The Bob Marshall Wilderness Open is 8 weeks away, so it’s time to start the specific period of my training regimen. This includes lots of mileage and elevation gain with a heavy pack to mimic the conditions I’ll be placing myself into over Memorial Day Weekend. I have time for 3 high mileage training trips, so I decided to head out to North Carolina to tick off a trail that had been on my to-do list for seven or eight years now, the Art Loeb. 30 miles long, with about 8,500 feet of gain over it’s length, I decided to yo-yo it over two days, as that would be similar to the hiking portion of the Bob Open. The more photographed portions of the Art Loeb are along open ridges, with miles of views that are rare outside of The West. Other portions of the trail are more typical of the Smokies, intimate and green. 

I arrived by car at the western trailhead, the Boy Scout camp, after dark and cowboy camped next to the car. At about 2:30 am I awoke to pee, and found that my bag was very dewy. I pulled my tarp out from under my legs and strung it over me in a lean-to configuration, tying it off to my car and pinning it to the ground using my boat and shoes. By the time my alarm sounded at 5:30, the bag had almost completely dried out. The temperature was about 45 degrees or so. I pulled my food out of my car and began packing up, hitting the trail by 6:30am in the darkness. The initial few miles follow the side of a mountain, climbing up to a respectable height to get to the top of a ridge, where the trail continues to stay almost exclusively for the rest of its length. I passed a group of sleeping backpackers shortly after sunrise, at the Cold Mountain turnoff trail. There had been plenty of water up until this point, but sources would soon begin to thin out. I carried 3 liters from the car, hoping that would be enough to get me to the Deep Gap shelter, the halfway point, where there is a dependable water source. 

“The Narrows,” as marked on the Pisgah Ranger District National Geographic map of the area, are an interesting cliffy ridgetop walk with a very braided trail that is often overgrown or closed in. There are small ledges for resting, and many little off-shoot trails that lead to views. There are several parallel trails through this area, which I suspect are all within 200 feet of each other. I often found myself realizing that I had been off the main trail as I rejoined it, a recurring theme of this hike. I began to check my GPS location in the CalTopo beta app on my phone every 10 or 15 minutes, or whenever I doubted I was on the right trail. One time it told me I needed to scramble up a brushy hillside to return to the main trail. The trail is not blazed inside of the Shining Rock Wilderness, and a GPS unit with an updated GPX track is almost mandatory here, unless you’re OK with being off the main trail frequently. 

For the purposes of self-assessment and training, I carried a 30 pound pack, as that is close to what I anticipate carrying in Montana. Including a packraft, pfd, paddle, and off-trail pack, it is a ridiculous weight for a trip like this, but it gave me a good idea of my current capabilities, which will be useful for planning. I arrived at Flower Gap at 9:50am. This section of the trail is the main highlight, all the way down to Black Balsam Knob Road. I passed half a hundred day hikers here.

I got to the Deep Gap Shelter at 2:25, an angular building on a platform that I would not wish to sleep in. These busy shelters always creep me out for some reason. Give me a tarp and a deserted area, please. I walked a hundred feet down to the obvious water source, and ate a snack while filling up my bladder and bottle. I had been out of water for about an hour, so I was happy to camel up before taking off. My Katadyn BeFree water filter has been performing very poorly of late, its filter rate slowing to a crawl, even after spending a full minute field cleaning it. It wants cleaned like this every liter or so, and that’s just not worth it. It’s only had less than 200 liters through it, and it’s almost useless now. It’s my second one, and they’ve both had this problem. I think I’m going to have to go back to Aqua Mira. The high today was about 65F; if it had been hotter, I would have had problems staying hydrated with how hard I needed to squeeze the bottle just to get a little water out of it. 

Near Butter Gap shelter I had a terrible time navigating. I had been checking GPS every 5 or 10 minutes due to uncertainty, and I noticed that the marked trail did not coincide with the line on my map, as it had for the entire trip. Doubting the markings, I doubled back to a six(!) way junction and tried three different options, but the only one that went the correct direction died out after about 10 minutes. After wasting an hour, I saw the Butter Gap shelter through the woods and just bushwhacked to it. Turns out, I should have just followed the sign, as the trail had been re-routed and no longer coincided with its position on the map. 

At 8:10pm it was getting too dark to hike without a headlamp. I had covered only 24 trail miles toward the 30 I wanted to get in that day. I started to slow down, and began to feel a little sick. Not knowing why, I decided to flip on the headlamp and continue for a little bit. I was able to do 3 more miles, increasingly slowly, before I was forced to stop for the night in a nice little trail-side site. Mile 27 on the trail, with 30 in the bank for the day due to my little navigation mishap. I quickly set up the tarp 3 miles short of my goal. After I forced myself to eat a Mountain House Macaroni and Cheese for dinner, I decided against hanging my food bag as I felt too bad to even stand up again to do it.  Bear canisters aren’t required where I slept, but it would have been safer to hang. I slept on top of it, glad that I had brought along the bear spray as training weight. I wasn’t sure why I felt so terrible, and didn’t know if I could continue on in the morning, but either way I would try to get some good sleep before deciding.

The next morning, I cooked a Mountain House breakfast and packed up quickly. I didn’t feel terrible anymore, and I decided to walk toward the end of the trail, away from my car, because I had already come so far and would hate to turn around ninety percent done. Sure enough, my body felt great in the morning. Awesome. I didn’t have any of the usual connective tissue pain that I usually have after a thirty mile day, due to my incessant training leading up to this trip. Lots and lots of fast 8 hour hikes, spaced every two weeks for many months. The final part of the trail descends toward the Davidson River and a campground, ending up on a gravel path. I took a quick picture at the eastern trailhead at 7:45am and immediately turned back around. I was behind schedule and was uncertain if I was going to be able to complete the trail in the planned two days, so I didn’t feel like celebrating. I grabbed another 2 liters of water at a small tributary of the Davidson, hopefully enough to last until the Butter Gap shelter in nine miles. I was also developing some pain in the front of my left knee, which flared up whenever I walked downhill. It wasn’t bad uphill, so I didn’t worry about it as I ascended back up into the mountains. I took some Ibuprofen as a precaution against inflammation though. 

The trail to Butter Gap shelter was mostly a trudge for me, as there were few views, and I couldn’t seem to get going much above two miles an hour. I was coming to grips with my left knee pain, which had me doing a slightly sideways walk whenever I moved downhill, leaning heavily on my trekking poles for support. I needed to rotate ibuprofen and Tylenol, taking one every ninety minutes, to keep the pain manageable. It worked though. I took two more liters of water and moved on toward Deep Gap shelter. It would take me a disappointing 3 hours and 15 minutes to cover the 6 miles between them. I was also running low on food. I had only brought 3500 calories a day, and hadn’t counted on the additional requirements that the elevation gain would cause. If I do this again, I’ll bring 4500-5000 per day. The lack of food was definitely causing my energy to flag. I took three liters of water at Deep Gap and ate a few meager morsels of what food I had left. I reveled in the glory of my last Cosmic Brownie, and ate it over the course of half and hour. Those things are great for my morale. 

I was hoping to finish the trip by nightfall, but now that didn’t seem possible. I adjusted my goal to 11pm, and sped up. But every time I looked at my distance, I hadn’t actually sped up. Still plodding along at two miles an hour. I’ll definitely need to find a way to speed up before the BMWO. I loved the breeze during the Black Balsam Knob open section, and passed quite a few more people near sunset there. I was able to see the sun set as I hiked through Flower Knob, which was pretty lucky. That boosted me a bit too, but then came the inevitable darkness. I hiked the final 6 miles or so slowed by darkness and lack of hustle. I needed to be cautious to keep my footing, and move slowly so that I wouldn’t get pulled off on one of the many confusing use trails. My Black Diamond Spot headlamp has a great feature that allows it to be quickly switched between two modes, so I set them to high power spotlight for finding the trail in the distance, and low power flood for walking along it and saving battery. Those last 6 miles took almost 4 hours, as my knee pain was no longer masked by the pain meds. I finished at 1:06am, 42.5 hours after I started. The barometer on my Fitbit said that I had gained 17,380 feet over the entire escapade. That is by far the most elevation I have ever gained, and on two consecutive 30 mile days, so I’m inclined to give myself a pass for my relatively slow speed. 

Gear List (note: lots of this stuff was in there to make the pack heavier for my training, not because it was necessary) 

Notes: The Nat Geo map is great for this trail. Bring a GPS unit and a relatively recent GPX track of someone who has hiked the actual trail, as you’ll need to refer to it frequently to make sure you’re on the right trail. Bear canisters are required if you’re camping in the Shining Rock Wilderness (the first 30% of the trail if you’re sobo/ebo). The water sources are almost all springs, and some exist where I wouldn’t have predicted based on the topo. Predictable water is found from the Boy Scout camp to just before the Cold Mountain turnoff, then at Deep Gap and Butter Gap shelters, and at the Davidson River. There were more sources, but I don’t know enough about their seasonality to recommend any of them. The northern half is significantly more scenic than the southern half, so concentrate there if you don’t want to do the whole thing.