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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Primary-Pickle-3395 on 2025-09-22 16:54:09+00:00.

I don’t know if I’ve gone insane. I keep telling myself I’m writing this for anyone who likes to wander into the cosmos of their own mind like a warning, like a flare. Still, it could be me trying to pin the world to the page so it stops slipping.

Backpacking has always been my anchor. When I was a kid and everything got too loud, I’d take off into the woods behind our place in Georgia, walk until the cicadas turned into a single long sound and the air went cool under the trees. I liked how the forest swallowed noise. I liked how light got filtered through pine needles and spider silk. The Appalachians feel different than other places. It’s not quiet like a library. It’s peaceful, like the mountain is pushing its thumb on the pulse of the land and slowing down life.

Moving to Florida for work felt like getting relocated to a frying pan. Flat, hot, sticky. The air down here doesn’t move; it sits and sweats. I can’t see a horizon without a billboard stuck in it. But the mountains are only eight hours away if you leave in the dark and drive like your brain depends on it. So I do. I still do. Those trips back up to Georgia feel like going home to a version of myself I don’t have to explain.

We planned this two-day trip for the past month. Jake, Brandon, and I. I should say it now: my name is Hunter. Jake’s been my friend since we were dumb kids getting scraped up on BMX bikes. Ten years of knowing exactly how he’ll react before he does. He’s serious. Responsible but in that quiet way that makes you forget he’s always taking care of something. Brandon is a later addition. Jake’s buddy from college. Like a stray that started following us around and then refused to leave. Brandon’s the guy who always has a story, and it’s always half true, and the other half is the part that should have killed him. He recently dived into a hot tub at a party. He fractured two vertebrae, then stood up with his neck crooked, asking if anyone thought he needed a hospital. Somehow, he didn’t die from the break, and even more impressively, he is ready to join us on a hike again, only a year later. He brags about stealing Aldi steaks like it makes him an outlaw. He’s dumb lucky, and I never really liked him, but Jake did, so I put up with him constantly doing stupid shit.

Last trip out, Brandon tossed a lighter into the fire “as a joke,” and it popped and burned neat constellations into my tent fly. I patched them with clear tape like Band-Aids on a sky. For this trip, I went overboard with a new bag, a new headlamp, a new tent, and the best food possible. Two frozen steaks for the first night, wrapped in newspaper. A couple of astronaut ice creams that taste like powdered vanilla, but the nostalgia makes it worth it. I found a trail on Reddit that looked like a good one, with less traffic, better views, and steeper climbs than most routes. The thread had a poorly scanned topo map and a comment saying, “worth it,” which, in backpacker language, can cover anything from scenic to near-death.

I left on Friday before sunrise. Florida leaked away behind me in long, wet rectangles of light. By Valdosta, the air shifted. By Macon, the sky felt taller. Somewhere after Dahlonega, the hills heaved up into more than a slight hill that Florida calls a mountain, and my shoulders came down out of my ears. I called Jake outside Commerce, and he answered like I dragged him out of a pit.

“It’s Friday?” he croaked. “Shit. Meet me at my house.”

Jake wasn’t packed. Of course, he wasn’t. He had ramen and trail mix and nothing like a tent. I tossed him my spare because it’s easier than scolding him. We hit the grocery for fuel, and then Jake called Bill, our usual guy. Mushrooms were the plan. Instead, Bill said, “I’ve got something new.”

He held up a zip bag to the light: little translucent black gummies with gold flecks suspended inside, like someone had ground up a wedding ring and poured the glitter into jello. He called them stoppers. Said they froze time, but not in a DMT leave-your-body way. “You’re still in the world,” Bill said. “Just… the world gets slow. Sticky. Like the second refuses to change.”

Twenty bucks a pop. Twice the usual. Jake didn’t blink. My stomach did. Psychedelics in the backcountry are a dice roll on a good day; time dilation sounded like a dice roll with knives glued on. But I couldn’t stop staring at those gummies. The gold didn’t look like edible glitter. It looked like metal filings caught in a jellyfish. I said yes before I finished the thought.

We swung by Brandon’s. Like always, chaos. His parents were in the house yelling, their voices hitting that too-familiar pitch old arguments have, the one that sounds like a fly trapped between window and screen. Brandon was on the porch drinking from a tall can, laughing at nothing. He had his pack, though. Credit where it’s due. When we told him about the stoppers, he grinned like a kid and asked if he could take two.

“No,” I said, and slapped his hand when he pantomimed snatching the bag. “One each. We’ve only got enough for one a night apiece.”

He smiled like he agreed, and his eyes said I’ll do what I want.

Up 19 to side roads, the Corolla is complaining like grandpa about every pothole. We stopped at a crusty gas station because the tank light popped on. Four pumps, two dead, a buzzing fluorescent light, and a top sign with the “P” in “Pineview” burnt out, so it read “_ineview.” Two guys out front by the ice machine in those puffy jackets that always look damp and never look warm. One watched us while we pumped. He had that too-thin face and jittery jaw. He eased over when he saw the packs and asked, “You boys going up Asher Mountain?”

We nodded. He shook his head like we’d told him we were swimming across an interstate. “Don’t camp up there. Not at night. Nothing good in those woods.”

Brandon snapped without missing a beat. “We don’t have shit for you, get the fuck out of here.”

The guy’s mouth twitched. He spat near our boots and shuffled off, muttering. I told myself it was just the usual mountain lore. Appalachia collects stories like burrs collect pant legs. Every ridge has a thing, every hollow has a dead man’s name. I’ve hiked enough. I’ve never seen anything but bear scat and people’s trash.

The road into the trailhead turned to red clay and ruts. Rain earlier had slicked it to a paste that grabbed the tires and tried to kiss us into the ditch. Trees pressed close, pines and crooked oak, trunks dark with wet, beads of water trembling on leaves like held breath. The Corolla did that sideways slide a couple of times, where your heart falls through your feet, and then the tires grip and catch, and you pretend you didn’t almost die.

Trailhead: a tilted wooden post, a bullet-pocked sign, a pull-off with enough room for three cars if everyone likes each other. Gray light under the canopy. The kind of light where a camera would turn the world to fuzz. We lit a joint and passed it, the smoke cut with that wet-leaf smell that always smells like rot and home at the same time. Packs up. Hip belts buckled. Click click. That little happy clatter of metal on metal that means you’re about to disappear for a while.

I hadn’t hiked this path before. The Reddit map said “easy first half,” but either they were lying or the forest decided to express itself. It was narrow, overgrown, a buckthorn slapping trail. Little wet branches whipped our arms and laid cold lines of water across our sleeves. The ground was all roots and hidden holes. The climb hit quick, a steep switchback that woke the lungs like a slap. We fell into the usual pace while going up the steep inclines of the Appalachians. Pass the joint, cough, laugh, and pass the joint. No one is willing to stop smoking and admit that their lungs are on fire from the climb. I can’t complain, though, there isn’t anything better than the smell of smoke and pine sap. It was getting slippery, though, and the dirt tasted like iron when it sprayed up in your mouth after a slip.

Brandon dropped half the weed in a puddle and swore like we’d pushed him. “That was the good stuff, dude!”

“You didn’t buy it,” I said, but I was smiling because I was still soft enough to smile.

The fog rolled through in bands like ghost rivers. Sometimes it came up from the valley and slid through the trunks at knee height. Sometimes it hung in ragged sheets between trees, and you had to walk into it like a curtain into another room. When the wind pushed it, it went sideways, and the whole forest blurred like it needed to be wiped with a thumb.

By late afternoon, we climbed onto a ridge with a low rock outcrop. The view unfurled. Green layers of mountains, ridges stacked like old blankets, each one taller than the one in front of it. A vulture circled a lazy loop that made me jealous. I set up the little stove on the flat rock and thawed the steaks. The paper peeled off damp and left newsprint on the meat, which cooked away, and we pretended it made us smarter. Grease dripped, hissed, smelled like five stars. We ate steak and ramen and laughed at how good everything tastes when the air’s cold and you worked for it.

Then the sky started bleeding purple, and the trees went black before the ground did. That’s when I pulled the zip bag out. The stoppers shimmered in the firelight. The gold flecks woke up when the flames moved, pulsing like they were reacting.

“One each,” I said. I meant it like a command. Brandon gave me his wide smile,…

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