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Outside Magazine September 2003

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Eric Rudolph Slept Here
The most wanted man in America survived five years in the North Carolina woods, eating salamanders, sleeping on the cold ground, and stalking deer. Or so he says. Spend a night in his secret mountain hideaway and you get the feeling there's more to this story.

By Bruce Barcott


	Sweet home Nantahala: The summer camp of bombing suspect Eric Rudolph, uncovered on the edge of Murphy, North Carolina. The tomato may be a memento from one of his dumpster-diving excursions. (Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)

"MAN COULD LIVE A LONG TIME IN THESE WOODS." Richard Farner says, pausing to lean against a red oak and light a cigarette. "If he knew what he was doing."

Deep in the foggy mountains of western North Carolina, Farner and I are picking our way up a steep, wooded slope marked off with police tape. "It's no big deal, surviving out here," Farner tells me. "There's plenty to eat. Bear, boar, deer, coon, possum, turkey, squirrel. Look there," he says, pointing to a spot where some critter has dug up the leafy forest floor. "There's some old hog roots."

Farner is a wire-thin hunting guide who's stalked game in these woods since he was seven. He's 52 now, but doesn't look a day over 90. He keeps his salt-and-pepper hair bunched in a ponytail, chain-smokes GT One Lights, and views the world through ghostly blue eyes. A tattoo on his right forearm reads tennessee. On his left: HILL BILLY.

It's early June, a little over a week since the capture of Eric Robert Rudolph, the 36-year-old accused serial bomber who, from January 1998 to May 2003, eluded one of the most intense manhunts in United States history by disappearing into the southern Appalachian wilderness. Farner and I are clawing up this muddy hollow to find Rudolph's last known hideout and explore the question of the moment: How did he do it? After his capture, Rudolph told the authorities about two of his forest sanctuaries. His so-called summer camp sat in a beech stand on a hill a couple of hundred yards off Interstate 74, on the edge of the small mountain town of Murphy, in Cherokee County. His more remote winter camp was secreted in the steep, laurel-covered mountains nine miles east of Murphy, in the 530,000-acre Nantahala National Forest. After his arrest, Rudolph reportedly told his jailers that he'd survived on his own, eating salamanders and acorns, and that life on the lam was like a rugged five-year camping trip. The FBI isn't so sure. Following Rudolph's capture, federal agents continued combing the hills and grilling the locals, looking for more camps and evidence that might implicate an accomplice—or accomplices—who aided and abetted the fugitive's flight from justice.

Farner and I didn't even try to get to the off-limits summer camp, where evidence is still being processed. But the feds have finished their search of Rudolph's winter camp—on Tarkiln Ridge, a little-used cut of national forest in the Fire's Creek recreation area—which is where we've headed.

With a little snow, Tarkiln Ridge would qualify as a black-diamond run: It's relentlessly steep. After locating the FBI's trail and hiking about a half-mile and 700 vertical feet up the ridge, we reach a slight break in the slope. Here lie the remains of Rudolph's winter camp, a collection of small living stations scattered over an acre of terrain, camouflaged by patches of hemlock and laurel. At the camp's lowest point, a small rock outcropping serves as a storm shelter and sentry post. (An assault rifle was recovered here—a Belgian .223 FN/FAL, according to one report.) Two pits, which apparently served as food caches, are dug into the hillside; one is two feet deep, the other goes more than five feet down. Federal investigators emptied both but left behind an enormous spill of the grain that Rudolph allegedly stole from a farming operation near the Andrews-Murphy airfield.

Farner scoops some up. "Feed corn," he says. "Rye. Clay peas."

A boulder the size of a tractor-trailer marks the upper limit of the camp. Just below it sits Rudolph's fireplace. The fugitive had dug a bench into the hillside and inlaid it with 20 pieces of flat, blue-gray slate. The bench was constructed with painstaking care. I've seen sloppier inlay work done at $75 an hour.

I sit on the fireplace and sketch the camp. Farner lights a smoke and joins me. He nudges a pebble of coal out of Rudolph's small fire pit and looks puzzled.

"Five years," he says, "and that's all the ashes they is?"

The scene around us throws doubt on Rudolph's contention that he spent half a decade alone in the woods—or at least that he spent most of it here. There's no latrine, no animal bones. I've read that Rudolph's pit caches held 50 to 100 pounds of grain, which itself raises a question.

"That feed comes in 50-pound sacks," says Farner. "Can you figure him carrying a 50-pound sack up that ridge?"

Well, maybe. It's only a six-mile hike from the airfield to here, and nothing says Rudolph couldn't have dumped half the sack before making the trip. Other things don't add up, though. At one point, while I circle the remains of Rudolph's fire, a low-hanging branch slaps me in the throat. The branch would have nailed Rudolph—who at five foot eleven is five inches shorter than me—square in the eyes.

"If you stayed here, how many times would that branch hit you before you cut it off?" Farner asks. And what about that bench, which is just right for two people: Did Rudolph have guests? Farner draws on his cigarette, exhales, and spits. "He didn't do this alone," he says. "That man had help."

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Contributing editor BRUCE BARCOTT wrote about the Chalillo Dam in May 2003.

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