Alex Hauck: Slickrock & Citico Wilderness Loop

Cherokee & Natahala National Forest
November 15 - 17, 2024

The Adventure:

I have been eyeing this one for a little while now and decided to take a Friday off from work to get it done. I knew it was going to be a hard one but was planning to take my time to see it all. That would not be the case due to several issues that you can read in the next section, and I ended up having to bail.

AllTrails lists this hike at around twenty-two miles with some off shoots to see both mountain views and a waterfall. I no longer trust AllTrails so I decided to plot it out in Garmin Explore that is still new to me. I had all the trails written out correctly in my notes but when I plotted the route on the app, I made a mistake that would be the big reason I finally decided to bail. This hike was my first at stringing quite a few trails together that would be weaving in and out of two different National Forests that added to the complexity of the route.

- Map of Hiking Area -

While the milage is not all that out of the realm for just a one-night two-day hike there is some profoundly serious elevation gain in sections. Another thing to account for is that National Forest trails are hardly maintained, so there will be obstacles to overcome along the route that will add to the time.

Thursday night and was tired. I got my food put together but instead of packing I decided to take it easy and relax a bit. I also slept in, packed up left however this did not put me on the trail until around 11:00 AM when I had planned to be on the trail around 7:30 AM – 8:00 AM. It was a very cool and overcast morning that gave the woods quite a Halloween / Lord of the Rings vibe, but the trail started out easy.

Then the elevation started, and it was a good workout hiking up to the ridge line. At about 5,000’ I was finally above the clouds and the sun peaked out. I stopped to have lunch to feel the sun, but if I only would have hiked on up for another minute, I could have had lunch at Straton Bald with a view to kill. Sometimes you win the lunch spot and sometimes you lose, and I lost this day.

At this point, the day was getting away from as I had planned to camp by the creek at a lower elevation. Because that was my plan, I did not take a lot of water up to the ridge line and was figuring on making up time on the downhill portion of the hike. This backfired as the downhill had extremely steep grades with wet slippery rocks and leaves that slowed my pace to a crawl. To make matters worse it was too steep and narrow to camp and there was not any water around. Finally, just before twilight was over there was a suitable campsite but I still had to face the fact that I was not going to have a water source. With only a half liter of water left I had to stop and camp. There was no way of dealing with the steepness and slick trail in the dark.

I had brought a steak to cook over the fire for the first night but that was not going to happen as without water around I did not really want to make a fire that I could not put out. I also did not want to use up the last of my water to warm up a dehydrated meal, so I snacked and went to bed.

Day two started out with an early departure, some great sunrise views, and the hope that I would hit the creek area soon for water. Again, the level ground went away, and it was slow going on steep grades and took me about two and a half hours to get to water. I stopped had a little fire, ate, and hydrated. Probably should not have taken the time for the fire but it felt good.

Here at the bottom things flattened out and hiking felt good, and my pace was up. I really wanted to camp along the creek relax and not have to worry about water on the ridge, as this was my plan for the first night, but felt that I needed to keep going as it would be too far to hike out the next day.

Just before the junction area of Big Stack Gap you can go up Slickrock Creek a little ways to Wildcat Falls, a beautiful little waterfall. I decided to take it as I missed the side trails yesterday and wanted to check it out. The trail is flat and beautiful with several good places to camp. I really wanted to camp here and will try to find time maybe next year starting at the North Slickrock Creek Trailhead and hiking down. This side adventure took time that caught up with me later.

Once back on my main route is where my navigational mistake became a problem. I start up the trail but when I check my route plot it kept showing me going the wrong way. After some back and forth I sat down and took out the good old paper map and realized what I had done. When plotting the route out on Explore I mistook the boarder line of the two forests as the trails. This was going to add five or more miles onto my hike. I realized here that I may not be able to make it back to the Jeep the next day.

The Garmin InReach Mini is one of the best outdoor investments I have ever made, and it was a good thing I had it with me today. I knew the trail I had to take would put me up on Foderstack and the Crowder Branch junction. Crowder Branch was only a two-and-a-half-mile hike, so I faced the situation and contacted my wife to pick me up at the Crowder Branch trailhead. I really wanted to complete this one, but it would have been too much especially after the climb I was getting ready to have and the lack of water on the ridge.

Getting to Crowder Branch was work and one of the hardest two miles of hiking in my life. Taking Big Stag Gap Branch was an extremely steep trail going from around 1,800’ up to 3,300’ in elevation in about a two-mile distance span. My pack weight, and lack of food was also starting to catch up with me and by the time I got to the top of the mountain I was just gassed. It felt so good rolling up to the little field along Crowder Branch and seeing I had it all to myself.

Got my shelter setup and I wanted to make a fire so bad, but just did not have the energy. I made dinner and then had some tea with a lemon poppy seed bar before rolling up in my sleeping bag. This turned out to be one of the worse sleeps I have had solo in the backcountry. I could not shut my brain off while I kept dozing then waking up with a start. It also seemed that my heartrate would not go down to a resting level.

I am sure this was due to all the hard hiking I was doing along with not enough food and being dehydrated. I finally had to concentrate on taking deep slow breaths and finally worked my way to sleep. After some decent rest I woke with a more clear head and filtered some water out of the mountain spring, made breakfast, packed up and headed down trail to meet the lovely wife.

This trip, however, was not done with me. Crowder Branch trail was in some really bad shape this time around with more downed trees than I could count. I climbed, crawled, and army crawled my way down the trail. Finally after about two and half hours I cam out at the trailhead.

This trip has made me really think and evaluate my methods. If I want to do more of these longer hikes I am really going to have to rethink how I backpack and become more focus on the “Type of” hike I am wanting to do.

The blue trackway is how this hike ended up. Note I did fix the actual hiking route in red to the correct trail route.

What Went Wrong:

So, why did I fail on my intended route? Well, there are a few reasons for this happening. First, I do this more often than I would like to admit, but I underestimated the difficulty of National Forest trails. National Forest trails are not like National and State Park trails that are routinely cleared and maintained. These trails are overgrown, have many fallen trees, and a lot of the lessor used trails are almost non-existent. The amount of time it takes to navigate not only the obstacles, but also just staying on the intended trail is a lot and something I forgot to factor in.

I am getting to the point in my hiking career, as it were, where I am going to have to start defining my objective of the overall hike. For instance, I am going to take my time and smell the roses, will it be more of a bushcraft camping trip, or am I going to cover a lot of miles? Right now, I am trying to combine all three and that is causing timing and packing issues. This hike was clearly putting on the miles and I should have treated it as such.

I need to start double checking my route planning to make sure I know the trails and junctions I need along with some different routes if I need to shorten the hike. AllTrails has failed me so many times I no longer trust just it when I am hiking and am moving towards Garmin Explore. The problem on this occasion was when I moved my list of trails from the paper map that I wrote down I mistook the boarder of the two forests as the trail I needed. As you read from above in the end cost me the hike.

The night before the hike I was tired, so I decided to relax the night before instead of packing and getting everything set up. That of course caused me to leave later than expected, which forced me to camp on the ridge, without water, instead of by the creek. It also put me behind schedule as I was planning on a 6-mile hike out on the third day.

Day two was when I ran into my navigation mix up and I wasted a lot of time looking for a trail that was not there. Finally, I pulled out my paper map and realized the gravity of the mistake. This also caused me to run into another issue of being short on water. That eventually led to my decision to camp at Crowder Branch and have my wife meet me at that trailhead for the pickup.

Thankfully, I had a Garmin InReach Mini so I could schedule that, or I would have had to have a 10 plus mile hike back to the car. As slow as I was moving who knew how long that would take. It would have been late and with little to no water. This was a good lesson for me on future adventures.