Celo Knob: Mount Mitchell's bookend

Looking north at Celo Knob along the gorgeous but hard-to-reach Black Mountain Crest Trail.

     Tourists who climb the quarter-mile sidewalk to the lookout tower on Mount Mitchell see a row of 6,000-foot peaks lined up like dark-green dominoes toward the northern horizon: Mount Craig, Big Tom, Balsam Cone, Cattail Peak, Potato Hill, Winter Star Mountain, Gibbs Mountain, and finally Celo Knob, about eight miles away.
     The hike along that ridgeline is sometimes known as the "death march," because of the punishing ups and downs. It is even harder starting from the other end, because there is no road up Celo Knob and you must start by climbing 3,000 feet. 
     Three years ago, I hiked to the four peaks immediately north of Mount Mitchell, which was an exhausting but spectacular six-mile round trip. This time (Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016—the day after Hurricane Hermine passed), I started on the other end and made the big climb to Celo Knob and its neighbor, Gibbs Mountain. This was a 10.5-mile round trip that took me eight hours. It was the longest hike I've done in a couple of years, and it was worth it to see Mount Mitchell from the other side. 

Looking south toward Mount Mitchell from Celo Knob: Percy's Peak (6,200 feet), Gibbs Mountain (6,224), and Long Ridge (6,180) dominate the near horizon. Winter Star (6,203) is dwafted by those beyond, which stairstep left-to-right from Potato Hill (6,475) to Balsam Cone (6,611) to Cattail Peak (6,600) to Mount Craig (6,648) to Mount Mitchell (6,684). Balsam Cone is actually further away than Cattail, which is why it appears lower from this perspective. The ridge further right is Mount Gibbes (6,562, not to be confused with Gibbs Mountain) and Clingman's Peak (6,520), where you can barely see the radio towers for WNCW and WMIT if you click the photo to enlarge it.

     I've had my eyes on Celo and Gibbs ever since I became interested in South Beyond 6,000 (SB6K), a program sponsored by the Carolina Mountain Club that challenges hikers to reach 40 Southeastern peaks over 6,000 feet. By bagging Celo and Gibbs, I have climbed 24 of the 40. In the Black Mountains, the only one I still lack is Winter Star, which will require either the death march or another 3,000-foot climb.

Like climbing this—4 times.

     This was also a training hike for a 15-miler I want to do later this month in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to climb two more SB6K peaks, Mount Guyot and Old Black. Guyot (pronounced GEE-yo) is one of the last six county high points I have not yet climbed in North Carolina.
     Celo (rhymes with Guyot) gets is name from seeloo, the Cherokee word for corn. At 6,327 feet, Celo Knob is the 13th highest mountain in the eastern United States--39 feet higher than New Hampshire's Mount Washington and 327 feet shorter than Mount Mitchell. 
     Celo was the first peak climbed by Dr. Elisha Mitchell during his 1835 exploration of the Black Mountains that led him to declare these mountains as the highest in the United States.
     What's it like to climb 3,000 feet? Imagine four trips up and down the staircases of the tallest building in Charlotte, the 60-story Bank of America tower (which is occasionally visible from Celo Knob, 90 miles away). 
     If you are interested in following in my footsteps up Celo Knob, you can find details of my hike on my Peakbagger page. And even if you don't feel up to the climb, you can now "walk" the trail on video, thanks to Google Trekker.
     Here are some glimpses:

Take this sign seriously. I couldn't see the bottom line (Park Here) and I had 4WD, so I proceeded with caution and made it safely up to the Bowlens Creek trailhead, which does indeed have room to turn and park. But you only gain a couple of hundred yards--not worth the risk to your oil-pan. 

If Mary knew how rocky it was, she would wisely forbidden this.

An interesting old tree along the Crest Trail.

Pink Turtlehead blooming at an iron-tinged spring about 500 feet below the summit. Thanks, Rick Shortt, for identifying the flower.

As you approach the summit, this is the view that greets you. (Not sure why the video is so grainy—trust me, the original is spectacular.)

Celo Knob's summit isn't that impressive, but ...

The eastward panorama from a clifftop just below the summit is worth the climb. If you know where to look on the horizon, you can see Elk Knob and Grandfather Mountain on the left and blade-shaped Table Rock toward the right. At 6,327 feet, Celo Knob is 357 feet shorter than Mount Mitchell, but from Elk Knob it appears to be higher. The white blotches are feldspar mines near Spruce Pine, N.C. Click on the photo to enlarge it.

Mountain ash decked out in reddish-orange berries for the Clemson-Auburn game.

I'm always thankful for the volunteers who blaze the way.
The N.C. High Peaks Trail Association has done a
tremendous job with the Black Mountain Crest Trail.

There once was a Wobegon headline

 "There once was a man from Wisconsin"
 How does that headline sound to you?

 Like the start of a naughty limerick?

 Or the unedited demise of a once-trendy newspaper?

 Or don't you recognize Garrison Keillor, the unmistakable voice of ... Minnesota? 

 Not Wisconsin, for heaven's sake.

 That's the woe-begotten headline that USA TODAY published last week for a story on Keillor's retirement after 40 years as the host of the public-radio institution, A Prairie Home Companion.
 I wish I could give the newspaper credit for attempting a limerick, because Keillor would have appreciated that. In fact, he wrote several limericks specifically for Wisconsin when he performed in the beer town of Milwaukee.

There was a young man who loved Pabst
He drank it until he collapsed
He gave up beer
For Lent every year
And on Easter morning, relapsed.

 On his farewell broadcast this past Saturday night, Keillor recited or referenced several limericks, including bawdy verses about men from from Pocatello, Antietam, and Nantucket. This one even had an autobiographical first line:

There is an old man of St. Paul.
Put his desk in a toilet stall.
It was quiet, conducive,
And one had the use of
The plumbing with no wait at all.

 Even at age 73, Keillor still has a boyish love for limericks. "I intended to be a serious poet," he confessed in his final Lake Wobegon monologue. "Instead, I was fascinated by the limerick."
 I felt much the same way about my old medium—newspapers. And after I heard Keillor's farewell show and saw that headline, it got my my words pumping:

Back in the newspapers' heydey,
One called itself USA TODAY.
The going got tough,
Proofreaders laid off.
Wisconsin looks like Minnesotay.

 I feel entitled to pick on USA TODAY because I was associated with the McPaper from its revolutionary beginnings in 1982. They gave me one of most obscure jobs in journalism—contributing the daily sports item from South Carolina for the old Around the USA page. I earned $5 per item, and as I recall, those words were edited and cross-checked relentlessly. That's what newspapers did in the days of yore, when folks up and down the street were willing to pay for home delivery—twice a day, mind you—and newspapers found value in employing copy editors and proofreaders.

 Those were the good old days. In the 1980s (about the same time that Keillor made the cover of TIME magazine) The Greenville News was so ambitious we thought we could take over the state of South Carolina. If we could gain a few thousand readers and establish a semblance of a statewide audience, maybe we could pry the lucrative legal advertisements away from the Columbia paper.
 As part of this campaign, I was given a wonderful opportunity—not to mention a bottomless budget—to expand our high school football coverage statewide and cultivate a border-to-border audience. We catered barbecue for thousands of coaches every year and published special editions that were over a hundred pages. On the eighth Friday night of the 1984 season, we succeeded in getting every score of every game in the entire state in our first edition, which we felt certain had never been accomplished before. And for the next eight years, we never went to press without every score. We had radio ads bragging about it.
 If a coach didn't call in his game—and why wouldn't he, since we offered him $10 to dial us toll-free?—then we would make the midnight call to his house or the firehouse or the Waffle House to hunt down the score.

There once was a coach in St. Matthews.
Who'd rip out the phone if his boys lose.
So we'd call the town cop
Or the local truck stop
Where the quarterback gets his tattoos.

 In a different era and a different state, Keillor might have been the one calling in the game for us. One of the revelations I discovered in all the tributes published last week was that he, like me, began his career as a junior-high sportswriter. When a San Francisco reporter asked him about the happiest memory from his youth, he said: 

"The happiest was when I went out for football in the eighth grade and I took a physical, and the doctor told me I couldn’t play because I had a click in the valve of my heart. I was shocked, but I took this experience as a cue that I have to do something else that was brave, and I went to the local paper and asked if they needed someone to write up sports, knowing they didn’t have anybody. So they let me do it. So instead of sitting on the bench, I sat at the top of stands in the press box with men from the local radio station who were broadcasting the game. I sat with a tablet and a pencil and felt like royalty up there. I was a writer!"

We're all the butt of a blond joke

     A new poll says that voters prefer Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a margin of 54-41.
     Or to put it in terms my fellow denizens of the AP stylebook will understand: The blonde is leading the blond.
     I'm paraphrasing Jesus' warning about the blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14) because I think He appreciated puns and I trust that He forgives mine. And I don't want to see my country wind up in the ditch.
     For what it's worth, we the people evidently prefer a white-haired President. The poll indicates that Americans favor Bernie Sanders 56-40 over Trump, 57-39 over Ted Cruz, and 50-46 over John Kasich. Let's make America gray again.
     In the most inexplicable and implausible matchup, Americans prefer the cowlicked Kasich 51-41 over the blond* Clinton—despite the fact that on Tuesday night, he got less than five percent of the votes cast in Indiana. (The CNN/ORC poll was completed May 1, before Cruz and Kasich dropped out of the campaign.)
     * AP style, which is the abiding conscience of newsrooms nationwide, is as perplexed as the rest of America when it comes to blonde vs. blond. Here's how the stylebook guides us:

     In other words, Hillary is a blonde with blond hair.
     Is America ready for a blond(e) president? I looked it up, and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were blond before they were bald. Straight-talking Harry is looking pretty good right now, just as he did in the Nixon era when the band Chicago recorded this ditty: America needs you, Harry Truman (click to listen). It ends with this plea:
     "Harry, is there something we can do to save the land we love?"

———

EQUAL TIME: Thomas Jefferson has been the only redhead in the White House. (By the way, redhead is now acceptable AP style, though it wasn't in the bygone days when Red Parker coached at Clemson.)

———

And if you are inclined to vote brunette, remember that Melania Trump has birther issues.

Fuller, Fullest, and the Fantastic 4

Old football proverb: The name on the front of your jersey is more important than the name on the back. (New York Times photo)

    At the end of the Orange Bowl, Clemson needed to run a six-second play to exhaust the clock and keep from giving the football back to Oklahoma. So instead of taking a knee, Deshaun Watson took a shotgun snap, waited a couple of ticks, cocked his golden right arm, and launched a 60-yard pass into the Clemson fan section on the other end of the stadium.
     The way this perfect-ending season has gone, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Watson's game-ending pass was caught by none other than Steve Fuller.
     Almost everything Watson has done this season has brought honor to Fuller, who was—listen, children!— the quarterback who put Clemson football on the map.

WON NOT DONE (Miami Herald photo)

     By the time Watson reached the podium on New Year's Eve to accept the award as the most valuable offensive player in the Orange Bowl, he had shed his game jersey, the one with the patch on the right shoulder honoring Fuller. Instead, he was wearing a T-shirt saying WON NOT DONE, immediately changing the focus to the Jan. 11 national championship game against Alabama. 
     I know there are some who thought it cheapened Fuller's memory to unretire his number and use it to entice Watson to come to Clemson. Some of my friends say it would be better to keep Fuller's No. 4 under glass, like Howard's Rock.
     Why not have it both ways? The New York Times had the story this week of how Clemson has balanced its history against its future:

———

A Clemson Juggernaut Is Led by a Star Wearing No. 4. That Figures.

By Tim Rohan

   Inside the Clemson locker room at Memorial Stadium, about 10 feet from quarterback Deshaun Watson’s locker, is a shrine to the jersey number he wears. There, set up neatly in another locker, is a throwback helmet, a pair of uniform pants and a hanging No. 4 jersey. It is all encased in glass, like a museum exhibit recalling the glory days of Clemson football.

   In reality, it is a tribute to Steve Fuller, the quarterback of the famed 1978 Clemson team. His number, 4, was the first one retired by Clemson’s football program.

Fuller made an exception two years ago and allowed Watson to wear the number. That has created an awkward situation: In leading Clemson to a 13-0 record and finishing third in the Heisman Trophy voting. Watson has perhaps surpassed Fuller as the greatest player in Tigers history.

   When Watson was coming out of high school in Gainesville, Ga., Clemson’s ability to offer him No. 4 was another advantage in his recruitment as the university competed with the likes of Alabama and Florida State. When Watson was still a high school junior, Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney slyly mentioned to Fuller, while the two of them were paired at a golf tournament, that some universities honored their past by allowing current players to wear retired numbers.

   The next year, at the same tournament, Swinney got more specific, explaining to Fuller who Watson was — a five-star recruit ranked among the top players in the nation — and what it would mean if Fuller would consent to Watson’s wearing his No. 4.

   “I gave him my blessing with the understanding that this was an unusual kid, and it would be a nice thing for the program,” Fuller said in a phone interview this week as he prepared to travel to the Orange Bowl. “If Coach said it was a good idea, I was going to go along with it.”

   It would have been hard for Swinney to blame Fuller if he had said no. When Fuller arrived at Clemson in 1975, the Tigers had not made a bowl game in the previous 15 seasons. When he took his first snap in his first start as a freshman, his feet were in the end zone in Tuscaloosa, Ala. — a metaphor for the state of the program.

   Fuller never put up the flashy statistics Watson has produced, but his role was different. Even though the Tigers had Dwight Clark and Jerry Butler, a future first-round draft pick, they ran a gritty option offense, and Fuller was its maestro. At one point, he started 27 consecutive games. In his senior year, the Tigers went 11-1, averaged 31 points a game, and beat Ohio State in the Gator Bowl in Buckeyes Coach Woody Hayes' final game.

   At the time, Fuller was the most decorated player in Clemson history. He was twice named the Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year and finished sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting as a senior, becoming the first Tiger to finish in the top 10. Clemson retired his No. 4 before he left campus, during the 1979 spring game.

   “I just happened to be the guy that was the quarterback on a team that, as we look at it, the team that turned the program in the right direction, gave it a little bit of a renaissance,” Fuller said. “We got it to the point where it was not a big national power, but a program that people started recognizing and kids in high school started noticing. It was more that, than me as an individual. I was the guy taking the snaps.”

    Three years after Fuller graduated, Clemson won its only national championship. Now, with Watson, they have their best shot at a second title.

   When Watson first got to campus, Swinney frequently gave Fuller updates on Watson’s progress, on the field and in the classroom, as if Watson were Fuller’s son. But Fuller mostly watched Watson from afar, from the same seats that his father had sat in when he played.

    Injuries, most notably a torn anterior cruciate ligament, cut short Watson’s freshman season, but he impressed his coaches with his maturity, decision-making and athleticism. Fuller noticed his poise under duress.

    In early October, Fuller watched from the stands with his college teammate Jeff Bostic as Watson accounted for all three Clemson touchdowns in a close win over Notre Dame, in what was perhaps Clemson’s most important game of the regular season. Bostic leaned over and asked Fuller if Clemson could retire No. 4 twice. He chuckled to make clear that he was joking.

   But perhaps Bostic had a point. “He would certainly be deserving of it when he’s done,” Fuller said of Watson. “Knock on wood. Hopefully we’ve got a lot of good things left to come.”

———

     Schools differ in how they honor the numbers of their football heroes. Alabama has never retired a number. Florida State retires jerseys but allows the numbers to be reused. 

     Of the schools who recruited Watson, only Clemson had retired No. 4, so once Fuller gave his blessings, it essentially leveled the playing field. Wherever he went, Watson could keep the number he wore for the Gainesville High Red Elephants.
     I don't know if No. 4 was even a factor in Watson's college decision, but it was a nice trump card for Clemson to be able to play. And of all the inducements a hotshot recruit may be offered, a special jersey number is pretty honorable.
     But the question remains: By bringing No. 4 out of retirement, has Clemson taken anything away from Fuller? Not as long as kids see the patch on Watson's shoulder and ask Granddaddy, "Who's Fuller?"

Steve Fuller against Notre Dame in 1977

     Oh, little Tiger, let me tell you about Steve Fuller. His team was the first from Clemson to beat Georgia "between the hedges," which were planted way back in 1929. Beat uppitty Georgia Tech in Atlanta back when they almost never came up to Clemson. Nearly beat Joe Montana and Notre Dame's 1977 national championship team. Beat Woody Hayes in the Gator Bowl. Fuller didn't do it by himself, of course, but he was the face of the program when Clemson decided to double-deck Death Valley and recruited many of the players who won the 1981 national championship.
     Little Tiger, don't you ever forget Steve Fuller.

     Retired numbers can be quickly forgotten. To prove my point, here's a pop quiz: See how many of these players you can name by their retired numbers:

Clemson: 4, 28, 66 (Hint: 66 is not William Perry).
Auburn: 7, 34, 88.
Florida State: 2, 16, 17, 25, 28, 34, 50 (Hint: 28 also had a profound impact on Watson's life).
Georgia: 21, 34, 40, 62.
South Carolina: 2, 37, 38, 56.

     Can you even pick out the seven Heisman Trophy winners on that list? (Answers below)

An Orange Bowl reminder of Fuller's first juggernaut

Before he was No. 4, Steve Fuller wore 11 at Spartanburg High

      I was away at Missouri or busy at the office during Fuller's career at Clemson, and the only time I remember seeing him play in person was in 1974, when he was quarterback of the Spartanburg High School team that regularly put 70 on the scoreboard and set a state record for points in a season. 
     And when I saw Watson and defensive MVP Ben Boulware on the podium after the Orange Bowl, it brought back a special memory. Boulware is a graduate of my high school, T.L. Hanna—the team that stopped Fuller's Spartanburg juggernaut.
     Thanks for the memories, Ben and Deshaun.
     Congratulations, Steve. This one's for you.

T.L. Hanna graduate Ben Boulware (Miami Herald photo)

RETIRED NUMBERS

Clemson: 4-Steve Fuller, 28-C.J. Spiller, 66-Banks McFadden.
Auburn: 7-Pat Sullivan, 34-Bo Jackson, 88-Terry Beasley.
Florida State: 2-Deion Sanders, 16-Chris Weinke, 17-Charlie Ward, 25-Fred Biletnikoff, 28-Warrick Dunn, 34-Ron Sellers, 50-Ron Simmons.
Georgia: 21-Frank Sinkwich, 34-Herschel Walker, 40-Theron Sapp, 62-Charlie Trippi.
South Carolina: 2-Sterling Sharpe, 37-Steve Wadiak, 38-George Rogers, 50-Mike Johnson.

Heisman Trophy winners are underlined. Conspicuously absent from that list are the 2010 and 2014 Heisman winners, Auburn's Cam Newton and FSU's Jameis Winston.