On Hiking The "Crown Jewel" and the Meaning of Retirement

Now that I'm 65 (in a few days) I wondered why we have to travel across our beleaguered globe to tick off items on our bucket lists. Some of the best destinations are right here.

Noah DeWitt on a characteristically steep descent to a bridge on the Foothills Trail

GORGES STATE PARK — So inviting. So close to home.

The “Crown Jewel,” my Foothills Trail guidebook calls the middle 31 miles of that famous footpath, the stretch that starts at the Laurel Valley parking lot south of Rosman and crosses the northern rim of Lake Jocassee.

I have to paraphrase the rest of the guide’s description because my already dogeared copy was reduced to a lump of sodden pulp last weekend, which is the sort of thing that happens when you walk through a rainforest. But it said something about this being the premier weekend backpacking route in the Carolinas.

With this gem on our doorstep, my son and I decided we’d be fools to stick with our plan to hike south from Fontana Dam in pursuit of a longstanding but arbitrary goal of completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina.

And the Crown Jewel, we found, lived up to its name.

The climbs were more challenging than those on the AT, at least as measured by average elevation gain per mile. The plant life was more abundant and diverse. The concentration of waterfalls and pristine, evocatively named rivers — Toxaway, Horsepasture, Thompson and Whitewater — was absolutely jaw-dropping.

What we lost in mountain-top views, we gained in regular sightings of Jocassee through straight, column-like trunks of red oaks and tulip poplars. We were treated to broader vistas of the lake’s green and glittering expanse thanks to another well-known feature of the Foothills, bridges that manage to blend in with their surroundings despite being engineered like scaled-down Golden Gates.

All this and we easily cut our expected total drive time of seven hours, including the shuttle, by more than half.

Which brings me to the subject of travel and retirement, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and which is especially worth thinking about in Transylvania County. When I turn 65 in two weeks, I will join the more than 33 percent of county residents in this age cohort, the largest per capita population in the state.

We worked and saved all our lives, according to the standard line of thinking. Our kids are launched. It’s time to buy that Harley-Davidson or recreational vehicle, time to visit Easter Island or New Zealand.

It’s time, in other words, to really start burning some fossil fuels.

Despite what some of you might think, I consider myself a political moderate on most issues, queasy about the long-term cost of indiscriminate government give-aways, fatigued by the focus on identity politics.

One exception is my view on global warming, which basically puts me in lockstep with Greta Thunberg.

I’m tempted to say the planet is dying, except that, as George Carlin put it in his famous routine, “The planet is fine. The people are f—ed.”

Exactly right. The issue is Earth’s future as a habitable environment, and in that regard it’s like one of those lung cancer patients still clinging to a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

By which I mean our habit of thoughtless consumption.

It’s pointless for me to list all the ways we can cut back because we know how to do it and just don’t. So let’s talk strictly about trips and vehicles, transportation being the biggest source of carbon emissions and travel one of the most cherished prerogatives of retirement.

Assuming nobody with the means is going to give it up entirely, let’s further narrow our focus to the difference between travel that is worthwhile and that which is gratuitous.

In the first category are trips that are truly mind-expanding or are needed to maintain bonds with family and old friends. We gotta see our kids and grandkids, right?

The second includes joining long lines of our buddies on motorcycles or in Jeeps or some inexplicably favored model of sports cars on exhaust-spewing tours through Pisgah National Forest. Then there’s the practice of ticking off items on so-called bucket lists, the term given to visiting as many exotic locations as possible so you can brag about it later.

Also consider that many of us older folks moved to Transylvania to retire. We are on permanent vacation in a desirable destination. Why do we need to leave? Why not enjoy what we have and work to make it better?

A lot of people do, and I’ll pause here to say that I’ve spent most of my life in havens of the elderly, including 28 years in Florida, where retirement is mostly viewed as a license to live a life of government-subsidized uselessness.

In Transylvania, on the other hand, the spirit of volunteerism is alive and well. It’s one of the things I love about the place, and I could point to plenty of examples of post-career productivity and community contribution.

But my trip this weekend put me in mind of one long-time Transylvania resident in particular, Bill Thomas.

A former Sherwood Forest neighbor, he’s a big reason I didn’t have to drive halfway across the state for a decent backpacking trip.

How much of the Jocassee watershed would have been preserved without him?

It’s hard to say exactly. But as I wrote in this profile a few years ago, Thomas — along with his wife and partner in preservation, Shirl — led the foundational protection initiative in this region, securing the designation of the Horsepasture as a federal Wild and Scenic River in 1986.

After retiring from his job as a chemical engineer with DuPont, he launched a second, unpaid career as an environmental activist. He served as the statewide chair of the Sierra Club. He was involved in the negotiations that created Gorges State Park and helped preserve what is now DuPont State Recreational Forest.

If it worked out well for the public and the planet, it also worked out for Thomas. Though he and Shirl have since moved to Raleigh to be closer to family, they recently returned to reconnect with their old neighbors (a prime example of worthwhile travel), and Thomas managed to fit in a brisk hike to the community’s highest point, Middle Mountain. At age 96.

That’s what I call a good retirement.

He was motivated to act by his appreciation of the unique landscape above Jocassee, the sudden elevation gain of the Blue Wall that captures both the windblown spores of a vast variety of ferns and mosses and the airborne water that produces its epic rainfalls, which in turn created its epic natural features — the waterfalls and rushing rivers, the deep, steep-walled ravines.

We got to see it all pretty much as Thomas saw it forty years ago, my son and I.

It rained, of course, because that comes with the territory. The climbs were so steep, the stairs so innumerable, the humidity so unrelenting, that, yes, there were times we talked about the appeal of a different kind of hiking.

It would be nice to try, say, the Continental Divide Trail, to experience the dry air of the West, the gradual climbs, the long views unobstructed by curtains of green.

We could do with a little variety. Someday, maybe when our power comes from renewable sources and we can make that drive in an advanced EV.

Until then, with so much to see so close at hand, that kind of trip seems, well, just a little bit gratuitous.

Virginia Hawkins Falls, one of many cascades on the Crown Jewel stretch of the Foothills Trail

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