Middle Prong Wilderness, NC - September 2003 - Okay, this trip to the Middle Prong (Google
Map) was an eventful trip. We hiked in to a bald and pitched camp. Tracy left her backpack at
the camp, and then we kept on hiking down the trail. After about 30 minutes, it started pouring
down rain (as always in the Middle Prong...), so we decided to head back to the camp. An
hour later, I couldn't figure out where we had gone wrong, as we were still trying to find the
camp. The rain was torrential and it was starting to lightning...and we were on top of clear
mountains. Now, I had marked the trailhead in my GPS when we started hiking, but I hadn't
marked the camp site. Yeah, I know... Now, I had looked at my paper map while at the camp
site, so I knew where we had camped on that map. However, I couldn't pull out that map, now,
because it was raining too hard and we didn't have any shelter. It also wouldn't have helped,
because the cloud cover was actually below us, so I couldn't see any mountains to use as
landmarks to get my bearings with the compass. I had the GPS, but it only told me where the
car was...and it was on the other side of a river valley that was 2500 feet of elevation down,
and 2500 feet of elevation straight back up again. Well, I really felt that I knew where camp
was...after all, I have a great sense of direction. So we kept hiking in the direction I thought we
needed to go. After another 30 minutes, the lightning was getting worse, it was still pouring
rain, it was getting cold, and we only had 40 minutes of daylight...I was getting worried. We
had enough dry stuff for one of us to make it through the night without hypothermia...I was
pretty sure. However, there were two of us...I was getting worried. So I sat down with my GPS
and decided to try my luck with finding the camp on the GPS topo map. With lightning dancing
literally all around me, I found the trailhead on the GPS, and then I found the creek we had
crossed, and then I found the ridge I thought we had climbed, and then I found the spur I
thought we had camped on (of course, the trail wasn't mapped). So I guessed. I made my
best guess, and marked that point, and told the GPS to take me there. I expected the arrow to
point forward and say that I was 100 yards short of the camp. Instead, the arrow pointed
behind me, and said I was 1 mile away from the camp. I decided to trust my map reading skills
over my sense of direction, and I followed the GPS. We pretty much ran, because we had a
mile to cover in 40 minutes before dark, assuming the GPS was right. When the GPS beeped
and said I had arrived at the spot, I looked up, and the tent was 30 feet ahead of me. Man,
that was close. We made it with 15 minutes of daylight. But we did make it. If we hadn't made
it, I was going to try for the car. It would have been really tough in the dark, though, and I
knew the smart thing to do was to get off the mountain and dry to build shelter for the night.
But, man, that was a scary option. But after all that backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, and
the closest I ever came to getting bad lost was in North Carolina. The next morning I found the
side trail that I had missed the day before that had sent me in a circle. And I also learned to
ALWAYS mark the camp site along with the trailhead. On the plus side, the rain let up when
we got back to camp, and God gave us a nice double rainbow and a great sunset for our
troubles!