June 19, 2015 - Ranger Heath Gives a Lecture

The morning walk to the campground was sunny and wet from last night’s rain. It is a beautiful combination here when all the wet leaves sparkle in the sunshine. The emerald boulders lining the campground road were brilliant again.

 

This is my favorite sunny branch over the campground road, taken as we walked back down toward the picnic area.

 

A small ditch runs through a culvert under the campground road. I have never noticed water in it before, but today it is a regular stream. This is where it comes back out and heads to Big Creek.

 

We walked out onto the bridge to look at the creek. The water level was only up a small amount. A woman was standing on the bridge with her dog. She had her hand held out for the small blue butterflies. I don’t know if any landed on her arm, but several took a liking to Andy’s hat.

 

These butterflies are a beautiful sky blue when they fly. When they land, they close their wings and they are mostly gray. I have yet to get a good picture of one flying. Here is a close-up I cropped out of the other picture so you can see how pretty it is.

There is a whole new patch of the slimy white fungus on the huge log in the group picnic area. I haven’t touched it to really know whether they are slimy. They always look wet and slimy even in dry weather.

 

It rained a good bit of the day so we stayed inside most of the time. I swept and mopped the floor but, this evening, you cannot even tell. I spotted this doe in the woods by the campground road as we walked up it in the afternoon. She stood perfectly still.

When some campers came down the road in their car, she carefully lay down among the boulders to hide. I don’t know why the second picture came out so blue. I took it soon after the first one.

 

We were standing at the campground registration board when a man came up and asked if we were rangers. I said, “No, but we can call if you need one.” He needed one. He lost two teenagers on the Big Creek Trail. Their group of eight was walking up the trail and the four children walked ahead. When the adults got to the Midnight Hole, only two were there. The oldest two had walked ahead of them and passed the Midnight Hole. The parents had waited for a while and then the fathers went looking for them up and down the trail. They had been missing an hour and a half at that point. I called 700 to report. (I never know which of our rangers are on duty, but know whoever is will hear me call dispatch.) Dispatch asked if Ranger Will heard and Ranger Will said for Ranger Heath to respond.

Andy finished talking to the campers who were asking him questions while I walked with the father to the trailhead. I assured him that it is very difficult to get lost in Big Creek; there are steep mountainsides on both sides. We met the mother and the other teens in the parking lot. The mother and I went to the trailhead to wait for Ranger Heath. I also assured her that they probably did not get lost. They would have to walk five miles to get to the first trail intersection and it is only 1-1/2 miles to the Midnight Hole and two miles to Mouse Creek Falls. The mountainsides are too steep to go off trail without some effort. This was our view down Big Creek Road at the trailhead.

 

One of the other teen children came up and told us she had received a text from the missing teens and they were on the way down the trail with the other parents. I called Ranger Heath on the radio and he responded that he was right around the curve. He drove up to the trailhead about thirty seconds later. When the missing teens and a set of parents arrived, Ranger Heath gave them all some education about hiking in the mountains. Have a plan. Stay together, or wait periodically for the slower hikers. Read the trailhead sign. Think. The athletic young man should have known he walked more than a mile and a half. They said they saw the Midnight Hole and Mouse Creek falls, but did not know that they were THE hole or THE falls. They are not marked with signs. Ranger Heath explained that the national park is preserved wilderness, not your state park. If someone gets hurt on the trail and they are unprepared or don’t have a plan, it could take hours or longer before help came. And it would be cold and wet spending the night up there. The parents got just as much of a lecture as the teens.

The group thanked Ranger Heath and went on their way. Heath leaned against the trailhead sign and I took his picture.

 

Then he made a funny smile face so I took another picture.

Heath said he was going to the Pittman Center firehouse for their monthly fund-raising supper. We jumped in the ranger truck with him and he took us on some back roads that we had not seen to get there. This month’s supper was chili, corn bread, salad, red velvet cake, and a drink. It was $7 a person. Judging from all the cake on the table, they were expecting a lot more people than showed up. The supper ended at 1900; we got there a bit after 1830 and only one couple arrived after us. It was good. I would go back every month if we lived here, to support the fire department of course.

 

On the radio

Laurel Falls Rover (a volunteer) reported that a woman slipped and fell at Laurel Falls. She apparently broke her ankle. Two rangers responded. They carried her out with some sort of chair that only required two people to carry. The woman did not request an ambulance; they would drive to the hospital on their own. A bear was hanging around next to the trail about half way up just to make the rescue more interesting.

A woman slipped and fell on the rocks at the edge of the water in the Chimneys picnic area and could not get up. The initial assessment was that she broke her leg. Dispatch called for a rescue squad from Gatlinburg and they took her to the hospital.

Park visitors reported that a motorhome ran into a bridge. Dispatch called a ranger to check it out.

There was a power failure in the Abrams Creek campground. They closed the campground, but I was not sure that meant they kicked the campers out or whether they just closed the toilet building for lack of water or, more precisely, lack of electricity to operate the water pumps. Some telephones lines were down too. The power company had the road torn up to fix the lines in the late afternoon and was estimating several hours to make the repair and reopen the road. It was 2105 when someone reported to 700 that the power was restored and everything was up and running.