Through the Smokies in 4.5 days, a hiking primer, Part I

As my girlfriend, Ashley, departed Hot Springs for Pennsylvania on Monday, April 5, Early Bear [GA->ME '09] and I headed south in a shuttle driven by Gene Laney. While we were making a pit stop at a gas station, Gene told Early Bear how he had been 17 when the Tennessee Valley Authority built Fontana Dam, at the southern tip of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the 1940s.

The Smokies, like the Whites in the north, have rules that differ from those that prevail along most of the Appalachian Trail. Mainly they have to do with the shelters.

There are 12 shelters along the 70 miles of AT in the Smokies. Because the Smokies get more visitors than any other US national park, backcountry hikers must submit reservation forms for the shelters. Tenting is prohibited, but if you are staying in a full shelter as a thru-hiker and section hikers show up with reservations, you must vacate, either to hike on or to tent outside. Early Bear experienced this.

Seven of the 12 shelters have privies. That's just something to keep in mind heading in.

Dogs aren't allowed; horses are. Though I never saw a horse, I saw plenty of footprints, and many of the shelters have places for parking horses. It gave the trail a more western feel.

We hiked out of the Fontana Dam visitors center at 1 p.m. The dam had an "I Am Legend" feel, or a "Silent Hill" feel, as Miguel put it before I went to Asheville: A huge, man-made place, a vast, empty road and a giant hole disappearing into the earth, and it's eerily quiet.

[Island in Fontana Lake, April 5.]

We headed up the mountain at 1 p.m. At the end of an unseasonably hot day we claimed spots in Mollies Ridge Shelter. Like all of the Smokies shelters, it had two levels accommodating about six people each and a roofed table area. We met some new hikers, one of whom wowed everybody with his tiny wood-burning stove and another who hung his hammock inside the shelter. Thankfully snoring was kept to the minimum. That wouldn't always be so.

To be continued...