It's starting to become a tradition that Greg and I go backpacking (at least overnight) on Labor Day weekend. I have been wanting to do this piece of trail for a long time, and we decided this was the weekend to do it. It is part of the AT, from Carver's Gap to Hwy 19E, a 14 miler that crosses 4 mountain tops.
We parked our car at the bottom of the trail, and it just so happened that one of our friends, Clint was camping up near where we were hiking, so he offered to shuttle us to the top.
The coolest part about this trip was that we spent a lot of time on open ground. Yeah, there were some boring spots in the woods, but the wide open views on the ridges and balds made it totally worth it. Day 1 can be described as up / down / up / big down / big up. Greg and I are bad to just keep hiking without paying much attention to eating or other silly things like that. This came back to bite us during that final mile or so uphill. We ran out of gas. Big time. I think we finally got to the point where we were taking 25 steps, break, 25 more, break. It was bad. We finally got to the summit, crashed for a bit, put up the tent, and ate. After we had food in us, we were fine. That's where the mountain top yoga and fun pics came into play. We got a good seat to watch the sunset when some weather blew in. Nothing major, but it got windy and we ended up in the middle of a cloud. Temps stayed nice and I was WAY to warm for my 15 degree bag that I brought "just in case". I actually slept really well for camping, and Greg attributes it to the fact that I hogged at least 2/3rds of the tent.
Day 2 turned out to be beautiful. We got up, took more pictures, made breakfast and basically took our time packing up camp. From what people on the trail had told us, we had one big uphill, and it was 5 miles of down to the road. We could see the big mountain we had to climb from our campsite, so at least we knew what was waiting for us. Things started out fine. Uphills don't bother me too much when there are good views all around. I had to borrow duct tape from several random people on the trail because I had two nice heel blisters from the day before. Then we ran out of water. I don't even know how that is possible. We both drank almost a gallon of water in the 2ish miles to the top. So another random hiker gave us a little bottle to tide us over until we found a spring. We actually did find one about another 2 miles later, and we ran into the same people who gave us the bottle and filtered their water for them. While 5 miles of downhill sounds like fun, it really isn't. This was brutal, crush your toes downhill. I ended up with 2 more blisters on my toes. By the time we got to the bottom, I felt like my legs were going to give out. I was kind of in a numb pain state from the calves down. Would I do it again? Heck yeah. It was amazing.
We made it out of the woods just as rain started to fall. It was the tailwinds of Hurricane something-or-other. It has rained ceaselessly since that minute for about 3 days now. All in all, the hike was great. Greg and I discussed it, and we both agree that this was the prettiest campsite we've had that wasn't in the Rockies. (Lake Ellen Wilson gives it a run for its money).
Color me jealous
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