August 19, 2011, Styx Branch bushwhack to Myrtle Point on Mt. LeConte.

Above, Jenny and Seth at the bridge where Styx Branch crosses the Alum Cave Bluffs trail as we prepare to start the climb to Myrtle Point on Mt. LeConte.

Each climb that we do seems to raise the bar another notch and this one was no exception. Styx Branch was one of the first big climbs I did in the Smokies decades ago, and I still remember lying on my belly in the mud high on a slide near Myrtle Point, sliding slowly towards a big dropoff, wondering if I was going to survive. I did of course, but never got around to finding somebody to go back to do the climb with me again.
Meeting Jenny and Seth has made me feel incredibly lucky - they love battling the rhodo beast as much as I do, and Jenny has a wealth of knowledge gained from years of exploring some of the wildest terrain in the Great Smoky Mountains.

As the photo above illustrates, the morning of the climb was warm and muggy. I had to keep the camera inside a zip lock bag to keep the fog off of the lens.

In ancient Greek mythology, the River Styx was the most important of the seven streams that encircle Hades. After death, souls would gather on the banks of the River Styx in hope of catching the boat across the river. If they were lucky enough to bribe the old boatman, Charon, to take them across, they would enter the gates of Hades and find peace. If not, they were doomed to roam the banks of the the River Styx for eternity.
In the Great Smokies, there is another kind of hell - the dense heath thickets that blanket many of the ridges and valleys in a thick pelt of nearly impassable rhododendron, laurel and dog hobble. One of the most infamous of these hells is known as Huggins Hell, snuggled deep in a steep-sided valley beneath Mt. LeConte. It's regularly swept with massive flash floods that rip the slopes apart, sending them avalanching into the valley below. The slides offer a slightly more open route through the tangled hells, and often lead all the way up to the top of the highest ridges on Mt. LeConte.

The stream quickly disappears beneath the deep piles of shattered rock and downed trees, and won't be seen again in normal conditions until we start climbing bedrock much higher up the watershed.

There is a small slide entering from the left not far up the stream after you leave the Alum Cave trail behind. It's not the one that we want. We need the one that turns off at around 4,600 ft. Styx Branch is heavily braided down low in the valley and it's best to plan to start your climb by watching the shape of the valley, rather than trying to stick with the stream.

Jenny has a great blog, Endless Streams and Forests, with lots of hike reports and some fascinating reports on subjects of historical interest.

Using her altimeter, Jenny finds the correct turnoff and we start to climb over the piles of rock and trees that have swept down from high on the mountain above.

Note the rock - this valley is shaped by the existence of the Anakeesta Formation, a thick layer of slate and shale that runs through and creates some of the wildest terrain in the Great Smoky Mountains. It consists of rock laid down in ancient Precambrian seas in thin layers. Water seeps into the cracks between the layers, sometimes forming ice that splits the layers apart. Even in warmer weather, water provides lubrication when it seeps in, and eventually a layer breaks loose, Sometimes it's just a small piece of stone from a cliff face, but often it sets off a domino effect as thousands of yards of rocks and trees suddenly gain their freedom and run for the valley floor, gathering tons and tons of more rock and trees as it goes. You defintely don't want to be in one of the steep sided ravines beneath Mt. LeConte when heavy rain moves in. What is a dry streambed one moment can be a roaring maelstrom of debris the next, sweeping up everything in its path. Another very real hazard on these slide paths is falling rock or rocks that suddenly shift when a person's weight is added to them. It's a teeter-totter path to the top. The Anakeesta Formation (a predominantly shale unit) contains pyrite,
which weathers to yield significant quantities of sulfuric acid. The highly acidic nature of the Anakeesta Formation, where exposed to a water supply and weathered, has indirectly resulted in negative impacts on fish and salamander populations in the Newfound Gap area. In many of the streams that drain through the big slides, you can see the discoloration that results from the weathering of the pyrite that is in the rocks of the Anakeesta Formation.