July 23, 2011: A hike with the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club to Big Duckhawk Ridge via Trout Branch.
Above, a misty rain-swollen Walker Prong gave us a hint as to what we'd be enjoying when we started our bushwhack up the Trout Creek drainage. Trout Creek runs beneath Hwy. 441 between the Alum Cave trailhead parking area and the Loop.

The SMHC has over 600 members and has been in existence for well over 80 years. Harvey Broome and Carlos Campbell were members, names familiar to anybody that is familiar with the history of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Today, the club continues the tradition established by those early pioneers of park protection by maintaining hundreds of miles of trails both inside and outside the park, and by providing opposition to poorly planned development in the Great Smokies region. The park that we know and love would be a very different place today without the enthusiastic efforts of the SMHC members to protect its amazing resources.
The SMHC has some good rules in place to provide protection for the folks on their hikes. The by-laws are posted on their website and provide good guidelines for either organizing or participating in a hike with the club.
Suffice to say, this was one of the most competent and able group of hikers that I've ever hit the ground with.

Crossing the highway, we immediately plunged into the cool waters of Trout Creek. Anybody that has hiked with me much knows that I've never been a huge fan of summer off-trail hiking, a result of some pretty miserable experiences that I had way back when I first started exploring the Great Smokies backcountry. For the most part, I prefer bushwhacking during the winter months, even if it means wading nearly frozen creeks. The temps today were supposed to reach the low 90s and I was dreading the heat and bugs. Thankfully, the day was cool and overcast, with misty clouds sifting through the forest on the steep climb up Trout Creek.

I decided to just go ahead and get the inevitable drenching over with and started wading from the get-go. The way I see it, when choosing between poison oak, yellow jackets and cold water, I'll happily choose the cold water. Everybody else must have felt much the same way and before long, we were all splashing through pool after pool as we made our way up the drainage. Trout Creek is ordinarily a small stream that tumbles down the slopes of Mt. LeConte, but today it was swollen from the recent thunderstorms. It made for some interesting and exciting hiking.

Sometimes it was easiest to scramble over the debris at streamside, and at other times, it was much easier to simply wade through the rushing water.