Day 113 on the trail: Zero day in Hiawassee

Two nights ago, I camped out in a gorge ringed by a USFS service road, out of the wind and just six miles from Dicks Creek Gap. It was just me and a couple and their dog.

They stayed in their tent while I, after arriving in the evening on the back of a 13.4-mile trek, went about the series of necessary camp tasks that comes with hiking the AT: Get water, hang line for bear bag, change some clothes, set up tent and set up camp stove. Then make dinner, brush teeth, hang bear bag. Next, hang laundry to dry, gather things, make bed. Efficiency grows with repetition.

Most people I have been seeing at camp this past week were staying at the Tray Mountain shelter, six miles south, but I wanted to be close enough to be able catch the morning shuttle into Hiawassee, mainly because my food supply was down to fig newtons and grape jelly, and a pack of Lil' Debbies that Two Dogs [AT '07] handed out as trail magic at Indian Grave Gap [just before Tray Mtn.]

Which is how it should be. If you're doing it right, you're supposed to be out of food whenever you hit your next resupply point.

I set my alarm and started hiking before dawn on Wednesday, jamming on my iPod and rocking my headlamp up Kelly Knob [elev. 4,276 ft.]. New band to check out, if you haven't: Glasvegas, of Glasgow, Scotland.

[View of the rising sun from the AT just past Kelly Knob, northern Georgia, March 17.]

 I got to the road at 9 a.m. At 9:30, Ron Haven, whom Baltimore Jack called the "Donald Trump of the AT" because he owns three hiker-friendly hotels in Franklin, NC and just bought the Hiawassee Inn, pulled up in a yellow short bus to drop off some hikers and pick new ones up. I jumped on board. He's a friendly Southern fellow who makes our lives easier down here.

So now I'm in Hiawassee. I've already resupplied [I bought some dried veggies and a little jar of pimento, so a new lunch wrap recipe is imminent]. Later I'm going to cover my calves and my left heel in muscle cream and relax my legs. Ashley said last night my Achilles problem is a sympathy injury for David Beckham, whose Achilles rupture was heard 'round the world this week.

There's only about eight miles left of Georgia; so far, I've hiked 76.3 miles. That's Week 1 behind me!

Hiawassee:

[Side of a Main St. auto body shop in Hiawassee. Signs of Bible Belt culture abound: No taverns, Christian speech prominently displayed.]

"A footpath for those who seek fellowship with the wilderness"

Next up on the AT

Christian youth from a Savannah bible college are serving hamburgers for breakfast outside the Walasi-Yi.

The next stretch of trail will take me 30-some miles to Hiawassee. I'm going to go extra slow because my left Achilles is inflamed. Hopefully I'm there on Wednesday.

The cookout last night? Called the Blaze of Glory party unofficially by the staff here, it celebrates the beginning of the thru-hiking season. The food was incredible: Barbecue chicken, venison stew, jumbalaya, red velvet cake, etc. etc.

I was the 202nd thru-hiker to register at Amicalola Falls State Park visitors center. I don't know how the people who start at Springer are counted. But this week will definitely see hundreds of additional hikers start the trail.

Photo dump

[Me at the start to the Approach Trail, March 10. Josh, Leigh's husband and co-owner/operator of Hiker Hostel in Dahlonega, drove a bunch of us up Springer Mountain in his Suburban, swerving through deep, muddy ruts as we passed by Army Ranger cadets. The Frank B. Merrill training camp is close to, nay, right next to, the trail in Georgia.]

[Section of Georgia trail. One of the rare moments it was safe to get out the camera.]

[Evidence of a controlled burn.]

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