Rabbit Box Blog

Joyce and I discovered the Pine Mountain Trail soon after we moved to Alabama. It’s actually in West Georgia, near Franklin Roosevelt’s Little White House. As it existed back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was just over 21 miles long, almost precisely the length of a marathon race.  It snaked back and forth across the ridge of a line of rather steep hills, or mountains if you prefer, and was fairly steep and rough in places. (Today, according to its website, it’s about 23 miles long, and a bit gentler than it was in those days.)

We did our first backpacking on a segment of the trail, using backpacks we rented from an outdoor store in Auburn. As neophytes, we read everything we could find on backpacking in those pre-Internet days. My main source was a book I bought that was written by an outdoorsman who had apparently never been east of the Rockies and obviously took pack animals with him on every trip. His list of mandatory equipment included a full-size ax (he disapproved of hatchets or camp axes) and enough food for at least twice your expected trip length. I had enough sense to substitute a hatchet. But we soon learned that even a hatchet is unneeded for overnight backpacking in the Eastern woodlands and isn’t worth the weight.

Even though we pared down his list a lot, my pack still weighed over 50 pounds, or nearly half my body weight. Joyce carried over 30 pounds.

We got a simple, not-to-scale map of the trail, which we learned later was not completely accurate. For instance, it marked water sources all along the trail, so we expected to refill our canteens as we hiked. But we found that many of the water sources didn’t have any water. As my cousin Tom reminded me recently, I complained that one we relied on heavily “didn’t have enough water for a Presbyterian baptism.”

But the water shortage was largely overcome during the night when we were almost washed out of our rented tent by a huge thunderstorm.

Surprisingly, we returned from our first attempt at backpacking eager to go again — but with our own, properly fitted, backpacks and a significantly lighter load. 

We also loved the Pine Mountain Trail.

Sometime later, in late summer or fall 1981, as my brother Charles and I both awaited the birth of our firstborn, we got the crazy idea of going backpacking. Joyce and Sophia had November due dates, so this was a “brothers only” trip. We planned for a quick overnight trip, roughly 24 hours. We didn’t expect to be able to cover the whole 21 miles, so we studied the map carefully and picked out a place where the ridge top road intersected the trail as it crisscrossed the ridge. If memory serves, we planned to cover about 12 miles. We were both young and reasonably fit, so six miles a day seemed easy enough.

Even though we had learned not to take quite so much in our packs, we still carried a lot. Extra food and water, extra clothes (cotton, because “technical” fabrics didn’t exist yet), gasoline cookstove and cookware all came along. My pack was closer to 40 pounds than 50, so I thought I was unburdened.

Joyce and Sophia dropped us off at the chosen spot, then drove back to Opelika. They would meet us at the trail end, at the TV tower, the next afternoon.

Charles and I hiked easily for the first mile or so, but when we found the first mile marker and figured out where we were, we realized we were behind schedule. We picked up the pace, but the afternoon was hot and parts of the trail were steeper than we expected. As we watched the map, we knew we were in danger of not making our planned six miles before camping for the night. 

Somewhere after five miles, we were both exhausted as we entered a designated campsite, which looked like it was heavily used. I had been told that Boy Scouts used the trail a lot, and this site looked it. Log seats surrounded a stone fire ring, and just about every sapling had been carved off to make various lean-tos, tables, and other Scout craft projects. The ground was pounded bare and dusty.

“Well, it’s ugly and there’s no firewood nearby,” Charles said. “And we’re a little short of where we wanted to be before night. We could go on a little while longer.” 

“No,” I answered. “Let’s get some food and rest awhile. If we feel better after supper, we can walk on a little more. If not, we can sleep here.”

So we broke out the food, stove, and cooking sets.

After eating, we put up the tent and went to bed.

The next morning, we felt better, and we broke camp without cooking breakfast, relying on the limited supply of snacks we had brought. He-men, we believed, cook their food while backpacking, so almost everything needed fire to make it edible.

 We walked another couple of miles, then stopped to cook our breakfast. We were becoming more concerned about making it to the meeting point by the time our wives got there, so we worked and ate as fast as we could.

As we were packing up, a voice greeted us from the trail. It was a stocky, middle-aged man wearing only white running pants (very short in those days!) and running shoes. We were at the top of a fairly steep hill, so he was a little winded. He stopped to catch his breath and struck up a conversation.

“Yeah, I’m running the trail this morning. I parked my car at the other end, and one of my neighbors drove me up to this end,” he said matter-of-factly. 

At about this point I noticed what looked like a Marine Corps logo on his shorts, but he didn’t look like a Marine. Charles and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh, but we didn’t say anything.

“So where you headed?” he asked. We explained that we had camped overnight and were meeting our wives at the trailhead later.

“Well, sounds like we’d all better get a move on,” he said, as he trotted on down the trail. “Have fun!”

We figured we had about four or five miles to go. Our visitor was at least 17 miles away from his car!

“No way,” we smirked. “That old guy?”

We chuckled as we pulled on our backpacks and started on the final leg of our trip.

We continued to watch the time and hope the next mile marker was just around the bend, walking as fast as we could under our packs.

Then it started to rain. At least there was no lightening, but the rain was torrential. Of course, we had minimal rain gear, so we were quickly soaked. We trudged on, but a lot of the fun washed off in the deluge.

Around lunch time, we still had some distance to go, but we were hungry and tired as well as sopping wet. We stopped and propped up the rainfly of Charles’s tent, creating just enough shelter that we could get the Coleman backpacking stove lit. After gobbling down some soup and whatever else we could salvage of our food, we packed up again and started off.

Of course, it stopped raining almost immediately.

The trail was wet and muddy, and we were worn out and miserable.

Finally, we saw the TV tower up ahead. We were almost done.

We saw a group of three middle-aged women walking down the trail towards us. They were dressed for Sunday in the park, not trail hiking — white Keds, white Capri pants and colorful skirts, etc. We, on the other hand, must have looked (and smelled) as if we’d been lost in the wilderness for a week.

“Whoa, where you boys been?” asked one of the women in her sweet Georgia accent, subtly shifting herself to be upwind of us.

“We’ve been camping on the trail,” I answered.

“Oh, Jimmy said he saw some boys on the trail this morning,” she said. “My, you didn’t make it very far, did you? He’s been home and had a shower and lunch.”

I don’t remember if we said anything as they sauntered down the muddy trail without a speck of mud on their white Keds. But I remember thinking a few things.

Charles and I dragged ourselves the last hundred yards or so and found Joyce and Sophia waiting for us. They had been waiting for some time, of course. We rode home in silence, with the back windows open for extra ventilation. We were required to shower as soon as we got home.