2024

Writing from my tent while listening to the rain. I slept quite well in the shelter last night. I was pretty tired so I mostly slept through the night. We woke up to our alarms at 6:45 and had eaten breakfast and packed up our stuff by 8. We were planning to hike over 25 miles so the slightly early start was necessary.  Most of the morning was drizzling rain so we had our rain gear on. With the weather and the lower elevation of the trail we didn’t have a ton of views. Just easy miles. We passed a few waterfalls and streams in the morning.  We stopped for lunch at Moreland Gap Shelter just before noon. Pyro, the guy who we met at the shelter last night, caught up and we talked to him for a while during lunch.  After lunch we kept moving and had some views of the surrounding mountains before dropping down into the valley where the flowers have started blooming.  Eventually we hiked down to Laurel Fork Falls, a very impressive waterfall for a relatively small stream....

Writing from The Station, a hostel just off trail where we stopped for lunch and to grab our resupply to get us to Damascus VA. Last night was very windy and chilly. The base temperature probably didn’t get below 30 degrees but there was a constant 15-20 mile an hour wind all night. I had one of my tent stakes in pretty soft ground and the wind pulled it out twice over the course of the night. Waking up with your tent on top of you is not a fun way to wake up. After the second time I found a big rock and put it on top of the problem tent stake. This fixed the problem for the rest of the night.  Since we only had 7 miles to make it down to the hostel for our resupply, we took our tents down and skipped breakfast to start hiking around 8:30. We had to get moving since the wind was strong and cold. We spent the first hour of the day going up and over Hump Mountain and finishing off the Roan Highlands. It was beautiful but there were wind gusts as high as 70mph. Wind that strong with 3...

Writing from my tent while hunkered down and listening to the wind.   I slept decently last night. Not great but I probably had 6-7 hours of sleep in total. The moon was incredibly bright, which doesn’t really make it harder for me to sleep. I usually just put the hood of my down jacket over my eyes anyway. The morning was very cold so despite waking up at 6:30, I didn’t get out of my sleeping bag until almost 8. By then most of the 20 degree weather had passed and the day was starting to warm up.   After the morning warmed up we had excellent weather for the rest of the day. Clear skies and 50 degrees.  We had a very slow start to the day. We hiked about a mile before 10AM when we had warmed up enough to stop for breakfast. I think we all want to get moving a little earlier in the morning so we have more time to hike and make it to camp before dark. We will probably start setting alarms.  We hiked up Roan High Knob for most of the morning. Roan Knob is over 6,0...

Writing from my tent after hiking 20 miles and finishing one of the hardest mountains between the end of the Smokies and Virginia. I didn’t sleep well last night since there was a lot of noise in the shelter and from the rain. It poured all night. And with 6 people in a shelter there’s bound to be snoring and a lot of shuffling around. I probably managed to sleep for around 4 hours. After the sun rose, Tyler was able to check the weather and see that the rain was supposed to slow down around 8:30AM. So we took our time getting ready and eating breakfast. The rain did let up and we started hiking just before 9.  There was one very strange thru hiker at the shelter last night. He was friendly but definitely a strange character. The other two people were very nice section hikers.  Once we started moving the first 10 miles up Unaka Mountain went pretty quickly. Unaka was challenging because we had to ascend for the entire 10 miles, so there is very little break. To make things har...