A Conversation With A Smokies Speed Hiker

Nancy East fell in love with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a veterinary student at Auburn University, settling on the North Carolina side of the mountains to work and raise her family.

In 2015, East joined the volunteer Haywood County Search and Rescue Team, and in 2019 she retired from her veterinary career. Since then, East has published the book “Chasing the Smokies Moon,” and together with her hiking partner Chris Ford she set two Smokies speed hiking records: fastest known time, or FKT, for a mixed-gender team completing the Tour de LeConte—hiking all 44 miles of trail leading to Mount LeConte within 24 hours—and fastest known time for walking all 800-plus trail miles in the park. Their efforts raised more than $30,000 for Friends of the Smokies.

What initially motivated you to join the Haywood County Search and Rescue Team?

“That all started with a search, a woman by the name of Julie Hays. She was a district attorney from somewhere in Tennessee and came over for a day hike on Cold Mountain. On the way down the mountain she stopped to take a break, leaned against a tree that was against the side of the trail, but it was a rotten dead tree that gave way when she leaned on it. And so it went careening down the mountainside, taking her with it. It was about a three-day search if my memory serves me, and it got a lot of media attention. She was found and she was found alive, but it just opened my eyes to the fact that we had a search and rescue team. And I thought, you know what, I’m an experienced hiker. I know this area like the back of my hand now. I think this is a place I could serve and be useful.

“Chasing the Smokies Moon” focuses on one particular mission, the 2018 search for Susan Clements, who was found dead 2 miles from the Clingmans Dome parking area. What about that story resonated with you so strongly?

This one really hit home a lot harder, I think, because she was a mom and I had lost my mom to cancer. Then one of her daughters made a series of YouTube videos to outline what the family went through that week, and it impacted me even more. I thought, nobody can die like this again. That series of YouTube videos was really the catalyst for thinking I want to do something more meaningful than just go search for people. I want to do some kind of a campaign for preventative search and rescue.

And where did that conviction lead you?

I found out Friends of the Smokies had in their 2020 budget a line item to fund a PSAR program in the park. I thought, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to raise that money for them. But I knew I had to do something flashy. I ultimately decided to hike all the trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but I wanted to do it in record time. Then in the process of all of this I found out that one of my good hiking friends, Chris Ford, was also interested in pursuing this speed record. The Tour de LeConte was kind of our test run to make sure that we were compatible in something this extreme and also to test our ability to raise money.

What was the outcome?

For the Tour de LeConte we raised $6,000 for the Trillium Gap Restoration Fund and we set the mixed gender FKT. And then the Smokies FKT we succeeded at, with certainly many, many more obstacles when you’re out there for a month on trail. Through that, we raised just a tick over $24,000 for preventative search and rescue. It really pushed me way out of my comfort zone because I’m not prone to taking on things with such high exposure publicly, so it gave me a lot of self-confidence.