Hard to believe it’s been two weeks on the trail. I’m exactly 144 miles from Springer Mountain. Today begin with a lazy morning around the NOC, I stayed in my bag a while then finally got everything packed and headed down the hill to the restaurant just before checkout time, 10 am. After a breakfast burrito, I met DJ again and we stayed around the river for a while, got a small resupply at the general store, and checked out the outfitter. I decided to buy an inflatable camp pillow. I think of part of not sleeping well in shelters has been due to using a compression bag filled with clothes as a pillow – it kind of works but isn’t comfortable. You’d think after a long day of hiking it wouldn’t much matter what kind of pillow you had, but it just isn’t the case for me. Anyway, the one I got weighs 3 oz, and I’m laying on now typing this and it’s quite comfortable.
DJ and I were heading back up the hill to where the trail leaves the other side of NOC around 12:30 when I realized it was now lunch time and we had one last chance for real food, so we were forced to stop for a BBQ sandwich before beginning the climb. It was uphill immediately, and uphill continuously. Most of it was not exceptionally steep, just unrelenting. There was one section though, named and marked on the map – The Jump Up – it wasn’t one big step of course, rather a challengingly steep 0.2 miles or so. We finally reached the top of the mountain and knew the shelter was only a mile away and that the climbing was done. The bottoms of my feet, well mostly just the right one, were still sore so I was stopping periodically to rest and take the weight off it. Everything feels good for a mile or so after a nice break, but after log stretches of no rest it feels like walking with a marble duct taped right on the ball of your foot.
We made to the shelter, a total of only 6.9 miles, and some hikers already had a fire going. It’s a nice large shelter with a loft and theres even windows on the upper level. Someone has even made it appear as though there’s electricity by drilling a socket cover into the shelter and using a sharpie to draw the three pronged outlet onto the wood. Ran into Shakes and Captain Slow here again as well who I last saw back in Helen. Shakes got an injured knee checked out at an urgent care and they skipped about one days hiking but are back and still looking to make it all the way.
Also today i asked DI what kind of podcasts he was listening to while hiking, and he said educational stuff, which gave me an idea. I was thinking how cool it would be if you were to do an AT thru-hike and learn a language via audio at the same time. As I told DJ, “imagine getting back and telling people, ‘yea, I just hiked 2,185 miles from Georgia to Maine, and now I speak French, Bonjour.’” Don’t think it’ll happen but it sounds wicked.