10 miles across the Roan. Few days pass when the fog does not close in at least for a little while, separating one from one's fellows. It is hard to imagine that the mountaintop was once an elegant resort people came to for the views and the cool and to hear the peculiar humming sound the mountain made at night. (We thought one time we heard that, but it was only the wind whining in a pack frame.)

There were 160 rooms in the old Cloudland Hotel that was the "in" place at the turn of the century. The N.C.-Tennessee line ran through the parlors. Now even the rubble of the chimneys is shrouded in laurels.

But there are worse things than being up there alone. Like being with the outing from the home for the aged and they all walk faster.

Some of us were making that passage the other day slowly panting, when Carol Hamby and her dog passed us. Carol was a couple days from graduating from Hickory High School out seeing how far she could walk in a day, alone. We never caught up with her; plainly she could walk much farther, faster, than we.

Is it not dangerous being up there by herself? Not so much as being down where the crowds are. A college girl stepped off the trail into the highway a few weeks ago into the path of another young woman's car and died in the fog.

It is very near the top of the world, on the Roan. It is a long way down, from any point. The road from Roan Mountain Village, Tenn., to Bakersville [N.C. 261] clings hard to the mountainside, but does not always, sad to say, hold on.

There is a one-lane hole in the road now on the south side of the summit. A guard rail bends around it. The infinity of the valley shines through it.

"We had a bad storm about a month ago," says Gene Buchanan of the Mitchell County's Sherriff's office. "We had a couple of cars come up on it, right after it went. It just washed out from underneath." Fixing it will be something, with nothing to build on.

Meanwhile, the traffic in that spot will be squeezed. The laurels are blooming. The Rhodedendron Festival with all the crowds it brings, begins Wednesday and runs through Saturday.

Most people will not walk farther than the picnic grounds. They will not see the best of the views. They will not get briar scratches and sore bones and blisters. They will not get hooked...

~*~

1977 Charlotte Observer article. Mom's handwriting.

08/2010. Grandpup Yerba along the Roan Highlands...
the trail "melting into the horizon" as clouds roll in.