2024

Writing from another shelter, after hiking another 18.5 miles with excellent weather. Listening to barred owls in the distance.   I slept fine last night. Not good, not bad. But to be honest, for as cold as it was I’ll count that as a win.  The only other person in the shelter was a lady who was planning on getting off trail due to an Achilles tendon issue. We hung her food bag for her since she wasn’t planning on hanging it herself. I understand being injured but I still think bear safety is incredibly important. You know what’s worse than an Achilles strain? Being mauled by a bear. Now as I’ve previously said, bears are not a serious danger in the northeast but that doesn’t mean you should increase your chances of a negative bear encounter. Especially not at a shelter where you aren’t the only person staying.  We had a slower start to the day, only really getting on trail at like 8:30. The morning was very cold, and was below freezing until almost noon. However, we real...

  Writing from the upstairs of a shelter, finally warm and dry in my sleeping bag. I slept incredibly well last night. I fell asleep before 10PM and woke up just before 8AM. I haven’t slept that well in a while, even in a real bed.  We all slept in and got on trail around 9. Since we expected high winds and rain all day with a cold night to follow, we wanted to camp at lower elevation. This meant we either had to go 15.5 miles or 20.5 miles. In between the two campsites is Mt Albert, the 100 mile marker for the AT.  We set out and began ascending our biggest mountain yet, Standing Indian. This mountain is over 5,400 feet, but has a pretty gradual ascent. It was a good warmup for the day, even if it was mostly foggy on top. Most of the rest of the day we got poured on. So we put our heads down and kept moving. It was cold and wet enough that I wore my poncho most of the day to keep my core dry and warm. I don’t really mind hiking in the rain, but I always feel like I’m mis...

Writing while mostly dry inside my tent, listening to the rain fall in the rhododendrons around me. I didn’t sleep a ton last night but I honestly wasn’t that tired and the lack of sleep didn’t bother me at all today. I probably got 5-6 hours of sleep, not terrible. The pull out couch was plenty comfortable, and I felt very relaxed and well rested this morning. We took our time getting out of the hotel and made sure we had all of our stuff together. We took a 10:30 shuttle back to Dicks Creek Gap, where we had gotten off trail to go into Hiawasee. By 11 we were hiking in the rain and fog.  Not a ton to show for views today, the weather kept visibility short. We managed to cover 13 miles between 11 and 5:15. The miles were certainly not simple. We ascended 4485 feet and descended 2575 feet. I’m not sure if it was the rest in town or that my body is adapting to hiking all day, but the miles weren’t too bad today. Don’t get me wrong, I was very tired and ready to get to camp for the l...

Writing from a warm bed indoors, in a quiet climate controlled room.   Today was a pretty quick day. Something that sounded like a deer ran past our camp site around 11PM last night. Other than that I slept solidly through the night. I woke up around 6:30 and got out of my tent just in time to see the second half of the sunrise.  Compared to yesterday today’s 9 mile hike was a breeze. We were still recovering from the long day yesterday, so the 9 miles weren’t simple but we were highly motivated to get to town and eat some food.  The only major climb of the day was Kelly Knob. In the way up we had a cool view of the three mountains we climbed yesterday.  We were on top of Kelly Knob before 11, having covered 4.5 miles, half of our mileage for the day. However we had covered almost all of our ascent for the day. The final 4.5 miles were all down hill and we covered them in under an hour and a half. Yeah, we were pretty motivated to get into town. We had an awesome shu...

Writing while watching the sunset out of my tent, after stretching my legs very thoroughly and taking care of some well earned blisters. We all survived the cold last night. Actually I found it pretty nice. It’s always good being warm, but if a night only gets down to 45 degrees I sweat all night in my 20 degree sleeping bag. That was not the case last night. I was almost the perfect temperature for sleeping. Granted I did wear my down jacket, but if anything I was still too warm, not too cold. The moon has been incredibly bright every night so far. I don’t know where exactly it is in the cycle but it might as well be the sun for how bright it has been. Overall I was probably asleep for 7-8 solid hours last night between 10PM and 6AM. At 6 I stirred and saw some orange on the horizon so I quickly packed my things up so that I could check out the sunrise. It was definitely worth being a little cold and losing a little sleep.  After sunrise we headed down hill and stopped at a water ...