Sam’s Knob Trail, Pisgah National Forest

Feb 1 2025

Sam’s Knob for sunrise: the goal motivated me to wake at 4am, drive nearly an hour, and hit the trail by 5:30. When I first started hiking, the sky was so dark that I couldn’t make out the silhouettes of the mountains around me. Every visual reference point blended into a solid black, as if I moved through a vacuum. 

Darkness can intimidate. I remember the first few nights I spent in the wilderness and how unsettled I felt, unable to see everything around me. The lack of sight equated to a lack of control: it rendered me defenseless to the danger that, I was certain, lurked all around me. The more time I’ve spent out in nature, however, the more comfortable I’ve become. Whether that’s with the danger that lurks in the dark, or with my own defenselessness, I don’t know. 

This morning, I kept my headlamp on the lowest setting possible so I could experience the all-consuming darkness. Only a gentle red glow illuminated my path, helping me dodge the patches of ice that lingered from the last freeze. Outside of my two-foot range of vision, night hemmed in on me. It held a presence all its own — my only companion this morning. I could feel its weight like an arm cast around my shoulders. 

Stars popped the amorphous black above me with sharp pricks of white. I had never seen stars with such intense clarity, their light hot like a welder’s arc. A regal silhouette of a red spruce rose up ahead of me. The pointed tip of the evergreen crested into a cluster of stars, making a crown for itself. I turned my headlamp up to take a picture. Artificial light flooded in and stole the shadows’ subtle magic, but I lifted my phone up to capture the scene anyway. 

Mid-click of the camera, my headlamp suddenly dimmed. Confused, I turned it off then back on to full brightness. Again, it flicked back into a lower setting after only a second. Was that a fluke? Off, back on, dim. Off, back on, dim. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I realized that this could only mean one thing: low battery. 

For years of hiking and backpacking, I had managed to avoid this rookie mistake. I dutifully charged my headlamp before every trip and it had never died on me. Well… at least both those things were true before today. I hadn’t charged it for this short hike because I thought it still had plenty of battery from my last overnight trip. I had completely forgotten that I used it on a night hike with friends a couple weeks back.

Shit shit shit. I looked at the icy, dark trail before me and panic invaded my body. I turned on the flashlight of my phone and rigged it upright with the zipper of my jacket pocket. Holding my breath, I took a step. The phone slipped back into the pocket and obscured the light. Pathetic. I switched to gripping the phone along with my trekking pole in one hand and relying mostly on the pole in my other hand for balance. I lurched forward, awkward and unstable, but managed to keep moving. I stubbornly increased my speed and fumed with every step: stupid ice, stupid phone, stupid light. At the heart of everything, though, was my stupid mistake. That was the biggest frustration of all. 

The patches of ice grew denser. I hopped up onto the grassy berm to step around a particularly large frozen section, only to return to the trail and find another. Soon, thick ice covered every inch of trail. It formed a single, slippery mass of luminescent white, stretching out before me like a luge track. To my left, I could hear a massive waterfall tumbling down into a deep holler — a slip here could be fatal. I stopped in my tracks. 

God, this SUCKS! Again, I cursed the situation, but I was really cursing myself. I came out here for a unique adventure, but I screwed it all up. I forgot a gear essential, underestimated the conditions, and put myself in a dangerous situation. And since I chose to come out here alone, I had to get myself out of this. I threw my pack down on the side of the trail then followed suit, frustrated and fed up. 

I contemplated turning around. Even though the stretch I had already traveled was treacherous, at least it was a known entity. The trail going forward could be worse. Still, I felt a pang of disappointment. That was a lot of effort for no summit sunrise. I buried my head in my hands.

After a moment of pouting, I lifted my gaze up. Everything was still shrouded in darkness, but I noticed the slightest change: in the few minutes that had passed, the sky had lightened by a single shade. Instead of flat black, it now showed a deep indigo. I felt my mind go suddenly quiet, my gripes expelled by curiosity. I sat stock-still, as if any tiny movement might scare the color away. With bated breath, I watched as night disrobed into day.

Indigo shifted to a steely navy; navy paled to grey backlit by a tinge of blue. Clouds had formed a wooly sheet that snuffed out the golds of sunrise, yet this dawn captivated me all the same. I felt like I had snuck into a private dress rehearsal: without the main act, I could study the subtleties up close. Each passing minute brought a new shade, seamless yet distinct from the one before. I savored every step of this dance from black to blue.

When I finally pulled out of my reverie, I saw how these first hints of morning had transformed the world around me. The sky’s nascent glow filtered across the trail and brushed everything with its faint illumination. The dark edges of every rock and tree now softened, feathered with blue light.

Suddenly, the path ahead didn’t look so daunting. I rose as if spellbound. As light continued to build, I walked on, eyes towards the sky that guided me.