Bryson city road to nowhere9/15/2023 In Vance's handbag I spot a bouquet of brilliant flowers: a reminder that for her this trip is sanctified. The women greet me in the accent of Southern Appalachia, where the vowels are swallowed, like an Irish brogue crossed with a Southern drawl. Vance is riding with one of her younger sisters, Eleanor Rhinehart. In fact, today we're going to make a brief excursion to the North Shore, and Vance has offered to take me along. Since my solo trek is a couple of days off, I have time to spend with Helen Vance, a 77-year-old great-grandmother who is an ardent supporter of building a road on the North Shore. Eric Rudolph, who pleaded guilty to setting off a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, managed to evade the FBI for more than five years by hiding in these mountains. The prevailing ruggedness of this region hasn't always been put to noble use. The town of just a couple thousand residents is about a half-hour drive from the national park and is surrounded mostly by the Nantahala National Forest. Meanwhile I'm sitting on a curb in Sylva, N.C. In other words, the wilderness I'm about to visit may soon, in one sense, cease to exist. The timing of my trip is key, because a 62-year-old dispute is going to be settled in the next year, perhaps allowing a road to be built on the North Shore. Starting two days from now, I plan to walk it end-to-end, covering about 40 miles of trail, and with any luck I won't see another soul for the better part of a week. The North Shore forms, in part, the southern boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the North Carolina side, and it is one of the biggest pieces of roadless land in the Eastern United States. I figure that I can hike across the North Shore of Fontana Lake in four days and three nights, as long as I stay close to the water, where the elevation doesn't change much. But by then I should also be out of the woods. The night after that there's freeze-dried beef stroganoff. I'm looking forward to dinner number one, freeze-dried lasagna.
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