My soul yearns for the woods. A vital part of me becomes malnourished when I stay outside of the tree line for too long. When I was a child, my family lived at the edge of hundreds of acres of undeveloped, wooded land, and I spent many boyhood afternoons venturing into its quiet, unexplored places. Even after living there for several years, I retained a delightful sense of wonder at the large, seemingly unowned tract of forest that bordered my backyard. We moved away from those woods when I was 13, and I’ve never again had access to such a wonderfully convenient wilderness. Now, if I want to venture into the wild, I have to drive there.
In the same year that we moved, I took my first backpacking trip. I went with a school group to the Cohutta Wilderness on the border of Tennessee and Georgia. It was, and is, a remote place, accessible only by driving many miles of dirt roads maintained by the Forest Service. I don’t remember exactly where we hiked, because there are many miles of trails within that wilderness, but I remember the empowering sense of carrying all that I needed for a two day journey on my back. I also remember a persistent, drenching rain that did nothing to quench my enthusiasm for getting back into the woods.
I had many opportunities to explore the mountainous forests of Tennessee and Georgia during my teenage years. My greatest outdoor experience was traveling to the Philmont Scout Reservation in New Mexico where I spent two weeks hiking through some of this country’s grandest and most pristine wilderness. I owe a debt of gratitude to my Boy Scout leader, Dr. Barry Ligon, who was active and engaged in passing on his passion for the outdoors. Due to these many experiences and influences, I was infected in my youth with a longing for primitive, isolated places.
One of my most memorable backpacking experiences took place during spring break of my senior year of high school. While others in my class were taking trips to the beach or Spain, my good friend Bivins and I loaded my van with gear for an excursion to the Cohutta Wilderness. By then I had hiked the Cohutta Wilderness at least four other times, and had a wealth of backpacking experience under my belt for a 17 year old. But as much as I loved the woods, I lacked respect for its dangers.
It had been a warm spring. Bivins and I were both soccer players, and had already sweat through weeks of practices in warm weather. Winter seemed long past, and it never crossed my mind to check weather forecasts. I had a Camp Trails exterior frame pack that had served me well over hundreds of miles of trails, a high-tech (for 1987) cold weather sleeping bag, and a compact and reliable Coleman backpacking stove. I wore shorts and a t-shirt, and packed a cotton hooded sweatshirt and a pair of blue jeans for the cooler evenings. Even 22 years ago I knew that cotton was a poor fabric for outdoor excursions, but I was convinced that cold weather was behind us.
We drove to the trailhead over the seemingly endless Forest Service road, which includes a shallow ford over a creek. I’ve experienced much greater isolation in the American west, but the Cohutta Wilderness is about as remote as a man can get east of the Mississippi. The isolation was at once exhilarating and sobering. It was the first time I’d ventured that far into the woods without a grown up. But I would be graduating soon, and I was beginning to feel like more of a man than I really was.

As Bivins and I began our walk into the wilderness, it started to rain. The body produces a lot of heat while climbing mountains and carrying 35 pounds, but in the midst of my exertion I sensed the temperature dropping significantly. We stopped to put on more clothes, and the rain showed no signs of letting up. The temperature kept dropping.
At some point along the way, we decided to stop before conditions worsened. It’s a miserable thing to set up camp in a hard rain because nothing escapes the moisture or the mud. We managed to erect the tent and left our filthy boots and soaked gear outside. I don’t remember what we did for dinner, but I do remember shivering in my bag while the noisy patter of raindrops gave way to the gentle sound of accumulating snow.
When I woke, the forest was strangely quiet. A blanket of snow muffled the normally cacophonous waking sounds of the woods. I peeked outside the tent and found the crystallized forest both beautiful and alarming. It was brutally cold.
We lay in our sleeping bags and weighed our options. We could either stay there until help came or the temperature rose, or we could try and hike out. The problem with waiting was that we were cold and getting colder, and had no way of knowing how long we would have to wait. I’d learned that hypothermia can set in at temperatures much warmer than we were experiencing. But the inherent problem with hiking out was that it involved our emerging from our dry sleeping bags and venturing outside with nothing but thin, damp cotton to guard against the cold and increasing wind, and we were miles from the van. As a first step, we decided to try and start a fire.
One challenge was that our boots, which we’d left outside the night before, were frozen solid. We couldn’t pull them on our feet. Consequently, we had to walk through the snow in our stocking feet while we gathered wood for the fire.
Boy Scouts are trained to start a fire with no more than two matches, but that can be challenging under ordinary circumstances. When all of the wood is covered in snow and the tinder is encased in ice, it’s nearly impossible. After just a few minutes of stumbling around in the snow in our stocking feet and aborted attempts at starting a fire, we were both shivering uncontrollably, and my fingers had essentially stopped functioning. Bivins had a pair of gloves, but they quickly got wet and lost their effectiveness. At one point, we poured a fair amount of my stove fuel onto some wood, but burning fuel did little more than melt the ice encasing the wood. We finally surrendered and went back to the tent and our sleeping bags. Once ensconced in the tent, which was no longer warm because our bodies hadn’t been heating it, I realized that I had dropped the matches in the snow because of my numb fingers.
My sleeping bag was better than Bivins’ bag, which was better suited to basement sleepovers than spring trips to the mountains, and Bivins was suffering more than I was. Bivins suggested that we share my bag, and that’s exactly what I had been trained to do in such situations, but my squeamishness and selfishness overruled my training. So we lay there, glum and shivering. In a short while, panic started to set in as I reflected on how remote we were, how unlikely it was that we’d be discovered, and how ill-prepared we were for the conditions. I was content to lie there waiting for an uncertain rescue, because it was just too cold to risk going outside again.
Bivins proved to be the better man that day. Unwilling to accept a passive death, he left the tent to search for the matches, risking frostbite as he dug through the snow. He eventually found them and crawled back into the tent. We brought my backpacking stove into the tent and started it (kids, don’t try that at home, it’s dangerous), both to warm our bodies and to thaw out our boots so that we could pull them on and walk through the snow. We kept the flaps open slightly to guard against carbon monoxide poisoning, but the cold wind kept us from keeping them as wide open as we should have. After warming our hands over the stove, and thawing our boots to the point where they were soft enough to pull them onto our feet, we plotted our exit on the trail map.
As we packed and began the trek out, the wind sliced through my light clothing and chilled me to the core. We stopped occasionally to start the stove, warm our hands and check the map. Even starting the stove proved to be a challenge because my fingers were so cold that I couldn’t easily open the zippers on my pack, pump the stove, or strike matches. When we didn’t use the stove, I had to unfold the map with the heels of my hands and my mouth because my fingers were useless. I swore I’d never complain about being hot again.
After hours of walking, we caught sight of my blue van through the trees. I fumbled through the side pocket on my pack, hoping that I hadn’t lost my keys and praying that my semi-reliable van would start in such cold temperatures. I found my keys, and the van started on the first try. We were home within three hours, and once we were fed and warm it was hard to believe we’d ever been in danger.
A couple of days after our return, my parents (who were living out west at the time) called to tell me that a family friend of ours had taken his spring break that same week at the beach in Oregon. He and some friends had rented rafts and gone too far out into the chilly Pacific. A Coast Guard helicopter ultimately plucked them from the waves, but not before our friend died of hypothermia. He was about my age, a freshman in college. I’m sure that he felt no less immortal than I did as he set out on his adventure that day. Upon hearing that story, I began to appreciate how fortunate we’d been to escape our blunders without harm.
An amusing side note to the story is that while Bivins and I were walking through the woods and unsure as to whether we’d make it safely to the van, I was struck with profound regret that I’d never expressed my true feelings to my high school crush. The same day we returned, and well before I’d had time to think clearly, I penned a lengthy and eloquent letter in which I expressed my undying love for this unsuspecting girl. I stamped it and dropped it in the mail box at the post office, resolved to render my decision irreversible before I could have second thoughts. By the time school began on the following Monday, I’d had plenty of time to re-think my letter, but no ability to pull it back. She sat next to me in home room Monday morning and said nothing. She said nothing Tuesday, and nothing the day after that. I finally called to solicit some sort of response, and she kindly told me that my letter was well written, but she said nothing more, which told me all I needed to know.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons on that trip. First, never enter the woods unprepared. Second, a calm and steady mind can make the difference between surviving or not ( I don’t know what would have happened if Bivins hadn’t mustered the clear-thinking resolve to dig through the snow for those matches and pull out the stove). Third, never express your love for someone on impulse. I have to admit that I had to suffer a few more romantic pratfalls before that last lesson really stuck.
I plan to go to the Cohutta Wilderness again this weekend, about the same time of year that my story took place. It will be my first time back since my adventure with Bivins 22 years ago. This time I’ll be equipped with multiple layers of synthetic clothing, a waterproof shell, a warm hat, gloves, and at least two sets of hurricane matches. But just as important as the stuff, I like to think that I’ll be equipped with a steadier mind and more substantial character. I was embarrassed by the tremendous immaturity that I displayed on that trip so long ago, and I emerged from it determined to become a better man. I think that my yearning for the woods stems, in part, from a desire to test whether I’ve succeeded in that quest.