The Kneverest Hall of Fame

Elk Knob beckons from my bedroom window (I need to call the tree-trimmers).

 I've had my eyes on Elk Knob since we built our mountainside house in Boone in 2005. On Thursday, March 26th, 2026, I celebrated my 300th hike up the mountain.
 In 2007, I answered a call for volunteers to help build a hiking trail to the summit. My first climb followed a steep old Jeep trail where realtors once tried to sell mile-high views. Thankfully, the lots were never developed, and the state of North Carolina acquired the land in 2003 to become Elk Knob State Park.
 The original superintendent, Larry Trivette, envisioned a walkable trail to the top, and we agreed to build it by hand, rather than scarring the mountainside with a bulldozer or backhoe. I was among the volunteers who came every Saturday to carve out the trail. Each year, we completed about a half mile of trail. On fall Saturdays, I brought a radio and we worked to the tune of Armanti Edwards as hacked stumps, leveraged boulders, and poured gravel on the muddy spots. After quitting time, if I wasn't too sore or exhausted, I trudged up the old jeep road to reward myself with the hundred-mile view.
 We completed the trail on Sept. 4, 2011, which was my 29th ascent. I reached No. 100 in 2019, No. 200 in 2023, and No. 300 in 2026. Could I reach 400 this year? Why not, now that I'm retired? Why not do two a day? I know of a Holocaust survivor in Phoenix named Sam Wagman, who climbed Camelback Mountain three times a day, six days a week, for 37 years, setting a world record with 34,000 climbs. His record is safe with me. 

I had the honor of dumping the last load of gravel on the Elk Knob trail in 2011.

 "Groundhog Day" is celebrated at Gobblers Knob, and Elk Knob has become my personal #GroundhogDay. Wake up and do it again. With a few excuses, I've missed only four months for the past 10 years. My streaks reached 48 consecutive months before the park was closed in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic, then another 54 months before we were gutted by Hurricane Helene. Until that seven-week shutdown, I was on pace to tally 70 hikes in my 70th year.
 Why, you ask? That's what they asked George Mallory in 1924 before his ill-fated climb of Mount Everest. "Because it's there," he declared.
 Why do I come back, month after month? Elk Knob is not Everest, but it's high enough—one of the 52 highest peaks in North Carolina. The view is always nice. Hiking is healthy and seems to keep my diabetes at bay. (If you want to impress your cardiologist, send him a summit photo five days after he put stents in your heart.) I like to stay acquainted with the wildflowers. I feel a sense of ownership in the park and trail. I confess to being obsessive. 

The elevation is actually 5,558.

 And I'm over halfway to a Hall of Fame. The International Poly-Baggers Hall of Fame recognizes peak-baggers who have climbed the same mountain 500 times. This is an online club based in Wales. When and if I get there, maybe they'll let me rename the club into something that fits in an obituary. My favorite so far is the "Neverest" Hall of Fame. Or in the case of Elk Knob, we could borrow the silent K and call it Kneverest.
 Elk Knob is a 4-mile round trip with 1,000 feet of elevation gain from the parking lot. By mountain-climbing standards, it's a humble ascent. My usual round trip takes a little over two hours. Some people can run a marathon faster than that. My fastest climb was 52 minutes at age 57. I've walked over 1,200 miles on "my" trail.
 Do I have the record for Elk Knob climbs? Maybe. There is another man who hikes as often as I do, but he does not keep count. Others have done more on other peaks, like Mount Le Conte. 
 If hikes were stackable, like shoeboxes, my 300 would rise 300,000 feet, which would approach the Kármán Line, the brink of outer space, over 10 times higher than Everest and a quarter of the way to the international space station. 

Elk Knob in Bloom

Last Gray's lily of the season (6/26/2024)

Same plant (2023)

 Elk Knob is a mile-high mountain in Watauga County, North Carolina, just 15 miles from my doorstep in Boone. It's been a state park since 2003, and for several years in my 50s I volunteered to help build the hiking trail to the summit. I try to hike at least once a month, often after work on summer evenings.

 The masthead of this blog shows the sun rising over Elk Knob, with a photo taken from adjacent Snake Mountain.  

 In 2024, my 70th year, my goal was to "hike my age"—70 trips to the summit. I was on pace to make it until Hurricane Helene struck and closed the state park for six weeks. In December, I hit 65, but the mountain and I were under the weather for the rest of my 70th year.

 This goal put me on the trail several times a week, so to keep the trips from getting tedious, I given them a purpose—this wildflower journal. I'm no authority on wildflowers, just learning on the way.

 The big show on Elk Knob is in June. In 2024, flame azalea bloomed June 6-20 and Gray's lilies June 8-26. These quickly dried up, and by the end of the month, pollinators were grazing on the drooping leftovers.

 Turk's Cap lilies were in bloom through July, along with coneflowers and turtleheads and the relentless purple Angelica. 

 Elk Knob is one of the few places in the world where you can see Gray's lily. They are named for Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who happened to be on Roan Mountain when they bloomed in 1840. 

 My experience is that if you're a day early or a day late, you may miss them. These perennials are also ephemerals. 

 For the past three years, I've taken an informal census of the Gray's lilies on Elk Knob. This year, I found 17 plants and 18 blossoms (plus more than a dozen lilies that never blossomed). Last year, 10 plants and 17 blossoms. In 2022, I did not count plants but found 12 blossoms. These are just plants I find along the trail, plus a couple of off-trail locations that I know. Certainly, there are many more elsewhere on the mountain, but this trailside sample gives me an indication that the population on Elk Knob is stable.

 As perennials, Gray's lilies can be found in the same place year after year. Also, wildlife scatter the seed to new locations. We evidently lost one lily, which had six blossoms last year but did not reappear in 2024. It was in the midst of the blighted beech forest, so it might have been crushed by a falling tree or nibbled by a deer. 

 Almost all these lilies were above 5,000 feet in elevation. There is one outlier at 4,600 feet, but it is too close to the trail and lost its bud to a broken stem for the second year in a row.

June 2024 was unusually cool and dry, though we were in the clouds on 6/17.

Seed capsule from the above flower (7/23/2024, later mowed down by trail workers)

What ESPN missed in Boone

 When ESPN brought their #GameDay show to Boone on September 17, 2022, we were suddenly the center of the college football solar system. 

 Welcome to the Town of Boone, as the signs say. We are incorporated as a town (kinda like Clemson) because we're not comfortable being a city. (Gameday was in Clemson Oct. 1, so ESPN may need an alternate version of their theme song: "We're coming ... to your cit-ay!") We are home to 20,000 students and roughly the same number of townies and snowbirds. We ain't as quaint as we used to be, but we're more than a craft brewery with a vexxing football team.

 Clemson has Howard's Rock. Boone has Howards Knob (which would have amused the not-so-bashful baron of Barlow Bend). Clemson had Chase Brice. Now, we do.

 As ESPN sought flights to Boone (you're not from around here, are you?), GameDay commissioned an introductory video essay by Wright Thompson, a sportswriter who graduated from the Missouri J-school a generation after me. It went like this:

 Welcome to Boone, North Carolina.
 Welcome to a post-card, hippy, outdoorsy, football town.
 Welcome to, "This town is nuts." My kind of place—I don't ever want to leave town, "I need a miracle" ... mountain-bike, parking lot, French-bread pizza town.
 Eric Church Town, Class of 2000.
 Welcome to Giant-Slayer Town. Cold-beer, thin-air, Gameday town. Cameron Peoples' town.
 Ask Michigan about the real victors? [Clip from 2007: "The Mountaineers of Appalachian State have just beaten the Michigan Wolverines!"]
 Ask the Aggies? [Clip from last week: "Appalachian State has done it again!"]
 Have you ever seen the Blue Ridge Mountains, boy? And the Chattahoochee? And the honeysuckle blue?"
 Welcome to Boone, North Carolina. Upset town, USA.

 I don't know Wright Thompson. He was born in 1976, the same year I enrolled at Mizzou. Wikipedia tells me that he grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi (home of the Delta blues), was a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and is a senior writer for ESPN.com. Folks in Ireland criticized him for stereotyping Dublin in a story on fighter Conner McGregor.
 I enjoyed his book, The Barn, which deals the lynching of Emmett Till and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. Growing up nearby in the Mississippi Delta, Thompson went to a white-flight segregation academy.
 I'll extend him some grace, just as he writes of how Till experienced God's grace. In this case he demonstrates only a superficial acquaintance with the town of Boone (as opposed to Boone County, where we both went to college).
 Fact-check: The Chattahoochee is a river in Atlanta, far-far from Boone. Thompson may have been thinking of the Chattooga, based on the video clip of whitewater rafters, but that's another remote corner of the North Carolina mountains, a long drive from Boone. The next-to-last paragraph is a verse from a Drivin' N' Cryin' song called Honeysuckle Blue. Jason Isbell once performed the song in Boone, but otherwise it doesn't speak for us.
 Here's how this Mizzou writer might have put it:

 Welcome to Boone, NC, 3333.
 Welcome to a town that's been center-stage before. Have you forgotten that we had our own Super Bowl commercial? We're the home of Foggy Pine Books: "Between the Baptist Church and the Boone Saloon." Thanks, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Sam Elliott!*
 Did you assume we had an airport? You're not from around here, are you? Looking for a Home Depot, the sponsor of GameDay? Sorry, but you'll have to go off the mountain. Looking for a Pizza Hut, the official pie of GameDay? We lived without a hut for years, but we opened a take-out location just in time for GameDay. Nor do we have a Target, nor a corporate steakhouse.
 We're glad we put in the four-lane highway a few years ago, so the GameDay bus could get here.
 Stop by the Chamber of Commerce. The director is the guy who brought you the call from the Big House. Moonlighting for ESPN3, he was also on the call for the Miracle on the Mountain II.
 You do remember the original Miracle on the Mountain, don't you? It involved a goof-up by the current Florida coach, Billy Napier, the lead singer for Needtobreathe, Bear Rinehart (named for Bear Bryant), and a little overthinking by Furman coach Bobby Lamb (who was raising a future Appalachian quarterback, Taylor Lamb, who nearly slayed Tennessee).
 We're not just a beer-swilling hippy town, boy. This is God's country. We're home to world-changing charities: Samaritan's Purse, World Medical Mission, and Wine to Water. GameDay actually had a campfire sound-byte from the co-founder of World Medical Mission, but they seemed not to realize that his world is far bigger than football.
 The real miracle on the mountain is that about 200 million children worldwide have gotten Christmas gifts via Operation Christmas Child from right here in Boone.
 You do know the riddle of 3333, right? At the top step of the Watauga County Courthouse, the elevation above sea level is 3,333. The altitude of the field at Kidd Brewer Stadium is actually about 3,250, which gives us the highest football field in the east (except for Avery County High School, 3,760). That accounts for the thin air Thompson mentioned. We put up the 3333 signs to intimidate our short-winded guests. Bobby Cremins, who used to coach basketball up here, once brought a team from Charleston to Boone and told his players not to worry about the thin air, since they were playing indoors!
 As you leave the mountain today, please choose and cut your own Christmas trees.
 If you call us App-Elation, mean it like this.

*Appalachian State also had a video of infamy back in 2005, back when Armanti Edwards was just a twinkle in our eye. He could have been a defensive back at South Carolina, but instead he chose a place that was HOT-HOT-HOT!

 Here's a list of Gameday locations since the show premiered in 1993 at South Bend, Indiana. Notable campuses that have never hosted GameDay: Illinois, Maryland, Rutgers, Virginia, and Syracuse. Back in 1869, Rutgers staged the very first college football game, but ESPN wasn't around then.
 Duke missed its chance in 1942, when the Rose Bowl was played in Durham, but marked GameDay off its bucket list in 2023. Other Johnnies-come-lately are Kansas and Montana State in 2022, James Madison in 2023, Cal in 2024, and Vanderbilt in 2025.