Near the 2026 Ides of March, as Spring began to awaken the Great Smoky Mountains, Rock Sprite and I set out together for a hike on the famous Porters Creek Trail, which eventually becomes a winding ribbon of rocks and earth and whispering rhododendron. The creek’s ample flow kept us company throughout, and nascent wildflowers pushed through the leaf litter under a crisp blue sky. Just before reaching our destination, Fern Branch Falls, a highlight of the journey included a lush, enchanted Appalachian forest understory completely blanketed by a dense carpet of what we later learned was Fringed Phacelia (Phacelia fimbriata). I’d heard them called “Small Baby Blue Eyes,” though I stand to be corrected by a botanist like my Central High schoolmate, Mike Blankenship.
Rock Sprite Kitty hiking the famous trail
This was Kitty’s first hike on Porters Creek, yet this wasn’t just another hike for a totally different reason. It was the same path that author, explorer, and adventurer Jenny Bennett followed on her final hike a decade ago, when her body was found near backcountry campsite 31 after environmental hypothermia claimed her life. Those who knew Jenny weren’t surprised that her body was found in one of the streams flowing from the flanks of Mount LeConte.
For the Honey Badger, who has now visited more than 2,250 waterfalls across the Southern Appalachians – of which 200 or more were first documented by him and Rock Sprite – the trail felt like a living bridge, a quiet concordance between Jenny’s indelible spirit and our shared quest for the wild.
Rock Sprite knows Jenny’s legend well. Both women excel at the same fierce off-trail climbs that define the Smokies’ hidden edges, pushing through rhododendron hells, scaling slick ledges, and finding routes where maps fear to tread. We both knew stories of Jenny’s tenacity, drawing parallels that made the miles feel even more connected.
My life first intertwined with Jenny’s at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, North Carolina, during Todd Ransom’s signing event for his 2014 guidebook, Waterfalls of Panthertown Valley. I’d just earned my trail name of Badger (née Honey Badger) after a pioneering bushwhack descent with Todd of the 200′ Flat Creek Falls, a roaring gauntlet of slick boulders, loose scree, and heavy spray from a 60′ tall rock feature called The Boss, which tested every ounce of our collective guile, determination, and perseverance.
At the event, Badger recognized Jenny, who, not surprisingly, had her own Panthertown adventure. She’d soloed to Dismal Falls in the remote Big Pisgah tract in the middle of winter, a daunting task for most hikers but merely a normal hike for Jenny into what writer Jim Bob Tinsley called “one of the most foreboding places in the Southern Appalachians.” With her signature wit, she described the unmarked manways, the slippery butt-glissades down slushy slopes, and her playful christening of an upstream cascade as Ethelred the Unready Falls—after the hapless Dark Ages king. “If there can be an Aunt Sally Falls,” she wrote in her blog, “why can’t there be an Ethelred Falls?” The waterfall is now known more generically as Trailside Falls, but her Ethelred name still felt truer and was adopted at her request by Badger, who is also known for a turn of a word himself.
Skeptical at first of this Badger guy, Jenny warmed as I shared tales of our waterfall odysseys, from frozen spectacles like Sculpted Falls to hidden drops in Big Pisgah that still bear the monikers we gave them. The conversation eventually and predictably turned to the possibility of future hikes together.
That day, I bought an autographed copy of her The Twelve Streams of LeConte (2014), a semi-autobiographical novel of a woman climbing Mt. LeConte’s twelve off-trail streams after heartbreak, interwoven with the suspense of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Her earlier mystery, Murder at the Jumpoff (2011), captured the same rugged Smokies terrain where she once roamed.
Jenny’s blog Endless Streams and Forests (2008–2015) remains a vivid chronicle of those journeys—Scotland’s Munros, Bolivia’s high passes, and always the Smokies she loved so fiercely. Her February 2014 Dismal Creek post brims with that same grit and humor: the frustration with surveyor’s tape, the “horribly lovely” Rhapsodie Falls, and the simple joy of naming something forgotten. Throughout her life, she carried that adventurous fire that has inspired countless explorers around the world.
Honey Badger (Thomas Mabry) and Rock Sprite (Kitty Myers)
Standing on the Porters Creek Trail late in the March afternoon – with Rock Sprite at my side – I felt Jenny’s presence in the creek’s persistent flow. Our paths are separated by years and circumstance, but now converged here, reminding me that these mountains bind us who crave discovery and find meaning in the places where people see from afar but very few actually visit.
Many of the HoneyBadgerImages are on display at instagram.com/honeybadgerimages.
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