I woke to fog laying heavy over Laurel Lake. Its density obscured the shoreline from view, as if beneath the veil the lake could stretch on forever. I had come to the bank to gather water, but on this dawn the lake gave me much more. Bands of color stretched across the horizon, infusing the mist with a pink hue. It was early April, most of the canopy had yet to leaf out, and the morning chilled my fingers as I sat on a log and made breakfast. I had run out of stove fuel the night before and was mixing cold water with my instant oats. Tonight I was bound for a creek named Dog Slaughter.
I broke down camp. Last night I’d set up on a finger of earth pointed into the lake along the Sheltowee Trace. Three days and thirty-three miles before, my roommate dropped me off at Camp Wildcat Memorial Battlefield, and I’d bumbled forth, crossing I-75, past old strip mines and storied country churches and quizzically-cut rock faces guarding hushed, wet ravines. I continued my walk, following the south edge of Laurel Lake as the morning fog faded into perfect blue. By the time I crossed the dam, entering Whitley County, I was sweating under the rising sun. I saw the last of the blemishless reflection of cloudless sky in the lake and was glad for another push into dense woods, following a path towards two rivers.
The past few days had laid out a pattern of descent into cliff-lined valleys, a stream at the nadir, then a climb back out to pavement. Once again I was savoring the changes of a descent, the landscape growing more lush as the din of moving water came gradually into earshot. Fallen leaves crunched underfoot with every step. The trail wound down towards the shade of towering rock houses, trees alongside them growing straight and tall in pursuit of sunlight. The sun pulsed through evergreen needles and still-naked branches on its way down to the forest floor. I met with Whitman Branch, a stream flowing into Laurel River. The valley widened out at the mouth of Laurel River. There at a boat ramp I met with the Cumberland and began my day’s crawl along its banks.
A couple miles after joining the Cumberland River I crossed paths with two hikers headed back where I’d come from. They warned me about the spring time floodwaters pushing up against the cliffs on the shore. One of the gentlemen pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of where they decided to turn around–the trail was inundated with murky water right up against a bluff, with no way to get above and around. I considered the high water route, but that would have required some backtracking. They left me with good-luck wishes and I pressed on towards whatever the swollen river had to offer me.
My pace slowed as I periodically climbed up thorny, rocky slopes to avoid the flooded trail. Stately sycamores and budding silver maples submerged in the river kept watch as I took my boots off to wade through clouded water. It was chilly, lapping against my thighs. At one point I decided to try and maneuver above a rock wall instead of through the water beneath it. Behind the rock I found a tight gap, which I squeezed through with diligent footwork after separating from my backpack. I emerged on the other end covered in sand, and ambled back down to the shore. Along the Cumberland, cliffs hosted seasonal displays of falling water, scintillating in a clear spring afternoon.
I made it to Bark Camp Creek. The blessing of the season was also its treachery. The spring’s heavy rains added both drama and danger to every creek and waterfall. My guidebook had described this creek crossing as a “challenging boulder-hop.” I stood on one end sizing up the situation, adrenaline welling up in my chest, deciding that “harrowing” or “ass-clenching” were more apt descriptors for the task at hand. White water rushed between huge boulders speckled with lichen and tinged with algae. A derelict, washed out bridge stood to my left. The structure loomed mockingly as I tried to identify the safest passage over the rocks.
I took a deep breath and crawled atop the first boulder in the creek. The next boulder stood closer to the water’s surface, and the only path forward I could see for myself was down. I tried to lower myself into the space between two faces of rock, leaping towards the next boulder. My footwork was unsure and I snagged my backpack–off snapped the chest strap holding my guidebook and bear spray. Thankfully, these landed on the dry surface of the boulder I was trying to get to. By the grace of my mother’s remote prayers and teenage aplomb I made it over the creek. Safe on dirt trail again, I gazed upstream at a set of cascades, azure pools stacked beneath short, churning falls. A creek valley framed by pines and early spring hardwood, bereft of color. Branches bearing hopeful buds splayed out and grasped handfuls of blue sky. I imagined the seasons falling into step and what that meant for the cascades. The power I saw that afternoon would thin out beneath a green canopy by midsummer. Come autumn and the serene pools would be choked with senesced leaves, later still the cascades might quiet to a whisper, immured in winter ice.
Patterns repeated. The trail dipped beneath a rock shelter, a stream pattered off its roof onto a pebbly low spot, draining eventually to the river. More creeks to cross, flowing into the Cumberland, though none as wild as Bark Camp. By six I had made it to Dog Slaughter Creek, set in a little valley green with moss and laurel.
After a cold dinner of tuna in a bag, I climbed up onto a big boulder set into the creek. Lichen of different creeds found their homes on the gray rock. Black lichen flaked up and bubbled like blisters, and green lichen splayed out like a Mandelbrot set. How long had this ancient rock stood sentry in this chilly cove? Up top I could still warm myself with the slowly lowering sun. I looked down at the cascades in the creek, rushing towards the Cumberland. Where the two courses met, frenetic blue contrasted with a calmer, stiller green. The afternoon was warm. I felt the woods themselves embracing me as a dying sun kissed the canopy of the Daniel Boone National Forest. I felt small upon the rock and small in the scale of rock-time. Each boulder would eventually weather to sand and blanket the belly of the Cumberland.
The back of a church in a rural neighborhood, the solitude of deep Laurel county woods, the sublimity of a lake guarded by springtime hills, and now a rhododendron grove by the mighty Cumberland River. In these lonely places I was blessed to take shelter over four nights along the Sheltowee Trace. In my life I occupied then a liminal space. Having withdrawn from my first attempt at college, my days were spent in a fast-food drive through, waiting to figure out what my existence was worth. My heart snagged on a yearning to see what more there was in the world, so I’d set out alone with a borrowed pack and a pair of boots to hike Kentucky’s backwoods. Never in my eighteen years had I experienced such freedom.
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, Oregon, 2023
I never did hike the Sheltowee Trace all the way through. I made it 68 miles that April, bailing out before the trail entered the Big South Fork. But I was hooked on the song of the backcountry, even before I knew the names of the birds, flowers, and trees who composed the score. At some point in the year after my inaugural backpacking trip I learned that people were getting paid to live in tents and spend their days in national forests, and thus my time with the conservation corps began. I first worked in southern California in the spring of 2022, witnessing for the first time in my life desert sunsets and sunrises, skies vast and dense with stars unbound from the cloak of any tree. Then a backcountry trail crew in the Sierra Nevadas, repairing parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, and a stint in prescribed fire in the Southeast.
Last year I wanted another sagebrush summer sleeping beneath the stars, but I wanted to make more than the $250 a week AmeriCorps generously bestows onto its crew members. So following in the footsteps of my first crew lead, Taylor, I flew out to Idaho to lead a conservation crew for Northwest Youth Corps. This was how I found myself hauling a behemoth pack full of a week’s worth of tools, gear, and food into the North Fork John Day Wilderness of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. We were tasked with maintaining the Elkhorn Crest Trail, which ran the knife’s edge of a ridge in Oregon’s Blue Mountains, a range where so many Oregon Trail emigrants perished in their 19th-century bid for a better life. These mountains were home to dazzling summer wildflowers, bloodthirsty hordes of ticks and mosquitoes, and bands of mountain goats fiending for human sweat. The trail was exposed on either side to sweeping views of cool-toned slopes stacked upon one another, with alpine lakes hidden amongst the trees. With groans of relief we set down our packs and established our base camp at Dutch Flat Lake, where we ate dinner around a smoldering fire and delighted in watching mosquitos incinerate themselves in the flames. Once evening chores were done I laid back in my hammock and listened to the peepers cry out to the dark.
One day in July, halfway through the hitch, I saw rain coming down over the hills in the distance. The conceit in me thought the clouds wouldn’t make it to our ridge. But the undeniable signs of a storm appeared as I bent over some tread: eerie wind and foreboding gloom. I gathered up the crew and we crouched beneath some low-growing spruce as the storm came. Rain turned to hail, thunder cracked and echoed between the mountains. We waited among the scrubby trees which offered only partial protection. I prayed the crosscut saw would stay dry. In half an hour the precipitation dissipated. The pebbly earth was dusted white with little hail balls.
Eventually, everything dries. I unfurled from my cowering stance, chilled to the bone, work pants and leather gloves soaked. I threw on my wet pack, took up my tools with rain-wrinkled fingers, and went forth on the ridge where sunlight shone once more, promising an end to this discomfort. Sunshine broke through parting clouds, illuminating valleys full of scree and pine. Off the side of the trail brilliant wildflowers like silky phacelia and penstemon bloomed out of thin soil. They glimmered with remnant raindrops, content to grow on an arid, exposed alpine ridge.
Three years after I first began backpacking, I could finally articulate what this way of life meant to me. In the Blue Mountains I realized that what I love about living outside is forgetting what I look like. In the backcountry my identity breaks down until I am only a vessel with strong legs that carries a backpack, saw, and pulaski. I am reminded of my visible form only in subtle ways. I suspect that I am brown because my skin does not burn or blister in the alpine sun. I think I must be small because I prefer to crawl beneath blown-down trees that my crewmates straddle and hop over. I am reminded of my womb each month when the moon is two nights from full. Blood leaves me then. Other than that, I am only what I can sense. I am the eyes that love the chipmunks, elk and mountain goats. I am the skin that sweats then rejoices with a merciful breeze, the eardrums which hear the quips of the osprey and nutcracker. The dry, cracked hands which trace the concentric, peeling hull of a whitebark pine. My being in the woods is not measured by mirrors, or how others treat me, but by the throbbing in the callused ball of my foot and the itch of a pinprick wound where a lone-star tick drew my blood.
In this stripped-down existence my emotions are shaped by the elements. I am exasperated when it rains and we have to huddle beneath a tarp to cook dinner. Jubilant when the sun shines and a gentle breeze ruffles the lupines flanking the trail. Relieved when a warm campfire promises protection from the evening chill, and dry socks. An existence pared down to this level holds the space necessary to develop kinship with each fellow form of life. My humanity is no more a marvel of evolution than the mechanisms which allow a mountain goat to scale sheer granite slopes, or the characteristics that grant scrappy flowers a hold on life among the talus. Wildlife teaches me how to be patient, to be graceful, to persevere. I have sat upon the edges of lakes in wildernesses and watched half moons reflected in their surfaces, feeling accepted into the family of life on this earth. From this kinship grows my commitment to conservation. I bear a responsibility to steward the woods that are home to those who have taught me so much.
