Holly Kays photo
Season of Awakening
Heavy fog is lifting to a gorgeous mountain morning as I heft my bulging backpack to the rear of the 15-passenger van, greeting the women with whom I’ll be spending the next 36 hours.
There are four of them, two of whom I’ve gotten to know over the course of six years in the same small mountain town, and two who I’ve never met before. But we’re all going backpacking together, and I know what that means—by the end of the trip, we’ll all be friends.
I’m here for work, technically, doing a story about Outdoor Mission Community, the group organizing the outing. But it’s a picture-perfect weekday in late May with not a raindrop in the forecast, so I have other motives as well. On a day such as this, who wouldn’t want an excuse to turn off their cell phone and disappear into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for two days?
The wilderness welcomes us before we even leave the car, turkeys and turtles playing hide-and-seek amid the bright green leaves and high grasses of late May, wildflowers exploding splashes of color on the verdant background as we drive by.
We park, strap on our packs and venture into some get-to-know-you chitchat as we echo through the graffiti-covered tunnel that is the infamous Road to Nowhere, relic of the federal government’s broken promise at the park’s creation. Then the road ends, and the trail descends through a second tunnel, this one made of arcing mountain laurel in full bloom, limbs high enough to look more like trees than shrubs. Three miles later, the trail deposits us at the backcountry site where we’ll be spending the night.
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Holly Kays photo
Season of Awakening
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Holly Kays photo
Season of Awakening
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Holly Kays photo
Season of Awakening
It’s time to set up camp, a task that pushes us to the next phase of turning our loose group of outdoor enthusiasts into a team. Two of the other women are experienced backpackers, while the other two will be spending their first night in the backcountry. They’re both there with tents they’ve never used before, one borrowed and one new. Everybody pitches in to help with set-up, and to address the minor emergency that occurs when we discover that the new tent didn’t come with pegs. But between the five of us, we have plenty of extras—crisis averted.
It’s just before 3 p.m. when we finish, so with hours of daylight still at our disposal we decide to explore. It’s just a short walk to the shore of Fontana Lake, where we rouse a swirl of tiger swallowtail butterflies from the beach as we approach, snapping photos and dipping our fingers in the warm water. Reversing course, we decide to hike up Forney Creek Trail before looping back to prepare dinner.
I’m enjoying the walk, the wildflowers and the conversation when I hear a rattle to my right. Before I have time to take in the largest snake I’d ever seen outside a zoo, my instincts have me jumping back, giving the snake some space. We all stand there, wondering if this roadblock means an early turnaround, when the snake unfurls itself and slithers across the trail and then downhill, where he settles down to bask in a patch of sunlight.
As the shadows grow long, we return to camp for the best part of the day—dinner and a flickering campfire, its ever-changing beauty mirroring the conversation it inspires. Yesterday, half these women were strangers, and half were friends, though not close confidants. But a trail and a campfire were all we needed to change that. We’re all women, we all love the outdoors and it’s May 2021—we’ve all been through something real and life-changing over the past year. These commonalities plant an intrinsic trust between us, and it blooms before the glowing fire.
The blossoming continues even as a stranger wanders into our circle, a red-haired woman who’s in the midst of thru-hiking the Benton MacKaye Trail, a long-distance trail that shares its route with the trail that brought us here. She’s glad to see us, a friendly knot of women gathered around the only light in the darkening forest. For much of its length, the Benton MacKaye Trail is extremely remote—we’re the first people she’s seen in days, and she’s hungry for some community.
So am I. After the terror of March 2020, which leaked through the summer and gushed through the winter surge, spring felt like remembering how to breath again. Like waking up from a dream and reclaiming from the fog memories of the things that used to give me joy, before the world went crazy. As I sat around the campfire on a quickly cooling mountain evening, surrounded by the easy, inspiring company of like-minded women, the edges of those memories sharpened into a blissful, pleasant reality. The season of reawakening began.