The first few days...

...have been rainy. Yesterday I counted three unique storms on my way from Gooch Mountain shelter to the Walasi-Yi outdoor center at Neel's Gap.

There was still ice at the top of Blood Mountain. I took a Gatorade break near the Blood Mountain shelter, a frightening stone structure with plastic sheets blowing in the empty windowsills. Sloshing down the two miles of downhill, soaked head to toe, gave me a flashback to when I headed into Rutland last summer. This time my electronics were still intact at the end of the day.

Another memory, from when I was a newbie last summer: Sitting under the Port Clinton pavilion on a June morning, I'm talking about how I need to get a pack cover. It's been raining quite a bit. Half Moon says, "You don't have a pack cover?" giving me a skeptical look. I can appreciate his point of view now.

On my first day, I saw a hiker waiting at the bottom of the 604 steps straight up Amicalola Falls with his 70 pound pack, as though he were waiting for it to sprout legs and hike itself. Further on I passed a big fat man in a big fat pack hiking in flip flops. At the first shelter, where I ate lunch, two guys were in their sleeping bags in the afternoon, and one of them said they'd run out of fuel. He seemed to feel aggrieved that I didn't offer to cook them both dinner; I left them to their misery. Some people are just helpless.

Other people, like a German woman and her 12-year-old son who started with over-heavy packs, have been doing everything right and possess the spirit of self-reliance, but they just have too much stuff. People like them will find help and good advice and come back stronger.

At Neel's Gap the staff is renowned for giving newbie hikers the "shakedown," where they weigh your most likely overweight pack, go through it discarding anything they see as frivolous and set you straight. I got the "You're looking trim already" seal of approval when I walked in the door yesterday, so that's cool.

I'm splitting up a cabin with Cheeks and Mojave Rain, a couple who met on their '07 thru-hike, got married, and are now practicing for their PCT '10 hike. I met them on my first night at Stover Creek shelter.

Last night we had hiker feast in the hostel here at the Walasi-Yi, Mexican cuisine prepared by Baltimore Jack and Miss Janet. Baltimore Jack is something of a trail legend, having completed a ridiculous number of thru-hikes [7? 8?].

[Miss Janet and Baltimore Jack, March 12. Baltimore Jack is wearing a T-shirt that says "Bill Bryson is a pansy ass." Enormously helpful guy.]

Cheeks scavenged the hiker box and emerged with a gem:

[Cheeks AT '07, PCT '10 with a sweet 1980s-style headlamp, Walasi-Yi.]

And, view from the cabin. It's a good deal. The hostel here is a bit of a dungeon and a lot of hobo-looking people have congregated there.

[View from cabin porch at Neel's Gap, March 13.]

Now I'm going to go read Winton Porter's book before the trails kickoff shindig this evening. There's also a huge cat downstairs and a lot of dogs roaming through the outfitter store that look petable.

Jellytellarito!

That's the name I came up with for the meal I've had for lunch two days now.  Grape jelly and Nutella in a burrito shell.

It's been a rainy couple of days on the trail.

The picture is of my socks smoking in the Stover Creek shelter, where I slept last night, just two miles north of Springer Mountain.

At approximately 2:47 p. m.  on Wednesday, I hiked past white blaze No.1 of the AT.

Heading for a party - trail maestro and memoirist Winton Porter's birthday - at Neel's Gap tomorrow.

And the trail so far is heaven. Smooth ups and downs and every step on soft earth.

The journey begins...again

Dahlonega, Georgia, the Atlanta-tourist enclave I find myself in the day before I start my GA->WV AT hike, feels a world apart from say, Millinocket, Maine.

Which it is. More than 2,000 miles of Appalachian Trail separate the two towns.

Coincidentally, the owners of the hostel where I'm staying tonight and the owners of the AT Lodge in Millinocket are bffs. Leigh at Hiker Hostel told me on the way from the Gainesville, GA train station to the hostel how the Millinocket couple [who gave me and the hikers I summitted Katahdin with a ride out of Baxter State Park] helped her and her husband get through the first couple of thru-hiker seasons, in 2004-06.

Here's me today:

[Me, airing out the tent for the first time since September, Hiker Hostel, Dahlonega, Georgia, March 9, 2010]

I slept last night in 30-60 minute intervals aboard the Amtrak Crescent [NYC to New Orleans] train. I woke up this morning to see red dirt, shacks and a big prison rolling by, by dawn's early light.

The air here feels different. I just ate a pimento cheeseburger.

The well-staffed and amenity-rich hostel is full of folks, and has been for two weeks, they told me. It's fun for me to size the newbies up.

[The mountains among us, from a hill above the hostel]

The Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail courses along the southern end of the Blue Ridge, into the Nantahala range, in what was for thousands and thousands of years Cherokee country.

My favorite explorer, Hernando de Soto, and his men were the first to meet the Cherokee, in the 16th century. The Cherokee and European settlers got along until the Revolutionary War. Relations soured when the Americans waged a slash-and-burn campaign to intimidate the Cherokee from fighting on the side of the British. The Cherokee's story virtually ends with the Trail of Tears march in the 1800s to Oklahoma reservation country.

[Statue of Cherokee in front of the Lumpkin County Courthouse]

Dahlonega claimed fame thereafter as a Gold Rush town.

See:

I have to go because the library is closing. But I'll be back very soon. Happy trails!

-Ink

Monday

Waiting for my train to Georgia. It's supposed to get up to 59 degrees today in DC.

Union Station

Breakfast at Union Station, watching the working lives of DC flow by. I caught an early ride to the metro with Matt on his way to work. Once it's warmer I'll meander over to the Smithsonian. They have an Earl V. Shafer exhibit at American History, I think.

I had the best home cooking last night at Matt and Maggie's while watching the Oscars. It was a perfect impromptu sendoff.

Already I'm missing Ashley. But I know I'll see her in a few weeks when she comes to spring break with me in the South. It'll be a nice complement to our bright days in Vermont last summer.

Eggs are getting cold, must go.

---

Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now.

Countdown: 66 hours until I leave for Georgia

Everything's about good to go!

The top AT memoirs

According to a recent poll I started on Whiteblaze.net, the top five AT thru-hiking memoirs are:

1. Walkin' on the Happy Side of Misery, J.R. Tate [8 votes]
2. AWOL on the Appalachian Trail, David Miller [6]
3. A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson [3]
4. As Far As the Eye Can See, David Brill, tied with
5. Walking with Spring, Earl V. Shaffer [2 each]

 Walking with Spring recounts a WWII veteran's 1948 thru-hike. AKA the first ever thru hike. First printed privately in 1981; 160 pages.

AWOL on the Appalachian Trail recounts a middle-aged engineer's 2003 thru-hike. Published 2006; 236 pages.

Walkin' on the Happy Side of Misery is a retired marine and four-time thru-hiker's account of his first thru hike in 1990. Published in 2001 [originally self-publihsed]; 554 pages.

As Far As the Eye Can See recounts a 1979 thru hike. Originally published in 1990; 192 pages.

A Walk in the Woods is a travel writer's tale of a botched thru-hike in the late 1990s. Published in 1999; 274 pages.

The diversity in these memoirs isn't in the authors, almost all of whom wrote or hiked and wrote as middle-aged, white men, but in the eras of the hikes - 1948, before anyone knew about the trail; 1979, the first wave of the modern thru-hiker and then through the 1990s and early 2000s.