We’re halfway through another trip around the sun, and I’m halfway through the second year of my resolution to explore at least one new hiking trail every month. Through the first half of 2019, I explored eight new trails across four states, and nine adventure loving friends joined me on one or more of these hikes. I’ve experienced some overwhelmingly beautiful and diverse wild places over the past six months, from the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California to the wildflower-spotted forests of Alabama. However, the memories that stand out to me the most aren’t about the scenery, but about exploring those magnificent wild places for the first time with so many wonderful people. Hiking alone challenges me, especially on strenuous trails (like Fiery Gizzard, one of my favorites that can be hiked as a day trip from my home in Nashville), but hiking with friends presents a totally different and equally meaningful kind of gratification.
Over the last weekend in June, I rented a cabin with friends at Big South Fork National Recreation Area and hiked Honey Creek Loop, an enigmatic trail that felt more remote and unpredictable than anything I’ve encountered yet in my home state, maybe anywhere. I think this deserves some back story. I travel out west as often as I can because a panoramic view from the upper slopes of a big mountain takes my breath away every time I look up from the trail. It’s a powerful thing to feel so small and humble yet so triumphant and infinite in the same moment. My first immersive experience in a mountainous wilderness was on a trip to Alaska with Andy just two years ago. After my first summit hike, to the top of Mount Healy in Denali National Park, I knew with unflinching certainty that I’d always love big mountains and the man who introduced them to me.
I say all of this to illustrate the unlikely balance between the trails I travel to and the trails that I call home. My passion for one is idealistic and ambitious, and my passion for the other feels familiar and comfortable. It’s a union between branches and roots, and a tree needs both in order to thrive. As much as I love the expansive beauty of mountains, the allure of the deep woods and canyons surrounding the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee feels so immensely personal. Hiking these trails in summer months guarantees dense woodlands with limited lines of sight, hidden waterfalls and caves, the incessant sounds of nearby wildlife – seen and unseen, and an invigorating sense that you’re enveloped on all sides by your immediate surroundings.
My experience on Honey Creek Loop represents the pinnacle of everything I love about hiking in Tennessee: the mystery and anticipation of what lies beyond my immediate surroundings while immersed below the thick canopy of the forest, and the refreshing inhalation of open air that accompanies a seat on the edge of an exposed cliff that really wasn’t visible until it was only a few feet in front of you. Honey Creek Loop includes a whole lot of the former and very little of the latter. Then again, it’s likely that we overlooked many of this trail’s hidden gems because the path itself was so difficult to follow. My friends and I accidentally wandered off the trail more times than I can recall. Although we were never really lost, I got the sense that we missed things, and that this alluringly complex trail needs to be hiked a few times before it can really be appreciated, and certainly before it can be properly navigated.
All five of us who hiked Honey Creek Loop together lost phone service long before we arrived at the trailhead, and we didn’t regain it once while on the trail. After studying the topographic trail map and reviews from other hikers on AllTrails, we decided to hike the loop counter-clockwise. The map of the route in the AllTrails listing is accurate, but the length is incorrectly listed at four miles, when the full loop (including the spur to the overlook – which is totally worth a short detour), is realistically almost six miles. As advised by signs at the trailhead, hikers should plan for one hour per mile on this strenuous trail. This strategy allows extra time to scout and navigate (and backtrack after a wrong turn) when the correct path forward isn’t apparent, which happens often. It also accounts for the trail’s many boulder scrambles and slow traverses across uneven, unpredictable terrain. Overall, the trail’s elevation gain and length may seem modest, but trust me, neither of those are accurate indicators of what hikers will actually encounter here.
Over the first mile or so, the trail steadily descends into a canyon, with the surrounding vegetation encroaching more and more on our group as we approached Honey Creek at the bottom. To make a mediocre attempt at a poetic nature metaphor (or simile, I forget the rules), the descent into the increasing density of the surrounding woodlands feels like slowly wrapping yourself up in a blanket. Although it’s a magnificent blanket, at a certain point its closeness becomes constrictive, so you keep moving in hopes that you’ll regain a comfortable balance between immersion and flexibility. And we hadn’t even reached the caves yet.
I vividly remember the caves surrounding this trail and the high cliffs rising above them. Their daunting beauty was impossible to miss, and our imaginations ran wild trying to envision the mysteries that their shadows obscured. As I mentioned earlier, hiking through the canyons along the Cumberland Plateau is not a quiet endeavor, at least not in the warm months (in Tennessee, that’s about nine of them). The sounds of water, wind, and wildlife moving through these spaces is ever present, and there’s not always a visual explanation to accompany the varied sounds along the trail. The ambiguous relationship between sound and sight on trails like this one can’t be taken for granted, and it always keeps you guessing. After the initial descent into the canyon, trail conditions intensified. Suddenly, we were no longer hiking alongside dark and obscure caverns, but through them.
None of the caves or rock formations that we hiked through or scrambled over were individually extensive, but they were frequent enough to stand out as a defining feature on the trail. A simple wrong turn within the cavernous void often led us to believe that as long as we emerged back into the light, we were headed in the right direction. However, these short-lived perceptions frequently ended with resounding confirmation of our inadequate navigation skills. The most straightforward path wasn’t always the trail. Even when we weren’t passing through rocky dens or boulder fields, the overgrown forest often obscured the trail or created an illusion that led us astray. Needless to say, we relied heavily on the GPS function within the map on AllTrails, but when you’re buried so deep in the wilderness, location accuracy is only an approximation. We usually didn’t realize we’d ventured off the trail until we moved far enough in the wrong direction to create a distinguishable distance between us and the trail on the digital map.
In a way, the constant need to focus on navigation created some blind spots. In places where we felt uncertain of the right path forward, we weren’t paying as much attention to the pristine beauty surrounding us. While passing along a narrow section of trail through a particularly rugged boulder field, maybe a mile and a half into the hike, I was walking ahead of our group and so focused on my footing that I didn’t notice a massive snake until I was only a few feet away from it. At least five feet long and sprawled across a rock immediately on my left, the snake was already staring at me as I became of aware of its presence. Despite instantly realizing that this was a common king snake, nonvenomous and nonviolent, I froze, shocked by the sight of something so glaringly present that I’d somehow overlooked.
Although we didn’t encounter any other snakes on this hike (none that we saw, anyways), that experience makes me wonder what else we missed. To be clear, this trail definitely doesn’t lack excitement or up close and personal views of the gorgeous Tennessee wilderness. And as has been my experience on similarly remote and challenging trails in my home state (Savage Gulf comes to mind), we saw only a small handful of other hikers, all in groups. The absence of solo hikers didn’t cross my mind at the time, but it’s a rare thing to witness and a testament to the enigmatic nature of the trail. If I’d hiked this one alone, never having been there before, I’d probably still be out there, utterly lost and resigned to my new life as a modern day cave dweller.
Speaking of cave dwellers, I experienced my first ever bear encounter near the end of Honey Creek Loop. With only a mile or so remaining between us and the sacred air conditioning of our car, we started to feel the increasing the weight of physical exhaustion. This realization, in addition to growing concern over the waning daylight hours as afternoon turned into evening, motivated us to move at a quick pace on this last stretch of our journey. The trail became easier to distinguish (finally) as it ascended away from the jagged canyon floor and the creek. As we passed what may have been the final cave that we saw on the trail, about thirty yards to our right and on the opposite side of a shallow creek, I heard a short, low, rumbling sound. The sound was faint and far enough away to make me question whether or not I’d really heard it, but when I heard it again less than a minute later, I knew. That sound was coming from a bear, and that bear wanted us to know we were hiking through its territory.
We never saw the bear, but we didn’t linger in the area or get any closer to the cave to investigate. We didn’t even acknowledge it until we got back to the car, but we all knew in that moment what the dark depths of that cave obscured. I think none of us wanted to create a sense of panic among the group, and there wasn’t much we could do about it anyways, except to keep moving and hope that the bear would remain in its cave. We discussed it at length later that evening over beer and pizza, relieved that the moment had passed without confrontation, but thrilled to have had the experience.
Those sentiments about the bear encounter apply to our overall experience with Honey Creek Loop as well. Please brace yourself for the following emotional ramblings of another basic white girl who went outside and had a nice time (because the world needs more of that, right?). The significance that I took away from my hike through this magnificent, untamed space was this: In the wild and in life, we’re not meant to see everything. Because of our limited capacity as humans, we’ll inevitably miss many extraordinarily beautiful things, dangerous things, and things that are painfully both. We’ll have faith in the reality of things we cannot see, and we’ll often overlook or take for granted things that lie in plain sight. We’ll stray from our rightful paths and move through dark places, and we’ll rely on friends for guidance when we can’t seem to find a way to move forward. As we approach the end of the trail, maybe we’ll find peace in knowing that we’ve already conquered our greatest challenges, and hopefully we’ll feel fulfilled and grateful for the beauty we’ve been blessed to encounter along the way.
