The Wilderness Gallery, LLC

11/22/2024

As part of the ongoing recovery effort in western North Carolina, we are partnering with our neighbors Vintage Market Marion/ Marion Furniture Company. Please consider purchasing a raffle ticket.

Message me if you purchase a ticket. As a thank you, I will extend a 10% discount on any purchase from me through the end of 2025.

Thank you.

~Western NC Hurricane Recovery Raffle and Fundraiser~

We'd like to invite you to help us support the continued disaster recovery efforts here in Western North Carolina. Enter our raffle for a chance to win a beautiful 28”x35" photographic print valued at $1,400—which has been donated by C.W. Banfield, a local artist and landscape photographer who uses large format film to capture his work. C.W., owner of The Wilderness Gallery (hibiscus-hawk-rhsa.squarespace.com), is one of our vendors here at Vintage Market Marion.

Raffle tickets are $20 each. 100% of donations will go to recovery efforts in Western North Carolina. We will draw the lucky winner on December 16, 2024, at 5:00 PM, and we will post the winner on Facebook and contact the winner directly. You do not have to be present to win.

Options for entering the raffle:

In-Person: Drop by our business at 21 W Court Street in Marion, NC and purchase your raffle ticket. Cash and card are accepted.

Online: Make a direct donation to Samaritan’s Purse (https://shorturl.at/ppQtB) or Red Cross (https://shorturl.at/msoJI) for disaster relief between the dates of November 11 and December 15. Send us a copy of your donation receipt along with your cell phone number to our email at [email protected]. You will receive one entry into the drawing for each $20 increment donated.

Phone: Give us a call at 828-559-2700. We will process your debit or credit card raffle donation payment over the phone.

Other direct pay options (Venmo, Paypal, Cash App, or Apple Cash): DM or call (828-559-2700) us for contact information.

If paying by any method other than in-person, we will fill out your raffle ticket(s) and text you a photo of your completed raffle ticket(s).

The framed print can be shipped within the continental United States.

Thank you to C.W. for his donation, and thank YOU for helping us help our Western NC neighbors!

03/19/2024

It seems impossible, but 30 years ago this morning I stood on Springer Mtn in GA preparing to embark on my first Appalachian Trail Thru-hike.

03/10/2024

Two new images: “Along Big Creek I” & “Along Big Creek II”.

I made these exposures on 1 May 2023 in Great Smoky Mountains NP, but didn’t start test printing them until late November.

A little behind the scenes story. After focusing the camera, I went to load a sheet of film and discovered that a tiny bolt & washer combo were missing from the camera back. Without the bolt, there wasn’t enough tension to hold the film securely in place. I was two miles from the tools in my truck and the light wasn’t going to last. In desperation, I looked around on the ground and quickly found a stick that perfectly matched the diameter of the missing bolt. I love working in large format.

If you can’t fix your camera with a stick, you’re using the wrong camera!

01/04/2024

I lost David & Andrew in northern Wyoming after I fell and sprained an ankle. I tried to keep pace for over a week, but we were racing southward to get through Colorado’s San Juans Mtns before snow fell. I couldn’t keep up with them and they couldn’t jeopardize their hikes to wait for me. So, we parted, and I took a week off in Pinedale WY to rest the ankle.

When I resumed my hike solo, it was like starting over. As a three-person team, we had slipped into comfortable roles when forced to navigate via map & compass. We spread out, staying just within earshot: one person reading the map, another working the compass and counting pace, while the third read the guidebook and looked for landmarks. Back on my own, it was all on me. It slowed my pace. Plus, without the benefit of a “second opinion”, I was more tentative. Ultimately, I would finish more than 2 weeks behind them.

When I reached the San Juan’s, summer thunderstorms were giving way to autumn snow. One afternoon I hunkered down on the side of a ridge and watched lightning strike a nearby outcrop more than 50 times (I stopped counting) and then spent the rest of the day hiking through a couple inches of fresh snow.

A few days later I was on an 11,000-foot trailless ridge when a storm popped up. Hastily, I checked the map & turned left down a drainage. I felt sure that I could go down the canyon and then turn up another one to rejoin the ridge several miles on. Unfortunately, I was not where I thought I was. I descended thousands of feet while the storm continued to dump icy cold rain for hours. Hypothermia was a real possibility.

By nightfall, I was following a raging, rain swollen creek in a narrow canyon. With few options, I decided to camp a few inches above the waterline on a tiny spit of land. At times like this, the “Don’t do the trail unless you are perfectly comfortable going to bed at night with no idea where you are.” advice taunted me. But it was oddly comforting. And while setting up my tent, I found a tiny, rusted shard of metal from a Folgers coffee can. “Humans have been here”, I thought. And if someone could get IN here, then I could get OUT. The next day I walked in the creek until late afternoon when the canyon opened, and the creek passed under a bridge on a dirt road. Checking my compass, I instinctively turned right to follow the road south. In an hour or so, I flagged down the first vehicle that I saw to ask the always embarrassing: “Where am I?” Incredibly, I was only a few miles from New Mexico.

The photograph is from the next day. After months of uncertainty, I was through the San Juans and in New Mexico. And for the first time felt confident that I could finish.

01/04/2024

Without question, thunderstorms and “staying found” (aka NOT getting lost) were the two most challenging aspects of daily life on the CDT in 1998.

For parts of Wyoming & Montana, I had the good fortune to hike with two other people. Andrew was an electrician from Yorkshire, England, and David, was a student from Richmond, Virginia. All three of us had done the AT & PCT, so the CDT was our final leg of the Triple Crown.

In northern Wyoming, we spent a couple days busting brush on a trailless ridge; the brittle, bone dry understory relentlessly jabbing at our flesh. Needing a reprieve and tight on food, we decided to take a chance on a forest road that shot directly across the valley. Near the middle, a storm arose. Bolts of cloud to ground lightning marched up the road toward us. As usual, we dropped our packs and shed ourselves of any other metal. Then we scattered, running down the road to find individual pockets in the shallow ditch.

The storm was violent, but compact. And once it passed and we went to retrieve our packs. As we did, a rancher pulled up in a white pickup. In conversation, he told us that lightning had claimed one of his cows the previous day. David & I looked at each other wide eyed, both thinking “I’m taller than a cow.”. Andrew was unfazed. As the rancher drove off, David and I started to voice our astonishment. Then Andrew, the electrician, nonchalantly observed in his gentle Yorkshire accent: “Not to worry. Cows: four points of contact. Far more likely to be hit.”

01/03/2024

I took this photograph on a hot afternoon above Lemhi Pass. Tired, lost, and nearly out of water, we were searching for the spring that Merriweather Lewis had, in 1805, mistakenly identified as the most distant source of the Missouri River. Lewis was wrong, but the water’s journey from that remote hillside in Montana’s Bitterroot Range to the Atlantic Ocean remains epic. The meager issuance that starts in a grassy meadow is fortified by other tributaries until it becomes the Missouri River just northwest of Bozeman. From there it crosses the northern plains to merge with the Mississippi River at St. Louis before ultimately emptying into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.

In 1996, Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” had sparked renewed interest in the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Flush with publicity, Lemhi Pass and its spring attracted a smattering of history/geography-nerds via a dirt road. Still, we were surprised to see 20+ cars parked along the road’s edge as we emerged from the woods. Almost immediately, we encountered a group in formal attire. Ominously, one was carrying an urn.

Minutes later, at the spring, we discovered the urn’s contents in our water source. We dubbed him “Uncle George” and unceremoniously extracted him from our water. Next, with bare hands, we dug out and dammed a pool a couple feet upstream, waited for the mud to settle, and filtered from the upper pool. I’ve drunk a lot of questionable water in my travels, but thankfully this was the only time I had to remove a body from it.

01/02/2024

Andrew, David & I approached the gravel road over Bannock Pass with a few swigs of tepid water left in our bottles, the temperature in the low 90’s, and nary a tree for miles. We estimated that it was less than 20 miles by road to our resupply in Leadore, ID, but we were reluctant to set out in the heat of the day. Instead, we opted to try hitchhiking while waiting for the cool of early evening.

Long distance hikers usually hitchhike from road-trail intersections (aka trailheads) into town to resupply. Doing otherwise is impractical because, depending on the distance from the trailhead to town, it can add days to already lengthy stretches between resupplies. Plus, walking pavement is miserable. But hitching wasn’t always an option for us in 1998 because if there was a contest for the most remote trailheads, the CDT would have won hands-down! Complicating matters was that most locals didn’t even know that the trail existed. To them, whizzing by at 60 mph, we looked like shiftless ne’er-do-wells; not the adventure seeking ne’er-do-wells that we were.

Bannock Pass wasn’t the first – or last – remote hitch. A few weeks earlier, while attempting to resupply at ranch in northern Montana, I walked for hours before being picked up by a flatbed Ford on a dead-end, dirt, forest service road. Hanging on to a chain stretched across the bed while speeding down a bumpy road for 20 miles should have been a rodeo event.

Back at Bannock Pass, perched on a fence overlooking the valley, we realized that we could see the dust plumes of vehicles 5 miles distant. We settled in, each taking a 20-minute shift on the fence, while the other two huddled in the tiny shadow cast by the “Celebrate Idaho with us” sign. When the guy on the fence yelled “Car!”, the two in the shade would slowly stand, dust off, and dutifully assume a position – thumbs out – at the side of the road. After three or four hours, fewer than 10 cars had passed. At one point, a logging truck stopped. We offered to ride the logs to no avail.

Eventually, a pale green Forest Service Jeep Cherokee topped the pass and pulled over. The three passengers were biologists, familiar with the CDT and thru-hiking, and anxious to hear about trail conditions. After a few minutes, they radioed their station in Leadore to report the meeting. The reply back was a simple: “Fifteen minutes.”. What’s “15 minutes” we asked. “They’ll be up in 15 minutes to pick you up.” the driver said.

As promised, the station supervisor retrieved us and, back in town, introduced us to the town’s mayor who was busy mowing the grass at our campsite in the city park. On the way to showers at the saloon, she pointed out the laundry, general store, and post office. Everything we needed was within a flat ten-minute walk. True to her word, 18 hours later she returned us to the pass.

In long distance hiker parlance, such extraordinary acts of kindness by strangers are dubbed “trail magic”. On trails with an established thru-hiking culture, trail magic is more common and often planned. But on the CDT in ’98, it was almost always spontaneous, and the benefactor often didn’t even appreciate the gravity of the act that they were performing. The purity of their selfless gifts made it all the sweeter.

12/29/2023

I can’t let 2023 slip away without mentioning the 25th anniversary of my 1998 Continental Divide Trail (CDT) thru-hike. The CDT was the third of my Triple Crown hikes. (Appalachian Trail, 1994; Pacific Crest Trail, 1997; Continental Divide Trail, 1998)

But the CDT was quite different than its counterparts. Whereas hundreds of hikers were attempting to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and thousands were attempting the Appalachian Trail in 1998, fewer than 10 were on the CDT. In part because the CDT wasn’t finished. While the AT & PCT offered 2100 and 2700 miles of marked & maintained trail respectively, only 1000 of the CDT’s proposed 3100 miles had been built. The task of cobbling together a workable route for the remaining 2100 miles fell to the individual hikers. And information was sparse. Very few people had done the CDT and even fewer had shared their experiences on the still nascent internet. The guidebooks that were available were 10 years old and often described “proposed” routes instead of actual ones. And because it wasn’t finished, there was no official map set. I managed to assemble an exceptionally detailed set comprised mainly of US Geological Survey (USGS) quads, but they were bulky and even they were 10 to 20 years old.

As for the route, the CDT begins in Glacier National Park at Montana’s northern border with Canada. From there, it snakes its way south through Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado before sputtering out at the Mexican border in New Mexico’s sandy Smugglers Hills.

Except for two guys that I hiked with in parts of southern Montana and northern Wyoming, I rarely met people: maybe once a week, and usually only at road crossings. When I did, I peppered them with questions about the area. I once asked a ranch hand if the trail marked on my USGS map was still passable. He studied the map for a minute, then looked up and growled: “There ain’t no trail down there. Whadda you wanna go down in that grizzly infested hole for anyways?” OK then.

Prior to my hike, one of the best pieces of advice came from a woman who hiked the trail with her husband in 1997. “Always be able to locate yourself within a quarter mile on a map. Because the trail will end. And when it does, you’re going to have to find yourself.” she cautioned. Then added: “And don’t do the trail unless you are perfectly comfortable going to bed at night with no idea where you are.”

Despite the challenges, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do the CDT while it was still in its infancy. It was truly a unique experience. Raw. This past summer while I was hiking the Colorado Trail (CT) I met several ’23 CDT thru-hikers. (The CT shares treadway with the CDT for about 300 miles in central Colorado.) When I mentioned that I had done the trail in ’98, they usually paused, then smiled, and said something like: “Wow, you did it before GPS… and before there was a trail.” I was deeply humbled by their acknowledgement.

Back to the Triple Crown. Doing the AT, PCT & CDT is like getting a bachelor’s, master’s & PhD in long distance hiking. The AT teaches the basics. The PCT introduces desert, snow, elevation, and water management. The CDT incorporates everything from the other two…and then it takes away the trail.

Although the first triple crown was reported in 1972, the idea of hiking the three trails as a set didn’t take hold until the 1990’s. By the time I got around to hiking the CDT in 1998, fewer than 35 people had reported completing all three trails. In recent years, the construction of more CDT mileage along with improvements in GPS technology have swollen the ranks of Triple Crowners to 525 as of 2021.

Looking back, I consider my 3100 miles on the CDT to be the most challenging, but also the most fulfilling miles that I have hiked, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Over the next few days, I’d like to share a few brief snapshots of life on the CDT.