~C. JoyBell C.~
I awoke Monday morning not quite ready to travel for the hills of West By God..........I was fleeing for what I thought were saner times hidden deep in the depths of The Gauley. First I needed to transport a lot of equipment from The Island back to my car. This included a play boat that I initially left behind until the last equipment run. I knew the water was low enough for an easy swim across a hidden channel, so I planned to use the kayak to float a large portion of gear across the channel, and then attach a rope system to drag everything through the forest, down the train bridge, and up the trail. The plan was exhausting and took the better half of two hours, but it worked well and I found myself ready to hit the road before noon. About the time I had finished tying my boat off I noticed a homeless friend of mine parked across the lot from me, so I went to say hello. He was happy to see me, and we traded stories with each other, caught up, and went our separate ways. I found it very symbolic that the last person I saw in RVA was one of the forgotten, a homeless man who just drifted through time, and through the streets of our city.
My drive to West By God was slow and steady. I stopped many times along the way at different points of interest that had gathered memories over the years. Overlooks, coffee shops, truck stops (White's), some creeks, Bath County, rock climbing spots, etc. Each stop surfaced a different memory and a different emotion from throughout the course of my life. It amazes me how many memories the mountains of Virginia hold. Most of my life has been spent exploring these places, from Charlottesville to Harrisonburg, Roanoke to Staunton, and every creek, trail, and lookout imaginable. They hold a lifetime of memories, and I knew this trip had a purpose that was far greater than any trip I had ever taken..........this trip was the difference between the same future and a new beginning.
I arrived at The Cabin around sun set, unloaded the car, and passed out hard on the couch. I knew that I had nothing but time on my hands now, so a good sleep was exactly the way to start off a week in West By God. After all, people come here to rest, to hide, to stop time............they come here for a time out in life. Some just never leave. I had to figure out where I stood in that equation.........but for the time being, my time had stopped. I just needed to make a choice about when to let it begin again.
"In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."
~Malcolm X~
I awoke the next morning to grey West Virginia skies, and a clear head from a good nights sleep. I cooked some oatmeal, geared up, and headed out the door. From where I was, I knew that I could access the Meadow Gorge and the second half of The Upper Gauley rather easily. My plan was simply to hike out the front door and head for the rivah. I passed a few houses along the way and a nice couple directed me to the end of the road. Where I live is considered the end of the road. All of the roads just peter out into dirt, and begin to drop quickly towards the river in a dramatic fall from the plateau to the river bottom. The trail began to slope downwards, and within a matter of 100 yards you realize you just dropped over the gorge rim. Everything becomes steep, overgrown, thick, wet, boulder strewn waste lands. West Virginia also spent the spring and summer fighting a high number of Derechos. For those of you not familiar with a Derecho, here is a quick lesson...............
A Derecho is a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a land-based, fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms. Derechos can carry hurricanic or tornadic force and can deliver torrential rains and perhaps flash floods as well as strong winds. Winds convection-induced take on a bow echo (backward "C") form of squall line, forming in an area of wind divergence in upper levels of the troposphere, within a region of low-level warm air advection and rich low-level moisture. They travel quickly in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to an outflow boundary (gust front), except that the wind is sustained and increases in strength behind the front, generally exceeding hurricane-force. A warm-weather phenomenon, derechos occur mostly in summer, especially during June and July in the Northern Hemisphere, within areas of moderately strong instability and moderately strong vertical wind shear. They may occur at any time of the year and occur as frequently at night as during the daylight hours.
Hope everyone got all that. Weather is fascinating, and the gorge walls of West Virginia provide perfect vertical wind shear from the oncoming storm fronts to produce Derecho's. Unfortunately the phenomenon takes fifty year old trees and piles them up like tooth picks ten deep directly on top of the trails. After about a quarter of a mile of climbing up, over, through, and under giant tree piles, I said fuck it, and cut directly down the gorge walls, instead of following the switch back trail to the rivah trail................This was not the best idea. I immediately ran into thick groves of the worst stinging nettles I had ever encountered. For those of you who haven't encountered stinging nettles, they suck. They make your legs and arms itch and sting, just enough to bug the shit out of you. They do not leave any left over effects, but stick with you for a few hours after encountering them. I crawled through about 500 yards of stinging nettles, and rock slides that, well, sucked! Remember, I have never gotten poison ivy and don't think I am allergic to it. Finally I popped out on a small, gravel, four wheeler road that was big enough to drive a four wheel drive truck on.........at least where I was that is. (That four wheel drive road comes back into play later in our story)
My conclusion from this initial experience was simple............Derecho's and Stinging Nettles suck, and there are plenty of other ways to access the rivah. I would not be taking that path ever again.
The four wheeler trail was about 100 yards above the rivah, and I realized I was close to Tumble Home. There is a nice tributary on the rivah left side of Tumblehome, and it allows easy access from the four wheeler trail. I rock hopped my way to rivah level and popped out at Tumblehome and to a Gauley running around 500cfs. The Meadow River is a major tributary of The Gauley, but it was running low and The Gauley was on a no release day. This made for very low conditions but gave great views of all the undercuts and nastiness the Gauley has to offer. I sat down on the rocks, pulled out a snack, and enjoyed the view.
While there I reviewed the path that I took and pulled out the topo map to get a better feel for the terrain. This may seem like a simple thing to do when exploring a new area, but it's value is priceless. Allowing my brain to connect the physical elements that I encountered with a map of the area is a great way to explore mental mapping. While reading Bending the Map, a short story by Laurence Gonzales about a man who becomes lost in the Colorado Wilderness, I educated myself on a natural instinct we already practice, mental mapping. Since we have already learned about Derecho's tonight, let's have a lesson on Mental Mapping (this way all the Gen Y crew will lose interest and miss the good stuff)........................
"Recent research in neuroscience has shed some light on how people navigate. The way we know where we are is complex, as are the parts of the brain we use - the hippocampus and it's components parts (such as the subiculum, the intorhinal cortex, and CA-3 and CA-1 formations.) Joseph Deluxe calls the hippocampus "a spatial cognition machine." Neuroscientists have described how the brain creates mental maps of the environment. Early research with rats in the 1970's by John O'Keefe at McGill University, among others, provided the first neurophysiological evidence that the hippocampus creates"a spatial reference map" in the brain. In addition, there are cells that fire depending on the position of the head and others that track the position of the whole body or it's parts. Still other cells fire only when traveling in one direction.
O'Keefe more or less accidentally found what he called "place cells" in the rat hippocampus. Place cells are individual neurons that get mapped to fire when the animal is at a specific place. Normally, hippocampal cells fire perhaps only once every second on average. But at the mapped place, they fire hundreds of times faster. In tests with monkeys at the University of Oxford, cells were found that fired only when the animal was looking at a certain view. A single cell can map more than one place.
So there is an elaborate system involving the hippocampus and other areas of the brain for creating an analog of the world and your motion, position, and direction of travel within it. It works in concert with other systems to locate you in your mind."
"Bending The Map" Lawerence Gonzales
Did you get all that? Pretty cool, isn't it? I tried to remain aware of the mental map my mind was creating as I continued to explore the area, but trust me when I say that trying to concentrate on your own mind creating a mental map while it is actually happening will literally drive you insane.
After giving up on controlling my own mind, I decided to hike the four wheeler road down river past Iron Ring and on to Sweets Falls. Iron Ring is pretty ugly looking with no water in the river, with a big ole' undercut on rivah right, and a nice sieve in the middle of the rapid. Even running it at 500 cfs would be sketchy, because it is steep at low water. Sweets Falls just looks like a giant pour over horseshoe hole at low water, but the lines are easy. I rested and ate again at Sweets while looking at the map to scout out a route home.
I had two choices. I could hike back up river to the road and then turn up The Meadow, or I could make things interesting. My ADHD kept telling me to traverse straight up the creek that entered the rivah at Sweets..........so, like every good mistake I make, I trusted my ADHD. The climb up the creek takes you up about 1700 feet in a half mile. I knew at some point it would get steep, which can be tricky, but I had done this exact same thing in WNC hundreds of times before. I started to climb straight up the middle of the creek, but started to zig zag from one side to the other based on where the waterfalls cliffed out. I have found that most of the time only one side of a waterfall will have a cliffed out section, and usually you can find a climbing route up the none steep side. After traversing and zig zagging three of four times, a broke off from the creek and started heading through the woods when the steepness lessened. It is important to remember that trail blazing West Virginia river canyons is not something I am overly experienced at, so all the Outdoor Yuppies reading this can kiss my ass if I am doing something wrong. I was well aware that I had left the cabin telling no one, with no clear plan, and was now in the middle of a bear infested forest traversing waterfalls alone with only one days worth of food and water, no headlamp, and no whistle. One fall and I would have been done. I'm cool with all that. I didn't really care. Besides, I have my mental map to guide me.....................
"Admitting that you are lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self. It's impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place. That's why small children, when asked if they are lost, will say, "No. My mommy is lost." The sense is; I'm not lost. I'm right here. But without a mental map, the organism can't go about it's business and rapidly deteriorates. So to [a lost hiker] it seemed that he wasn't lost. [His destination] was lost. It had to be just around the corner somewhere. Then everything would be all right.............
................If things get progressively more unfamiliar and mixed up, [the victim] may then develop a feeling of vertigo, the trees and slopes seem to be closing in and a feeling of claustrophobia compels them to try to 'break out'. This is the point when running or frantic scrambling may occur, as the organism frantically attempts to get a fix on an alien environment."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
On second thought, maybe I didn't have my mental map to guide me....................but I did have a real map, a good feel for the land around me, a general direction to travel, and a lot of gun tottin' West Virginia Hillbillies just waitin' to shoot the shit out of me for any reason that validated a "legal killin'"............which is not that promising. I figured if I fell into this scenario, I would use a combination of my "social skills", bartering of safety gear, and my Redneck Training from the Bristol races to overcome the hillbillies.........then I would drink moonshine and shoot some animals with them until the sun came up........At least, that was my plan.
Once on the rim of the gorge I started following the landscape back up rivah through the forest. At this point I figured I was probably lost, but that was kind of the point in the first place, so I just went with it, testing the theories of Gonzales and "Bending The Map".............................
"In daily life, people operate on the necessary illusion that they know where they are. Most of the time, they don't. The only time people are not lost to some degree is when they are at home. (ouch............that one stung a little) It is quite possible to know the route from one place to another without knowing precisely where you are............Nevertheless, most people normally have enough route knowledge to get them where they are going. If they don't, they get lost.....................
.........................People have known for ages that going from the protection of society into the wild can have a profound effect on the balance of reason and emotion. It can induce altered states of consciousness, hallucinations, even death. The word "bewildered" comes from the archaic verb "wilder". To "wilder" someone means to lead them into the woods and get him lost."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
At this point I found the gorge rim again and realized that I was not going to get lost where I was. My mental map was well developed, I had done this a hundred times before, I was fit, properly equipped for the day, and I lived on a freakin' island for five months. This was a walk in the park...............that is when I started letting my mind wander and realized that I was not testing my physical skills in the forest. I wasn't lost in the woods. I always knew where I was.................I was lost in life, and The Island represented a lot more than a place that I lived for the past five months.............It was an island. I couldn't get lost there, even if I didn't know every corner of the rock. It represented my life perfectly. As long as I stayed on The Island, I would never be lost again. Now I was in West By God. It was big, it was scary, and I was alone. I could get lost here.
At this point Gonzales dropped the one piece of knowledge on me that I never saw coming, and it was one heavy piece of reality to have to swallow...........................
"Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion. There is always a destructive synergy among numerous factors, including exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia, anxiety, hunger, injury. So woods shock (the fear associated with complete loss of spacial orientation), led [the lost hiker] to frantic, poorly planned actions. Those stresses and actions incapacitated him even further in a tightening spiral until reason and emotion, instead of working in harmony to produce correct action, became like two drowning swimmers, dragging each other down.
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life. People know that instinctively. A man leaves a perfectly good family for a woman half his age and makes a mess of it, and people say, he got off the path; he lost his way. If he doesn't get back on, he'll lose the self, too."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
...................................BOOM! Knock out punch, and it hurt.........badly. I mean, WTF!............seriously. Out of all the examples in all the world that you could use to demonstrate the relationship between being lost in the woods and lost in life, and you pick that one. Did I mention that I don't believe in coincidences, so needless to say, I took it hard......real hard, and I didn't see it coming, which made it even worse.
I staggered back to the cabin through the woods for about an hour, and discovered some rather interesting West Virginia sights...............two deer stands, a bunch of shattered Mason Jars, some big metal bins, a bunch of plastic buckets, some copper piping, and an old furnace..............did I mention the gun tottin' West Virginia hillbillies waiting to shoot the shit out of me for anything that validated a "legal killin".............yep. Stay tuned, because this shit is about to get real!
"Buckle up ladies. This might get excitin'!"
~Bo Duke "The Dukes of Hazzard"~
See ya on the rivah................hopefully not stubblin' upon a still. PEACE
Hope everyone got all that. Weather is fascinating, and the gorge walls of West Virginia provide perfect vertical wind shear from the oncoming storm fronts to produce Derecho's. Unfortunately the phenomenon takes fifty year old trees and piles them up like tooth picks ten deep directly on top of the trails. After about a quarter of a mile of climbing up, over, through, and under giant tree piles, I said fuck it, and cut directly down the gorge walls, instead of following the switch back trail to the rivah trail................This was not the best idea. I immediately ran into thick groves of the worst stinging nettles I had ever encountered. For those of you who haven't encountered stinging nettles, they suck. They make your legs and arms itch and sting, just enough to bug the shit out of you. They do not leave any left over effects, but stick with you for a few hours after encountering them. I crawled through about 500 yards of stinging nettles, and rock slides that, well, sucked! Remember, I have never gotten poison ivy and don't think I am allergic to it. Finally I popped out on a small, gravel, four wheeler road that was big enough to drive a four wheel drive truck on.........at least where I was that is. (That four wheel drive road comes back into play later in our story)
My conclusion from this initial experience was simple............Derecho's and Stinging Nettles suck, and there are plenty of other ways to access the rivah. I would not be taking that path ever again.
The four wheeler trail was about 100 yards above the rivah, and I realized I was close to Tumble Home. There is a nice tributary on the rivah left side of Tumblehome, and it allows easy access from the four wheeler trail. I rock hopped my way to rivah level and popped out at Tumblehome and to a Gauley running around 500cfs. The Meadow River is a major tributary of The Gauley, but it was running low and The Gauley was on a no release day. This made for very low conditions but gave great views of all the undercuts and nastiness the Gauley has to offer. I sat down on the rocks, pulled out a snack, and enjoyed the view.
While there I reviewed the path that I took and pulled out the topo map to get a better feel for the terrain. This may seem like a simple thing to do when exploring a new area, but it's value is priceless. Allowing my brain to connect the physical elements that I encountered with a map of the area is a great way to explore mental mapping. While reading Bending the Map, a short story by Laurence Gonzales about a man who becomes lost in the Colorado Wilderness, I educated myself on a natural instinct we already practice, mental mapping. Since we have already learned about Derecho's tonight, let's have a lesson on Mental Mapping (this way all the Gen Y crew will lose interest and miss the good stuff)........................
"Recent research in neuroscience has shed some light on how people navigate. The way we know where we are is complex, as are the parts of the brain we use - the hippocampus and it's components parts (such as the subiculum, the intorhinal cortex, and CA-3 and CA-1 formations.) Joseph Deluxe calls the hippocampus "a spatial cognition machine." Neuroscientists have described how the brain creates mental maps of the environment. Early research with rats in the 1970's by John O'Keefe at McGill University, among others, provided the first neurophysiological evidence that the hippocampus creates"a spatial reference map" in the brain. In addition, there are cells that fire depending on the position of the head and others that track the position of the whole body or it's parts. Still other cells fire only when traveling in one direction.
O'Keefe more or less accidentally found what he called "place cells" in the rat hippocampus. Place cells are individual neurons that get mapped to fire when the animal is at a specific place. Normally, hippocampal cells fire perhaps only once every second on average. But at the mapped place, they fire hundreds of times faster. In tests with monkeys at the University of Oxford, cells were found that fired only when the animal was looking at a certain view. A single cell can map more than one place.
So there is an elaborate system involving the hippocampus and other areas of the brain for creating an analog of the world and your motion, position, and direction of travel within it. It works in concert with other systems to locate you in your mind."
"Bending The Map" Lawerence Gonzales
Did you get all that? Pretty cool, isn't it? I tried to remain aware of the mental map my mind was creating as I continued to explore the area, but trust me when I say that trying to concentrate on your own mind creating a mental map while it is actually happening will literally drive you insane.
After giving up on controlling my own mind, I decided to hike the four wheeler road down river past Iron Ring and on to Sweets Falls. Iron Ring is pretty ugly looking with no water in the river, with a big ole' undercut on rivah right, and a nice sieve in the middle of the rapid. Even running it at 500 cfs would be sketchy, because it is steep at low water. Sweets Falls just looks like a giant pour over horseshoe hole at low water, but the lines are easy. I rested and ate again at Sweets while looking at the map to scout out a route home.
I had two choices. I could hike back up river to the road and then turn up The Meadow, or I could make things interesting. My ADHD kept telling me to traverse straight up the creek that entered the rivah at Sweets..........so, like every good mistake I make, I trusted my ADHD. The climb up the creek takes you up about 1700 feet in a half mile. I knew at some point it would get steep, which can be tricky, but I had done this exact same thing in WNC hundreds of times before. I started to climb straight up the middle of the creek, but started to zig zag from one side to the other based on where the waterfalls cliffed out. I have found that most of the time only one side of a waterfall will have a cliffed out section, and usually you can find a climbing route up the none steep side. After traversing and zig zagging three of four times, a broke off from the creek and started heading through the woods when the steepness lessened. It is important to remember that trail blazing West Virginia river canyons is not something I am overly experienced at, so all the Outdoor Yuppies reading this can kiss my ass if I am doing something wrong. I was well aware that I had left the cabin telling no one, with no clear plan, and was now in the middle of a bear infested forest traversing waterfalls alone with only one days worth of food and water, no headlamp, and no whistle. One fall and I would have been done. I'm cool with all that. I didn't really care. Besides, I have my mental map to guide me.....................
"Admitting that you are lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self. It's impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place. That's why small children, when asked if they are lost, will say, "No. My mommy is lost." The sense is; I'm not lost. I'm right here. But without a mental map, the organism can't go about it's business and rapidly deteriorates. So to [a lost hiker] it seemed that he wasn't lost. [His destination] was lost. It had to be just around the corner somewhere. Then everything would be all right.............
................If things get progressively more unfamiliar and mixed up, [the victim] may then develop a feeling of vertigo, the trees and slopes seem to be closing in and a feeling of claustrophobia compels them to try to 'break out'. This is the point when running or frantic scrambling may occur, as the organism frantically attempts to get a fix on an alien environment."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
On second thought, maybe I didn't have my mental map to guide me....................but I did have a real map, a good feel for the land around me, a general direction to travel, and a lot of gun tottin' West Virginia Hillbillies just waitin' to shoot the shit out of me for any reason that validated a "legal killin'"............which is not that promising. I figured if I fell into this scenario, I would use a combination of my "social skills", bartering of safety gear, and my Redneck Training from the Bristol races to overcome the hillbillies.........then I would drink moonshine and shoot some animals with them until the sun came up........At least, that was my plan.
Once on the rim of the gorge I started following the landscape back up rivah through the forest. At this point I figured I was probably lost, but that was kind of the point in the first place, so I just went with it, testing the theories of Gonzales and "Bending The Map".............................
"In daily life, people operate on the necessary illusion that they know where they are. Most of the time, they don't. The only time people are not lost to some degree is when they are at home. (ouch............that one stung a little) It is quite possible to know the route from one place to another without knowing precisely where you are............Nevertheless, most people normally have enough route knowledge to get them where they are going. If they don't, they get lost.....................
.........................People have known for ages that going from the protection of society into the wild can have a profound effect on the balance of reason and emotion. It can induce altered states of consciousness, hallucinations, even death. The word "bewildered" comes from the archaic verb "wilder". To "wilder" someone means to lead them into the woods and get him lost."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
At this point I found the gorge rim again and realized that I was not going to get lost where I was. My mental map was well developed, I had done this a hundred times before, I was fit, properly equipped for the day, and I lived on a freakin' island for five months. This was a walk in the park...............that is when I started letting my mind wander and realized that I was not testing my physical skills in the forest. I wasn't lost in the woods. I always knew where I was.................I was lost in life, and The Island represented a lot more than a place that I lived for the past five months.............It was an island. I couldn't get lost there, even if I didn't know every corner of the rock. It represented my life perfectly. As long as I stayed on The Island, I would never be lost again. Now I was in West By God. It was big, it was scary, and I was alone. I could get lost here.
At this point Gonzales dropped the one piece of knowledge on me that I never saw coming, and it was one heavy piece of reality to have to swallow...........................
"Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion. There is always a destructive synergy among numerous factors, including exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia, anxiety, hunger, injury. So woods shock (the fear associated with complete loss of spacial orientation), led [the lost hiker] to frantic, poorly planned actions. Those stresses and actions incapacitated him even further in a tightening spiral until reason and emotion, instead of working in harmony to produce correct action, became like two drowning swimmers, dragging each other down.
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life. People know that instinctively. A man leaves a perfectly good family for a woman half his age and makes a mess of it, and people say, he got off the path; he lost his way. If he doesn't get back on, he'll lose the self, too."
~"Bending The Map" Laurence Gonzales ~
...................................BOOM! Knock out punch, and it hurt.........badly. I mean, WTF!............seriously. Out of all the examples in all the world that you could use to demonstrate the relationship between being lost in the woods and lost in life, and you pick that one. Did I mention that I don't believe in coincidences, so needless to say, I took it hard......real hard, and I didn't see it coming, which made it even worse.
I staggered back to the cabin through the woods for about an hour, and discovered some rather interesting West Virginia sights...............two deer stands, a bunch of shattered Mason Jars, some big metal bins, a bunch of plastic buckets, some copper piping, and an old furnace..............did I mention the gun tottin' West Virginia hillbillies waiting to shoot the shit out of me for anything that validated a "legal killin".............yep. Stay tuned, because this shit is about to get real!
"Buckle up ladies. This might get excitin'!"
~Bo Duke "The Dukes of Hazzard"~
See ya on the rivah................hopefully not stubblin' upon a still. PEACE
