By Adam Orr
Staff Writer


For more than 30 years, Spartanburg’s Steve Oliphant has made it a habit of trudging up, over and through some of eastern America’s toughest terrain in the Great Smoky Mountains.

The 57-year-old recently completed his third “map” — or complete circuit of every mile of hiking trail within the park — and said he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Each full circuit through the park, which sits in both North Carolina and Tennessee, requires roughly 850-900 miles of strenuous off-road trekking, which takes hardcore hikers like Oliphant months or years to complete.

The Smoky Mountains Hiking Club’s Ramsay Roth said Oliphant is one of just 21 people to hike every inch of the park’s trails three times.

“I guess it’s in my blood,” Oliphant said. “I hope to be doing this the rest of my life.”

Ancient playground

Stretching anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours from Spartanburg, the network of hiking trails that span the Great Smoky Mountains National Park reach nearly all corners of the massive 800-square-mile public park.

The National Park Service estimates the ridges and valleys that comprise the park may have formed some 200-300 million years ago, and it’s home today to more than 19,000 documented species.

The rough, rain-soaked lands provided refuge to American Indian tribes for centuries before the arrival of European settlers in the 1700s.

The National Park Service said a long tradition of self-sufficiency gave way to logging boom towns before the park was finally established in 1934 and closed off to habitation.

From that point, road building throughout the park slowed, and its network of hiking trails and back country activities like camping and fishing came to the fore.

Oliphant said he practically grew up with the park, traveling there with his parents to hike on occasion, but the seeds for seriously attacking the park’s trails came when he was in high school in 1977 after reading a newspaper article that recounted the journey of Margaret Stevenson and Elgin Kintner, the first couple to fully hike the park’s trail system.

“I knew right then that was something I wanted to do,” Oliphant said.

So he got started at age 17 and expanded on their footsteps in following years.

‘Just stay with it’

The Smoky Mountains Hiking Club was founded in 1995 by mountain meanderers and hiking buffs as a way to promote, protect and preserve the national park and surrounding areas.

Roth said the park offers a wondrous diversity of life, along with well-maintained and signed trails that can be repackaged and hiked in creative sequences to keep them challenging. There’s also seasonal changes and the ability to set and meet a challenging goal in hiking all the park’s trails.

For Oliphant, that 900-mile dream became a reality at the age of 50, after more than three decades of dedicated work on the trails.

Most of that mileage was tackled during one or two extended day hikes per month, where Oliphant would make the trek from Hub City to Western North Carolina, he said.

Some years he only accumulated 50 or 60 miles in the park as he traveled from his job in Texas to visit his parents back east.

“But the point is to just keep going,” Oliphant said. “Just stay with it.”

He picked up that pace to 450-500 miles per year beginning in 2014, a pace that has allowed him to complete two more “maps” over the past four years.

At the conclusion, there’s usually a pole celebration where club members raise their trekking poles overhead, an homage to military saber arches and as a salute to new “900-mile club” members.

For Oliphant, reaching another milestone is nice, but he’s in it for the journey.

Oliphant said he’s seen plenty of sunrises, sunsets, had several hundred run-ins with black bears and a even a handful of rattlesnakes.

None of those are memories he said he’d trade.

He said the nature of hiking also means it can be scaled for nearly all ages and difficulties, and the Smokies’ trail system can be adapted to most experience levels.

Oliphant said some members of the group’s “900-mile club” had never set foot on a single trail before their 60s.

“Some have hiked into their 90s,” Oliphant said. ” I hope I have another 25 or 30 years in me.”