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Summit,
Springer Mountain
This is Jason and me, standing on the very summit
of Springer Mountain and about to step off north towards Katahdin.
The preceding day was rain-filled and dreary, but the 20th of March, as
you can see, dawned bright and perfect. This
weather stayed with us for the next several weeks. |
 This was the view from our campsite on the third night of
the trail. Butterscotch pudding for
dessert, yum! |
 Jason was still breaking in a new pair of boots, and had
wicked awful blisters. He spent
almost an hour every morning -- for the entire first two weeks -- bandaging his
feet. |
 OK, so it rained one day in those first weeks.
We were lucky enough to find a shelter, and spent the night here.
This was a two-floor shelter, and it was PACKED with smelly thru-hikers.
One of the particular joys of thru-hiking the AT is learning what a
shelter full of 15+ sweaty, haven't-showered-in-days hikers can smell like on a
hot muggy spring afternoon. The AT
has about 200 of these shelters, with a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and
quality. Most thru-hikers spend
most of their evenings camping either in or in the immediate vicinity of one of
these shelters; the camaraderie, privy, water sources and definite legal camping
spot just make for a good daily goal. Pros:
no tent setup, no (wet) tent takedown in the AM.
Cons: noisy, smelly hikers
(see above), bugs, and a plethora of rodents crawling all over you.
Of course, it's impossible to hike the entire AT without camping away
from a shelter several times. Personally,
I seemed to enjoy staying IN shelters for the first half of the AT, and spent
most evenings on the second half of the AT sleeping in my tent off to the side
of a shelter. |
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This is the NC/GA border -- our second state!
Apparently the real sign gets stolen very often, so the spot is simply
marked by a metal pole nailed to a tree. Regardless
of the lack of pretty signage, we were excited:
one state down, 13 to go. |
This was our first -- and certainly not last -- snowstorm
of the AT. This is about two weeks
into the AT, the day after Easter. Maybe
my memories of those weeks of glorious sun were totally wrong.
In fact, we had a great deal of snow in the Smokies. |
 About once a week we would cross a road and walk or
hitchhike into a town. Most of
these town visits were planned, as was this foray into hiker-friendly Fontana
Dam, NC. Towns were a lot of fun,
and necessary for resupply. Every
thru-hiker needs to resupply from time to time, and there a variety of ways to
do it. Our approach was towards the
more-planning end of the spectrum, and while it worked pretty well, I'd plan
ahead a little bit less next time. We
packed about twenty boxes of food, left them at my parents' house, and had a
family member mail one box to a prearranged town at a prearranged date.
Because we never got ahead of our schedule, and kept in good touch with
my folks, it worked out well: we
would get to town during the day, find the post office, and there would be a big
box of food waiting for us. We
would then find the local grocery store to supplement our (often very boring)
maildrops. Jason and I had slightly different styles, but in general, we
did our best to get into town late morning our early afternoon, and would then
visit the PO, buy our groceries and whatever other supplies we needed, and then
find a hotel, hostel, campsite, etc to spend the evening.
Some towns are incredibly hiker friendly and have hostels located within
easy walking distance of many stores; others are larger and cater less to
hikers. I would definitely
recommend carrying (or at least reading before you hike) The Thur-Hiker's
Handbook by Wingfoot. You can
buy this at http://www.trailplace.com, I
believe.
In any case, this was the hiker hostel in which Jason and I
spent the evening in Fontana. When
you hike all day long, every day, you tend to develop voracious, insatiable
appetites. For dinner in Fontana we
each devoured a large pizza -- but about halfway through the pizza, we both
realized it wasn't going to be enough, so we each had some gorp, a bagel with
peanut butter, and then finished off the pizza.
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 Up in NH, where I'm from, rhododendron are small to medium
shrubs that people plant in front of their homes. In Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia (this photo was
taken in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park), rhododendron are huge, and
make for fantastic hiker tunnels. The
plants pictured here are over my head. |
The AT doesn't always meander through forests, as I soon
discovered. In and around the
Smokies, many mountains are "bald," or treeless. Some have been this way forever (there are a wide variety of
hypotheses as to why, ranging from lightning strikes to Native American burning)
and remain in this state naturally, while others, like Max Patch mountain near
Hot Springs, NC, are regularly mowed. |
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We camped on top of Max Patch, and were rewarded with a
glorious sunset. |
 Hot Springs, NC, is an incredibly hiker-friend town, with
helpful signs like this one pointing the way.
We spent the night at a fine place by the name of "Elmer's",
and Jason took in one of the local hot springs. The AT runs down Main Street of this tiny village. |
 As I mentioned previously, one of the best aspects of
camping at a shelter is the camaraderie. In
fact, for me, one of the best parts of the entire thru-hiking experience was
meeting, hiking with, and camping with a wide variety of wonderful, wonderful
people. At the Hogback Ridge
shelter near Erwin, Tennessee, we camped with a bunch of great folks: pictured
here are Jason, Gruff, Coppertop, and Count (or Batgirl, or Pooper, or...).
Oh yeah, and we all had "Trailnames."
Mine was Eggman, and Jason went by the lovely moniker of Shuteye.
In any case, I still maintain friendships with some of the hikers I met;
in fact, I thru-hiked the John Muir Trail in California with Gruff two years
after the AT. |
 For the first several weeks Jason and I shared one tent.
He carried the fly and poles, and I carried the other half (or was it the
other way around?). There became a
point, in southwestern VA, where we both realized it would be better for our
friendship to each carry one smaller tent.
So, we each got new tents, mailed the big one home, and are still
friends. Unless you plan on, for
the rest of your entire life, living with the person with whom you're tenting, I
highly recommend separate tents. For
Jason and me it came down to our hiking styles:
I like to get my miles done early in the day and have fairly similar
mileages to hike each day (~13-15 miles/day), while Jason liked to sleep in,
would hike few miles on some days and BIG miles on others.
Both hiking styles are great, but are best served by carrying individual
tents. In any case, this tent (a
Sierra Designs) was excellent. I
recommend their Clip Flashlight model. |
 The Overmountain Shelter was one of the nicer
accommodations along the trail. It's,
obviously, a converted barn. It was
here that we had a wonderful dinner of pancakes with butterscotch pudding poured
over the top. Pancakes can be made
by turning a shallow frying pan upside down, placing it over the stove, and
using the bottom (now the top) as a flat frying surface.
The handle end of a spoon can be used as a spatula.
The next morning brought with it a bunch of snow, so we weren't able to
really see any of the balds we walked over during the course of the day.
I hope to get back to do this section -- from Roan Mountain (the actual
mountain) to Roan Mountain (the town), and highly recommend it to folks looking
for a 2-4 day section hike. |
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This was the last room available in a rather
seedy-looking hotel in Elk Park, NC. This
is what our room typically looked like during a town stop:
gear strewn everywhere, and piles of food and mail -- glorious mail --
all over the bed waiting to be read or packed up. I had heard a number of bad things about the decidedly
unfriendly townspeople in Elk Park and neighboring Roan Mountain, but I
had nothing but good encounters. In
fact, an older woman who was in the post office told both Jason and me
that we had, "nice teeth." |
Silence, Wapiti, and Shadow in Moreland Gap shelter on a
VERY cold evening. Notice the tuna
cans hanging from the shelter room. Hikers
hang their foodbags from these contraptions, in an extremely successful attempt
to keep little hungry rodents from getting free grub. Mice can run down rope attached to the shelter roof, but they
can't get around the can suspended halfway down the rope on a small knot.
Every shelter I stayed at had at least one or two of these hangers, and
mice didn't get ANY of my food. |