Styx July 25, 2013
Posted by Jenny in bushwhacking, hiking, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Huggins Hell, Mt. LeConte, Myrtle Point, Styx Branch
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View from upper Styx Branch drainage. There’s something I don’t like in the foreground.
For the first time in weeks, the forecast for Gatlinburg said nothing about precipitation. I had to get out on this beautiful day!
So I climbed Styx Branch to Myrtle Point on LeConte. I’ve been up Styx four or five times via different routes—some accidental rather than intentional. This is the first time I’ve done it by myself. Readers may notice that lately I’ve been doing more solo bushwhacks than usual. I always enjoy hiking with my disreputable comrades, but this summer I’ve been in a mood to explore the feeling of being by myself in really wild places.
Yes, being a few hundred vertical feet below the popular tourist destination of Myrtle Point is a really wild place. Check it out sometime if you don’t believe me. From the bottom.
I hiked the familiar lower stretch of Alum Cave Trail until I reached the footlog above Arch Rock, then headed up Styx Branch. At the footlog, it carried a fair amount of water, but soon Styx lived up to its usual identity of a stream that often flows in subterranean paths, offering an unusually dry route for off-trail types. And you thought Styx got its name because it goes through Huggins Hell. No, it’s because it issues forth from diabolical realms far below the earth’s surface. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I expected to see some new landslides after the recent phenomenally heavy rains, and I was not disappointed. Nothing super-dramatic, but noticeable.
New slide coming down from the Parton Peaks ridge.
I turned up the left fork and proceeded up the stream.
Small cascade on left fork of Styx.
I encountered the thickest, woolliest vegetation of any time I’ve been up in this area. Has the rainfall been saturated with Miracle-Gro?
A world of vegetation.
I also noticed that more blowdowns blocked the stream than I’d recalled from previous outings. As I’ve whined about on other recent blogs, the heavy rainfall and the thunderstorms seem to make it easy for trees to become uprooted.
I got into one particular spot that gave me ridiculous difficulty. It wasn’t dangerous, it was just incredibly awkward. One of those situations where one foot was on the slimy branch of a blowdown, the other foot on a slippery rock, and I was trying to leverage myself up by one arm—surely the push-ups I’ve been doing lately should help—and the branch I was leaning on snapped off.
Getting into the area of tall cascades.
Starting to make upward progress.
Saxifrage hangs over stream.
Now I’m in the halls of the mountain gods!
Looking down the draw.
I reached the perimeter of a big landslide area (not a new one—it’s been obvious for a long time). I climbed along the edge on steep gravelly soil and opted to move into pleasant open balsam woods.
Moss under balsams.
But when I saw a nice open meadow to my right, I traversed over to it. I was unpleasantly surprised to see that it was covered with a parasitical plant called dodder (which you also see in the top photo).
Cuscuta gronovii, better known as dodder.
It’s not one of those invasive plants that’s arrived in shipping crates just recently from overseas, it’s been around for a long time. My wildflower book says the Cherokees used it for medicinal purposes. Yet this is the first year that I’ve seen it in any quantity in the Smokies (if you’ve had a different experience, please let me know). I saw it last weekend along the A.T. near Mt. Cammerer, and now I see it all over the upper slopes of Styx, where I haven’t seen it before. Perhaps something to do with our bizarre climate this year?
It’s been around in the Black Mountains for a while, especially the northern Blacks like Celo Knob, where I saw tons of it on a traverse of the Blacks.
The wildflower book describes these vines as “parasitic annuals that lack chlorophyll. They attach themselves to a variety of host plants from which they derive nourishment through rootlike connections.” It’s also known as “love vine,” the book says. Funny! Mistletoe, another plant associated with love, is also parasitic. Hmmm . . . can anyone come up with a concept of love that doesn’t involve being a parasite?
I climbed steeply through these meadows of dodder, trying a route to the side that led to a combination of Rhododendron minus and Anakeesta bluffs, worked my way through, and popped out on the Myrtle Point side trail just steps away from the Point.
Some people came through just as I emerged from the brush. This time, oddly enough, they assumed that I was some sort of worker attached to the Lodge. Two separate groups both said something like “Thank you for your efforts” as I stood by the trail, removing my gloves, attempting to brush spruce and balsam needles from my clothing.
After this and my other recent experiences arriving on LeConte’s top, I’ve come to the conclusion that people can understand workers on the summit, but they cannot understand a person (especially a female on her own) bushwhacking just for the enjoyment of it. I responded to one of the groups, “What’s really nuts is that I do this for fun, not for a job.” I said I’d come up off-trail through the stuff they saw just to the side, but once again they had no questions for me along the lines of “What was it like?” or “Where did you start?”
Come to think of it, I didn’t see any other solo female hikers even on the Alum Cave Trail going down. I like to think of it as sort of a blank area of experience. In the end, I’m glad it’s that way.
View from Myrtle Point.
Playing the Styx Branch game May 11, 2012
Posted by Jenny in bushwhacking, nature, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Huggins Hell, Mt. LeConte, Myrtle Point, Styx Branch
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The sand myrtle is near peak bloom.
Warning: Tedious navigational details ahead.
We didn’t quite achieve our objective of coming out right at Myrtle Point, but we came close. We hit the spur trail to the Point maybe 20 feet away. This has become sort of a game.
For those who haven’t followed descriptions of earlier expeditions, I’m talking about following Styx Branch through the area called Huggins Hell to get to the top of LeConte.
The first time, I went with the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club on a trip that was supposed to go up the left fork but accidentally went up the right fork. We landed way to the east of Myrtle Point on the Boulevard ridge. The second time, I went with Seth O’ Shields and Dave Landreth up what I thought was the left fork but now believe was a variation of the right fork, staying on a course of about 17 degrees and following a small split in the stream instead of bending east with the right fork. We hit the Boulevard ridge much closer to Myrtle Point, but still to the east of it. The third time, I went with Chris Sass, Seth, and a friend of Seth’s. We started up the same route as the previous time but landed further away from Myrtle Point. This last time, we finally went up the left fork…
My current best guess as to the ways I’ve gone.
The forks split, and split, and split again. What looks at first glance on the map to be a simple stream valley proves to have small indentations that diverge from it—side valleys that don’t carry enough water to rate blue lines on the map. But one of the odd things about Styx is that often those upper valleys have more water flowing through them than the main stem, where the water flows invisibly deep underneath stacks of geological rubble that have been carried down over the years in mighty floods.
The other thing that makes Styx a challenge is that the critical junction, the one at 4700′ between the left and right forks, lies close to several other draws that come in nearby. In fact, the junction is fairly obvious, but I’d been outsmarting myself by deciding that was not the correct one. It was partly because the left fork takes a course of 350 degrees up to above 5000′, but right at the very start it’s more like 320 degrees, and the right fork seems at first to run closer to the correct course.
I know, all you GPS users are laughing!
On our recent outing, we walked up and down around the junction, checked out different possibilities, and once we angled over to the left fork from one of the little draws, we actually walked back down it to confirm its appearance at the main stream.
The left fork is worth the trouble to follow. Above 5000′, it tumbles down over a series of lovely cascades. There is a great split at 5700′. We went to the right, working around the steep base of a giant unclimbable bulge, slithering on shards of loose Anakeesta. We then climbed steeply through different bands of vegetation offered up like flavors on a menu: grass mixed with blackberries that you could use to pull yourself up, groves of spindly spruce, great spongy swathes of moss, carpets of perennial wildflowers not yet in bloom, and finally—what told us we were zeroing in on Myrtle Point—aromatic Rhodendron minus that grew in a dense interlocking barrier. At one point close to the top, I watched Chris working through it on his back, his legs pushing against the tangled branches to propel himself forward.
Our goodnatured companion Jim uttered a few curses as he fought through the barrier, but he emerged victorious and seemed satisfied to have conquered Myrtle Point. It was his first climb of LeConte.
Jim was a good sport about the whole experience!
We climbed in drizzle and fog the whole way up, and none of us took pictures along the way. It was chilly on Myrtle Point. After stopping for something to eat, we headed over to the lodge for some hot chocolate. As we sat in front of the heater in the lodge, Chris and Jim shared hilarious stories about some of their associates on the faculty of Young Harris College.
This is the second hike in recent months where I’ve had serious problems with my fingers. My gloves get saturated, the activated charcoal handwarmers I carry don’t work when they’re wet, and my problem with Reynaud’s Syndrome becomes apparent. I’ve finally learned the lesson that even in temperatures above 50 degrees I need to have waterproof gloves available. My fingers stayed so stiff even all the way down that I could unlock my car only by pressing the key between my palms and turning it with my whole hands.
But as we descended the Alum Cave trail, the clouds thinned and all of the intricate, green, furry ridges emerged from the gloom, those distinctive places like Big Duck Hawk and Anakeesta Ridge. There’s no other place like this.
A beautiful plant.
Left fork of Styx Branch August 20, 2011
Posted by Jenny in bushwhacking, hiking, Smoky Mountains.Tags: Huggins Hell, Mt. LeConte, Myrtle Point, off-trail navigation, Styx Branch
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Dave climbs the staircase of the stream
For more photos and another perspective on the outing, go to Dave’s trip report.
A year ago, the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club set off to climb the left fork of Styx to the top of LeConte but accidentally climbed the right fork instead. Yesterday three of us succeeded in climbing the left fork. It does involve paying close attention at the junction, which is located not by looking at separating watercourses in this complicated, braided stream, but by observing the shape of the valleys.
So I returned to the area on the south slopes of LeConte known as Huggins Hell and to the appropriately named stream that runs through it.
"Crossing the Styx" by Gustave Dore
My companions were Seth O’Shields and Dave Landreth, who proved to have the right combination of determination, strength, and insanity to pursue this quest.
Seth
Dave
The first time I saw Seth’s orange shirt, I said, “But it’s not hunting season!” However, Seth just likes that shirt, and Dave points out that it makes him easy to spot in the underbrush and also makes him stand out clearly in photos.
We relied on my altimeter to identify the elevation (4750′) where we should look for the junction. The going in the lower part of the stream was easy, as the streambed held very little water and we were able to rockhop along at good speed. After a brief false move going up a dead-end side draw, we rejoined the main stream and recognized the junction. The lower Left Fork was clogged with rhodo, which made it even more obscure, but we wrestled our way through this section and emerged onto a nifty stone staircase. The rock seemed like a combination of sandstone and Anakeesta—fairly large solid blocks mixed with the sharp-edged slaty pieces that make for great handholds.
Studying the situation
The rock got slimier as we got higher, making for some tricky spots.
Slimy climb
It was a beautiful, wild place, a ribbon of rock and trickling water that led into the steep, mysterious, sometimes dangerous fastnesses below Myrtle Point.
Wild place
Eventually, around 5800′, the stream disappeared and we found ourselves working through worlds of lush vegetation: wildflowers of all kinds, blackberries, and cushions of deep moss so plush you could kneel comfortably in it and feel yourself sinking in without any discernable bottom.
The underbrush was so thick here that even Seth's orange shirt disappeared
Dappled light
We weren’t sure exactly where we were going to come out—we hoped somewhere in the vicinity of Myrtle Point. As we approached the top, we ran into steep cliff bands. I reached a spot where I could not manage to go straight up, so I did an interesting traverse making use of some good handholds. Dave took this picture of me—what it doesn’t show is the dropoff below my feet. He called it “the crux.”
"The crux." Photo by Dave Landreth.
On the far side of the traverse stood a tangled mess of rhodo and laurel, incredibly dense. I fought for a few minutes and got nowhere, but then noticed a little slot through the growth that led to the right. I crawled through it and found myself on a narrow ridgecrest with a view down to the Boulevard. We were just a short distance east of Myrtle Point. We’d expected to encounter a large slide, but it turned out we came up a little to the right of it.
Bears had traveled back and forth on this ridge, making for a decent path where you could almost stand up straight. There was just one point where the bears, probably chuckling to themselves, led the way up a steep outcrop that could only be descended by crawling down a blowdown. Before long we came out on a herd path made by curious humans investigating out from Myrtle Point.
Herd path leading to Myrtle Point
I love the interwoven vegetation there, the mounded cushions of myrtle mixed with ferns and dense masses of wind-sculpted Rhododendron minus with its aromatic leaves. From this understory rise scattered mountain ash and spruce. In the distance, a crazed jumble of jagged green ridges. Two peregrines soared high above as we watched, seemingly playing with each other.
We stopped at the lodge and met some of the friends Seth has there—he has frequently stayed there for a few days at a time, doing chores in exchange for room and board. After relaxing for a while, we wended our way down the Alum Cave trail. We saw beautiful flowers.
Gentians
Grass of Parnassus
This was one of those journeys that touches my imagination in a certain way and makes me long to return quickly to those difficult, hidden, beautiful places.
View from Foothills Parkway---taken on the drive over
Endless streams and forests 