Category: Thru-Hiker

Purple Haze, a married mother of four grown women, spent the night a few weeks ago at Cosby Knob, a shelter on the Appalachian Trail in the Smoky Mountain National Park.  She woke up to a pouring rain. Members of her trail family, Boots, Highlight, Foxy, Trip, Bear Chaser and others, were cooking breakfast or had already begun to eat. Or were packing up. All of them were thru-hikers, walking from Georgia to Maine, more than 2,000 miles, but no one was in a big hurry to get going that May morning.

Purple Haze headed for the privy, about 50 yards from the shelter and was on her way back when a bear fell in behind her, almost close enough to reach out and touch her, she said.

“When the bear huffed and I turned and saw it I remember thinking, ‘Holy crap, that’s a big bear.'”  Purple Haze is close to five feet, nothing tall, not that it mattered much how big she was.

She said she turned around and started to run but her friends were yelling, “Don’t run!”

Purple Haze remembered that she was supposed to look “big and scary and make noise,” not an easy thing to do when a bear is already breathing down your neck, literally. She tried, she said, but the bear wasn’t having it.

“When I turned it was so close I was afraid that it would swipe at me or bite me if I stopped moving.  So I just turned back toward the shelter.”

She was almost to the shelter, walking fast, when the bear bit her on the butt.

The other hikers yelled and threw rocks and the bear retreated. But he hung around on a nearby ridge even after one hiker had sprayed it with bear spray.

The bite, which left two puncture wounds, felt like a hard pinch, or a sting, like when you scrape your knee, she said.

“I wasn’t scared at any point that morning – I think it just happened too fast. Everyone kept asking me how I was so calm.”

Purple Haze had been a dispatcher for 15 years, a job where “freaking out” is not allowed, she said. Her husband is a police officer.

The hikers, figuring there was safety in numbers, left in a group.

“Since I wasn’t in serious pain I felt, well, lucky,” she said. “Once we hiked down to the gap and met with all the park folks and the medical personnel at the hospital, it started to sink in exactly HOW lucky I was.   Yikes! The following day when we were dropped off at the trailhead, THEN, I thought, ‘Wow, is this a good idea?’ And I hesitated for a few minutes before hiking on.”

And is Purple Haze still on her way to Maine?

She is.

And has she seen any more bears?

She has, two.

“Just a few days later a bear ran down onto the trail in front of me…then turned and looked at me.  I banged my poles together and yelled and then it behaved like a ‘normal’ bear and ran [away] from me.

The other one was a baby bear, up a tree. Mother bear was nowhere to be seen, thank goodness.

Why didn’t Purple Haze carry some sort of bear repellant?

She does, she carries pepper spray. But it was in her backpack.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t carry it with me to the privy that day,” she said. “I do now.”

What happened to the bear, the biggest bear one park ranger said he had ever seen in the park?

Park rangers killed him. If a bear attacks a human, and nothing bad happens, it emboldens him, rangers told her.

I know, I know, you’ve been wondering, Why is Purple Haze called Purple Haze? And will she change her trail name to, say, Honey Buns. Or Bear Bait.

She’s Purple Haze because some of her hair is purple. She said she thought about changing her trail name, partly because her initials are B.B., but she’s going to stick with Purple Haze.

One question Purple Haze has been asked repeatedly seems to rankle her.

“I’ve had a huge number of people actually ask me if it hurt when he bit me,” Purple Haze said. “Yep.  Sure did.”

Maybe she should ask them, “Duh! Is ice cold?“

When I hiked the Appalachian Trail five years ago I kept a sharp eye out for white blazes, the trail markers hikers follow from Georgia to Maine.  They were usually painted on trees or, sometimes, fence posts. Pretty often, on boulders.

Almost all of the trail is in the woods, in the Appalachian mountains. That why it’s sometimes called the “green tunnel.” But the blazes, thousands of them, are not the only signs out there the woods.

There are signs identifying shelters and roads, signs telling you how far you’ve come — and how far it is to the next shelter.  Or, sometimes, how far it is to Mount Katahdin, the end of the trail in Maine.

Believe it or not, there are a few grave markers close by the trail —  in the middle of nowhere.  Two graves were for soldiers from the North Carolina mountains who fought for the North during the Civil War.  They were ambushed when they came home on leave.

There are also signs warning hikers about rowdy bears and washed out bridges.  The bridge signs were helpful but I didn’t need a sign telling me to give bears a wide berth.

Occasionally there are weather signs, like the one beside the trail just before you begin climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the highest peak in Northeastern United States at 6,288 feet.

Mount Washington has some truly awful weather.

Until mid-1990’s it held the record for the fastest wind gust ever recorded on the surface of the Earth — 231 mph.   It’s also one of the coldest places on Earth, with wind chills that have approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

The Mount Washington sign isn’t hype — there have been a total of 161 fatalities on that mountain since 1849, according to NH Magazine, about half the number who have died trying to climb Mount Everest.

But some signs, one in particular at the entrance to what they call the “100 mile wilderness” in Maine, greatly overstate the difficulties ahead.

The sign says: “CAUTION  There are no places to obtain supplies or get help until Abol Bridge 100 miles north.  Do not attempt this section unless you have a minimum of 10 days supplies and are fully equipped.  This is the longest wilderness section of the entire A.T. and its difficulty should not be underestimated.  Good Hiking!”

I hiked the “100 mile wilderness” in five days, when I was 73.

I’ve forgotten where I saw, and photographed, my favorite sign of the whole trip.  But ask any thru-hiker, it’s truth is universal and it would be right at home anywhere on the trail.

The A.T. intersects hundreds of other trails and most of those intersections are well marked.  But not all, far from it.  Sometimes it take a while to figure out which way to go.  This sign offered helpful advice. It says, “When in doubt, the A.T. always goes up.”

Truer words were never spoken.