Fourteen Students, One Mountain, and a Cottonmouth We Didn’t Plan For
The best trips don’t announce themselves. On April 18th, 14 other UNC students and I piled into cars, half running on coffee and half last-minute packing before our camping trip to Hanging Rock State Park. Somewhere between the school parking lot and the trees off Highway 89, the week started to fall off our shoulders. By the time we crossed into the park, the conversation had already shifted. Less about exams. More about whether anyone remembered to bring a lighter.
Camp came together fast. Fourteen of us, in a tangle of straps and stuff sacks, made a stand of trees into prime real estate within about ten minutes. Most of the group strung up hammocks, and we ended up with something I’ve started thinking of as a hammock village. Everyone is in their own pocket of forest, but close enough that a joke from one corner ripples through the whole cluster. There’s an intimacy to it that a row of hammocks tents can’t quite match.
After setting up camp, the plan was simple: Get to the top of Hanging Rock before the sun goes down. The trail had other ideas. It climbs hard through rhododendron and rock, the kind of grade that makes the back of the group go quiet while the front keeps insisting we’re “almost there.”
We weren’t almost there. But we made it.
And then, halfway up, the trip handed us its first surprise. A cottonmouth, coiled just off the trail, completely unbothered. We did what you do: backed off, kept our voices down, and let a few people with steadier hands get photos. Nobody got close. Nobody got bitten. The snake went on being a snake, and we went on being grateful for the reminder that we were guests out there, not residents.
The summit delivered. That last scramble onto the rock face opens up into a view that makes you stop talking for a second. The Sauratown range rolling out underneath us, the Piedmont fading into haze, and the sun doing exactly what we’d hiked up there to watch it do. Fourteen people, sitting on warm stone, not saying much. That’s the part you can’t manufacture.
Back at camp, dinner was a beautiful disaster. A pot of ramen on a backpacking stove, an assembly line of PB&Js, a stack of ham and cheese sandwiches put together with the kind of efficiency you only get when everyone is hungry. No one was filming it. No one needed to.
What I’ll remember about that night is what happened after the food. The fire, the conversations that wandered from dumb jokes to the kind of honest stuff that only seems to come out under a sky that dark. You can plan a trip down to the minute and never engineer those hours. They just show up, and they only show up when you’ve made the room.
That’s the part of the community that gets talked about a lot and is built rarely. We built some of it that night.
Morning came, and so did the weather. The first drops hit the rainflies around dawn, and within twenty minutes we were in full breakdown mode, wrestling wet hammocks into stuff sacks and laughing at how thoroughly we’d been outvoted by the forecast. Nobody complained, which I think says something about the group. A soaked camp is a problem when you’re alone. With fourteen friends, it’s a story.
We caravanned back to campus muddy, tired, and a little bit changed. That’s what these trips do. You leave as a group of students who happen to share a school and you come back as something more like a small tribe.
I’m a National Park Trust Ambassador because I believe these places do something to people that classrooms can’t. Hanging Rock didn’t just give us a view. It gave us a night where phones lost their grip, where strangers became friends, and where a friend group became a community. Public lands are quietly in the business of making us better to each other, and the more students we can get into them, the better off we’ll all be.
