June 5, 2015 - Richard and Pat Bachor Are Not Crazy

Here is an excerpt from my log on August 12, 2010 for a little background:

Richard and Pat Bachor stopped in to say hello. They are camp hosts who are going to replace us here in September. They have been here before and shared some of their experiences with us. They did have bears in the campground once or twice when they were here last year. Richard told of some campers eating at their picnic table after dark. The woman could hear something, but did not see anything. Then she got a flashlight and discovered a bear in the tree next to them watching them eat.

Here is an excerpt from my log on July 19, 2011 for a little more background:

We were just finishing eating we saw a man walking in the woods. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, but he was carrying a spray bottle. He disappeared. A few minutes later, he reappeared with a wad of something. I asked him what he had and he said he didn’t know. But, then I recognized that it was what was at one time an RV sewer hose. It was literally torn to shreds. He said that a bear had done it.

 

We could see the tooth marks on the fittings. The man told us that bears like to chew on plastic.

 

Then it dawned on me. Last year, shortly after we arrived here, we got a visit from some other campground hosts who live fairly close. They had been driving by and decided to come in and visit the current hosts – us. The man told us that a bear had stolen his sewer hose. He was a very nice man, but I decided that he must be a little nuts. Why would a bear steal a sewer hose?  That’s crazy. So, today I got proof that a bear will steal the sewer hose because it likes to chew on plastic. Maybe the couple will stop in again this year and I can apologize for thinking he was crazy.

(The man had been spraying invasive plants)

Back to the present.

We were up in the campground this morning when a Cosby maintenance truck drove in with Robert, Linda, and Tom. Linda and Tom headed to clean the toilet building and Robert had a can of wasp and hornet spray for the bee’s nests in the campground. I walked with him to show him where the campers saw bees. Robert looked and said they were honeybees. Of course, we don’t want to kill them; they are having enough trouble as it is. Honeybees are not as aggressive as hornets and yellow jackets, so they should not be a problem for the campers.

The elderly man, Junior was back and had is tarp and lawn chair set up in Site 2.

Back in the parking lot, I saw Andy standing with some campers who were loading up their vehicle to leave. There was also another couple with him who had a dog.

 

I did not recognize them right away, but when they introduced themselves, I remembered their names. They were the campground hosts who told us the bear had stolen their sewer hose in 2010. I immediately apologized to Richard for thinking he was a little crazy. Now they are on my log distribution list and can see how I was convinced that a bear will chew on a sewer hose. You are not so crazy after all Richard!

We were having such a nice time talking that I invited them to Sao for some coffee Andy had made before we walked up to the campground. It was a bit strong this morning.

 

When we talk to campers about not leaving food, or anything with a scent, out to attract bears, we tell them that a woman had told us a bear tore open and drank from a bottle of bleach and a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid. Today, Pat reminded us of that. She is the one who told us a bear will drink bleach. Anything with a scent folks.

Another Richard and Pat story. They had a group in the group site with a bunch of kids screaming and making a lot of noise in the night. Pat said she didn’t think anything of it. Just kids playing. The next morning, the adult campers asked if they had heard them and said it was a bear that had torn into all the tents during the night that set off the screaming.

A wildlife guy came and set a trap to capture the bear. The Bachors got the privilege of naming him. They named him Ted E. Bear. They figured it was the same bear that stole the sewer hose and tore into the tents. Later, they adopted the dog and named him Teddy, after the bear.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this before. This is a management boulder in park lingo.

 

You may remember all the problems we have had in past years with park visitors parking along the roadsides, into the forest, and sometimes blocking the road. A few days we had gridlock in Big Creek. Last year, Maintenance Junior came over with a tractor and placed boulders all along the road to prevent people from parking where they should not. I have to say that it is working. People still park on the roadside near the Big Creek trailhead where he did not place management boulders, but not on the campground road. Of course, there was that drunk young woman who parked on top of one of the boulders last week. She was an exception.

We took a quick trip to Newport in the afternoon to pick up the grocery items we needed to get through the weekend. I took my computer, but forgot the JetPack. I put the groceries away and we drove down to the river to send/receive email and pay a bill.

In the evening, the woman in Site 3 was serving bison chili to anyone who wanted some. She had made a huge pot full. Junior was there and having seconds.

Andy hauled a cooler of food from Site 10. I wrote up a courtesy notice and carried a sandwich bag of potato chips that had been stuck in a sneaker and a bottle of some sort of lotion.

One the radio

Just before 1400 someone reported that there was a Ford Explorer about ten feet down an embankment, sideways on the hill, and up against a tree. There were no injuries.

At 1915, there was an 87-year-old man in a campground with a head injury.

A 27-year-old man on Laurel Falls trail had hurt a foot and was hobbling on one leg down the trail. Ranger organized a rescue team to carry him out. They took Rescue One to the trail head at 2008. That is a big pickup truck with rescue gear. They reached him at 2040. That is impressive; it took me a LOT longer than that to get up to Laurel Falls. The man was back in his car at 2106 and all units were clear.

June 04, 2015 - Preening Bird Over Creek

Every year I try to get a picture of this tree in our campsite with the sun lighting the moss. I have not yet captured the brilliance, but will keep trying.

Only Site 4 was empty when we walked around the campground, but two fishermen told me they got there while the two women had packed up and were eating their lunch at noon. We did not hear dispatch call for a vacancy report today.

There are a lot of children in the campground today. This morning, they were jumping on the rocks separating the parking lot from the campground. They also played in the creek with a small orange inflatable boat.

The father from Site 6 and the mother from Site 3 both showed me bothersome bee nests near their campsites. I mentioned them to Maintenance Richard when he and Linda came here to clean. Richard said that it is best to spray them early in the morning when they are cold and not moving too much. He’ll be over here first thing to take care of them and Andy will have the coffee pot ready.

The group of Appalachian Trail maintenance volunteers camped in Sites 5 and 7 have five tents on Site 5 and one tent on Site 7. The legal limit is two tents per site, but we don’t call a ranger for that offence. Besides, they are volunteers.

The drowned out family from Illinois in Site 12 that stayed in a motel last night bought new, dry tents this morning. The man said they spent $400 on dry stuff. They asked me where they could find a dryer for their sleeping bags and I gave them directions for Standing Bear on the other side of the interstate.

Site 12 Drying Out

It was a beautiful, dry day today so maybe some things dried out.

We stood on the bridge watching the water flow by for a long time. I spotted a bird in a tree next to the bridge. I can’t figure out what it is from my bird books. It is close to a vireo or a flycatcher. I took 78 pictures of that bird. It was busy preening and had its head buried in feathers in most pictures. The feathers were so fluffed up; it looked as though it had just come out of the dryer. Four or five of the 78 pictures came out well.

We were expecting campers in the horse camp, but no one was there early in the day. I filled out registration forms and put them on the board for them. I saw a tree with a ring of rocks around the base behind the registration board. That set me to wondering who put them there, why, and how long ago.

Ring of Rocks

One of the horse campers was there in the afternoon and said the other was on the way. I should say they are mule campers. I asked the woman what is the advantage of mules over horses. She said mules don’t get spooked and start running through the woods and hurt themselves. Her mule is Lulu.

Lulu

 Lulu started making a terrible racket several minutes before this horse trailer pulled in with a mule friend of hers. We watched the man backing into his site and continued our walk.

Ledge on Big Creek

Wildlife

Walnut Leaves Over Our Campsite

On the Radio

This is the first night of the official firefly viewing at Elkmont that it has not been raining (at least here in Big Creek). The radio has been abuzz with talk about parking, trolleys, and who is where. The Knoxville TV station came in again tonight.

There was a motor vehicle accident at the Laurel Falls Trail parking area at 0945. The man was hit in the head and got arm lacerations when the trunk hit him on the head on impact. We guessed it was a hatch back.

About 1500 a phone call came into dispatch reporting that a heavy woman had fallen and broken her arm at Abrams Falls. She did not think she would be able to make it out by herself. At 1550 they were assembling a litter team at the trailhead. Rescue 2 was at the trailhead at 1722 and would be on the trail with the litter in five or ten minutes. Then they reported that they were on the trail at 1729. They got to the patient at 1818 and were heading back down the trail in just a few minutes. They requested an ambulance at 1905, when they thought they were about half an hour from the trailhead. There must have been more than a broken arm; I don’t see how that would prevent her from walking out.

Three-five-nine and another vehicle reported that they would be at the Abrams Creek trailhead overnight netting bats.

As usual, there were a number of bear incidents. One man called for a ranger when park visitors were getting within 20 feet of a bear. They shoo the people away from the bear and then they shoo the bear into the woods to keep others from getting too close.

June 03, 2015 - Mostly Rain

It was 56 degrees this morning. Spence stopped by for a coffee refill and told us that the only campers in the campground were the purple raft people. We reported eleven vacancies for the morning campground report.

After a brief period of sunshine in the morning, it rained or misted most of the cold, dreary day. We stayed indoors. Loud thunder echoed through the valley all day.

A Brief Moment of Sunshine on the Horse Trail

I made an excellent Asian-style stir-fry for dinner and Spence joined us. I told him it would be ready at 1400 and he showed up exactly at 1400. We ate out in the screen room and then moved to our chairs under the awning. We watched the heavy rain, but did not get a deluge like yesterday.

We drove the car up to the tent campground in the evening to check occupancy. Andy walked around to check for food left out. The family in Site 12 had their vehicle blocking the road. The woman backed up so I could pass, but then put the vehicle right in the same spot blocking others trying to come in. They were in a dither. This was their first night camping in Big Creek and everything was already soaked. The woman asked me where they could find a reasonably-priced motel and I directed them to Newport. They left their tent in Site 12 and said they might try to sleep in it tomorrow night. Three more sets of campers arrived while we were there.

I drove the car down to the Pigeon River and did an email send/receive. It was still raining.

June 02, 2015 - Another Deluge

We slept late. Spence was off and did not show up for his morning coffee. We met two young men in the campground parking lot who were loading up the car with their gear. The only tent left in the campground belonged to the couple with the purple raft. We took the path along the creek from Site 3. Some engineers had propped up a boulder in the side of the hill with large rocks.


The rains had raised Big Creek enough that there was water flowing over the rock bridge so I climbed down the bank to get a shot of the three waterfalls. They were between three and four feet high.

We paused at another spot to admire the cascade. That was our last stop because we were suddenly in a downpour and had not brought umbrellas or raincoats.

We hurried on back to Sao, but not before getting soaked through. Andy took a picture of me under the motorhome awning.

Our campsite was a river. I got an umbrella to cover the camera and walked around to determine where all the water was coming from.


From the front of Sao, it appeared to be the little drainage ditch across the road but, when I walked up to the ditch, I saw that the water was not overflowing there. The flow toward us began alongside the road in the tire tracks last weekend’s group site made off the edge of the gravel. Apparently, the rain was simply washing down the slope of the mountain.

The rain ended and the sun came out for a while. We walked back up to the bridge to see how much water was in Big Creek after the deluge.


It is always beautiful when the sun shines brightly after a rain. Water was flowing all across the rock ledge below the bridge and the waterfall was only about a foot high.

We saw Maintenance Linda in the parking lot and she said she would stop in for a cup of coffee. She said she had been told that kudzu is edible and borrowed my edible plants book to look it up. Kudzu was not listed and I can’t Google it.

I was making corn nuggets when Linda arrived. They are hush puppies with a can of creamed corn in the mix. They turned out well and Andy could not stop eating them. We ate more corn nuggets than beef stew for our dinner.

About 1600 we left for the grocery store to pick up whatever was on the list, but mostly to get out. The rain had continued most of the afternoon and we took advantage of a lull to get out of the motorhome for a while. We had a cup of Starbucks in the grocery store café and I made some phone calls. No contact with Son Christopher or Daughter Kathy. Daughter Jennifer was in the throes of cooking dinner with two small children making a huge racket in the background so we didn’t talk but a few seconds. I did get a long conversation with Brother Paul.

It started raining again on our way home. The truckers and everyone else on I-40 slowed down to 30-40 miles per hour. I thought about pulling over on the shoulder, but decided that someone might run over us in the invisibility.

We drove the car up to the tent campground when we got back from the grocery store since it was still raining. When we returned to the drive to our campsite, a car was parked in front of the gate (the one with the “Do Not Block Gate” sign on it). I put on the turn signal to give them the hint that we wanted to turn in. The people were standing next to the car, so Andy got out of the car and told them, “You can’t park here; you are blocking the gate”. The young woman newlywed responded, “It’s my car and I’m the customer and I can park it wherever I want”. Andy returned, “Well, I can call a ranger and he can discuss that with you”. I could hear her from inside the car, “Call the f---ing ranger and I’ll call the police!”  I guess she doesn’t realize that rangers are the police here. Andy turned to me, “Dinata, call the ranger.”  At that, the newlywed man told his bride to get back in the car and he drove away.

On the Radio

We heard discussion about a missing 13-year-old at the Midnight Hole as we were driving back from the grocery store. A few minutes later, 700 announced that the kid had been found. As Ranger Chuck (421) said, “It’s hard for someone to get lost in Big Creek”. At the Midnight Hole, there is the creek and the trail with steep mountainsides on both sides.

At 1850, a VP reported that a four-foot wall of water had just passed through the Chimneys picnic area. Others, elsewhere in the park and I presume downstream, were reporting water levels and warning people wading in the river.

June 01, 2015 - Fireflies at Elkmont

June 01, 2015

I got an email with a dozen photos from Denise, the nurse who had been camping in Site 8 for about a week. She is the one who told us about the drunk driver in the pickup truck. Holy cow, it is a wonder the stupid girl did not get worse than a huge knot on her forehead,

She had spun gravel 10 yards down the campground road before ending up on top of a boulder. Both front tires were in the air.

It is hard to believe there is not some damage under there, but I’m pretty sure she drove away the next morning, after the trash truck pulled her off.

Spence stopped in for his cup of coffee, as usual, at 0830. He said he has never been to see the fireflies in Elkmont and didn’t want to go along with us. I have been looking forward to it since last year. Andy was happy to go see the fireflies because I told him we could stop at Mellow Mushroom for a pizza on the way.

Spence was busy trimming the grass, poison ivy, and moss around the perimeter of the campground parking lot when we walked around in the morning.

Andy posed for me next to the huge tree in Site 2.

I noticed some of those little sprouts in the moss on the roof of the registration kiosk today. I wish I could get an internet connection to find out what they are. Moss blossoms?  Fungus?

We walked along the creek path and spotted a few more saplings that have been cut down for firewood by campers. I may have to move up my forecast for when the campers are going to denude the valley for firewood.

We took off in the afternoon and made a stop at Lowe’s for a flashlight for Andy to replace the one he misplaced the night of the horse-and-buggy incident. Naturally, I love flashlights and had to have a new one too. The next stop was the Mellow Mushroom in Pigeon Forge. I took my computer and did an email send/receive after we ate.

On the way into the park, we stopped at the welcome center to look for Meigs Line – Rangers rediscover a two-century-old disputed boundary between the U.S. & Cherokee Nation  by Dwight McCarter and Joe Kelley. Michael Aday, the park librarian and archivist, had recommended it to us last year. They had sold out at the welcome center and the woman called the Sugarlands visitor center to see if they had any. Negative. Then she called the Moonpie General Store in Pigeon Forge. They had one and held it for us at the register. Moonpie happened to be practically next door to the Mellow Mushroom. We were driving in circles.

We wandered around a bit and also picked up Buffalo Bill’s America and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I am still smarting from not having read it when we took the trolley tour of Savannah years ago. It was all the tour guide talked about and I was clueless.

We drove back into the park and went straight to Elkmont for the last night of firefly viewing before the official event. Boss Larry had recommended the cemetery as a good spot to watch the show. We were hours early, but that gave me time to look around. Wow!  I was enchanted  with the old buildings. I can’t look it up to find out any more about it, but is must have been a resort before the park was established. It was a walk back in time. There were maybe two dozen cottages along a straight road. 

Some were small and several were quite large. They were all run down. U. S. no trespassing signs were posted, but all the doors were open. I went inside two. A blue cottage has a large front porch and a warren of rooms, some very large.

The cottages uphill from the parking lot were in worse condition than those downhill. Several of them were falling down. I didn’t go in them, but peeked inside the door of a few. It is easy to imagine the vacations spent here and the hours people must have spent in these cottages. I am sorry that that is not the time period the park sought to preserve. They are amazing.

We were happy that we bought some books on the way because we had forgotten to bring our current reads. We sat in the car reading and waiting for dark. We had some rain, but it stopped before dark. The parking lots filled up and cars were milling around looking for some place to stop. We took our umbrellas and walked up to the cemetery. It was interesting, in that most of the names were ones we recognized, either from our reading, park locations, or from street and business names in the area.

It never did get very dark. There must have been a full moon above all those clouds. We didn’t see any fireflies in the cemetery, but the woods surrounding it were full of them. It was awesome, and that overused word is appropriate here. There were more fireflies than I’ve ever seen in one place. There were thousands of them. When they flashed, it was like a Christmas tree covered in blinking lights. After a while, they synchronized their flashing. They would all light at the same period for five or ten seconds and then all stayed dark for five or six seconds. A few didn’t quite have the rhythm. All the fireflies in the forest were not together either. Those in one direction were synchronized and those in another direction were synchronized, but the two areas did not match each other. Sometimes it was like a “wave”; they would light up and the ones nearby would start, and the wave of light would move around us.

We did not see anything like the U-Tube videos we saw last year where they all blinked on and off at exactly the same time, but we are guessing that it is a bit early in the mating season and that might happen in the next week or so. It was still amazing. Even if they were not perfectly synchronized, there were so many of them that the forest was a twinkling fairyland. I got what I went for and went home happy. It was after 0100 before we got home. Search U-tube for “fireflies Elkmont” and you should find several good videos of the phenomenon.

Continuing the theme of wet leaves: