I’m in Georgia! Seventy miles and zero more states to go! After the first two weeks I felt like I would never finish; yesterday I took one last zero day in a town called Hiawassee, GA, just to extend the experience a little bit.

I’ve now carried my math book for 960 miles without reading it. Whenever I have time to look at it, either my hands are too cold or I fall asleep. I’ve also written fewer half-finished essays than I did during last year’s hike. But I’m going to finish the trail on Thursday, almost a week earlier than I planned, so I can finish those things when I get home.

Unfortunately the zero day in Hot Springs didn’t fix the pain in my right foot like I hoped it would. It is still slightly swollen above the toes, and I’m still taking ibuprofen almost every morning so I can hike more comfortably. I think part of the problem might be the hundreds of miles I’ve walked on it in old Crocs and worn out socks. Maybe. The good news is that the second day out of Hot Springs I found a left Croc on the side of the trail to replace mine with the hole in the heel. I’ve been wearing that Croc on my left foot ever since, to good success.

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Me and Oxy-Lou (the Croc I found is on the rock in front of us)

The Great Smokey Mountain Nation Park has been one of the best parts of either of my hikes. The day I climbed into it from Davenport Gap was a foggy/drizzly and windy day. It is the first and only time I got my gloves out to hike in (and wore my knit cap that night at camp). But the next day was sunny and perfectly clear, so I had great views of the vistas and Fall colors as I walked along the ridgeline of the Smokies.

In the park hikers are not allowed to camp, except to stay in the provided shelters (which are larger than the average AT shelter, with bear cables and good springs near each of them). And since I was meeting friends at Clingmans Dome the next day, I had only a 12-mile day planned to a shelter just north of Newfound Gap. I tried to go slow, I even took a long lunch and nap on a sunny rock, but I still got to the shelter early in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was boredom, hunger, or curiosity, but I decided to continue down to Newfound Gap and hitch a ride into Gatlinburg, TN, for the night.

Pretty much the only thing I knew about Gatlinburg is that it is a traditional (if unnecessary) resupply place for hikers going through the Smokies, and what Bill Bryson wrote about it in A Walk in the Woods:

Gatlinburg is a shock to the system from whichever angle you survey it, but never more so than when you descend upon it from a spell of moist, grubby isolation in the woods. It sits just outside the main entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and specializes in providing all those things that the park does not—principally, slurpy food, motels, gift shops, and sidewalks on which to waddle and dawdle—nearly all of it strewn along a single, astoundingly ugly main street… throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks.

That’s about right. I stayed at a Microtel and ate at McDonalds and there were aimless crowds of people everywhere. The hitch in and out both took longer than I expected, based on the amount of traffic passing between Newfound Gap and Gatlinburg. On the way into town all of the pickup trucks I expected to stop passed right by me. But then a big guy in a small Saturn stopped. Not only was the car small, but it was crammed full of stuff… stacks of papers, bags of clothes, everything. He spent a minute placing the stuff in the passenger seat on top of the stuff in the backseat, then motioned for me to get in. I barely fit, with my pack on my lap. He was a very nice guy and offered to take me anywhere in town… he even offered to wait while I checked motel rates so I could find the cheapest place. But I just had him drop me off at the first main intersection and wandered around on foot.

To get out of town I hitchhiked for about two miles, to the Sugarlands Visitor Center, again being passed by lots of pickups, before a girl in a small sports car picked me up. She said she was visiting family in the area during her Fall break, and that she had never really hiked before but she was spending every day doing a different hike in the park. That day she was doing the hike up to Chimney Tops but said she didn’t mind going a few miles further to drop me off right at Newfound Gap.

I got to Clingmans Dome, the highest point on the trail at 6,588 feet, in a cloud. A ranger up there told me it was supposed to start raining any minute, so I quickly made a lunch of macaroni and cheese with a hotdog I packed up from Gatlinburg (I’d been meaning to try that for a long time), then headed down to the parking lot to wait for my two friends named Louis who were going to hike with me through the rest of the Smokies and who were being shuttled to that parking lot from Fontana Dam (where they left a car we would hike back to).

Before I even got to the parking lot I heard someone call “Diode!” through the fog. It was Ori-Lou (who is from the East/orient) who had just arrived with Oxy-Lou (from the West/occident, who also happens to be my dad). That timing was perfect… and along with three-days of instant potatoes and Cliff bars, they brought me some double cheeseburgers and a candy bar! Good people.

We walked back up the steep road to Clingmans Dome where we went up the observation tower at the top. We couldn’t see anything, but they say on a clear day you can see seven states from the tower.

It never did rain that day. In fact it never rained on us while we weren’t in a shelter, and we had sunshine for at least part of each of the remaining three days of hiking. That first night we had the shelter to ourselves until sunset when a group of six polite guys on Fall break from a small liberal arts college in Franklin arrived. I got in my sleeping bag while the six guys were still out smoking their pipes, and I fell asleep to one of them telling another that his churchwarden pipe made him look like Gandalf.

We hiked 7.2 miles the next day to Derrick Knob Shelter, the easiest of our full days, and were the first to arrive at the shelter again so we got to lounge around in the sun and make ourselves comfortable. By evening, though, the shelter was packed. I didn’t even count everybody. Two thru hikers who came in a little late set up their tent and hammock on the side of the shelter instead of trying to squeeze in. The next morning, like every morning, Ori-Lou made Peet’s coffee for us with his travel french press (an Aeropress, made by Aerobie, who makes those awesome orange flying rings).

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Derrick Knob Shelter

Our third day was about 9.2 miles to Russell Field Shelter, the first half of which included a few good descents and ascents. One of the climbs was up to Thunderhead Mountain, which is the 2,000 mile marker! To celebrate we ate a bag of Skittles my sister, Miode, sent with the Lous for me. Another half mile along the ridge is a point called Rocky Top, where somebody had written a big "2000.5" on the rock in chalk.

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Diode at the 2,000-mile mark on Thunderhead Mountain (~850 miles this year)

Shortly after we arrived at the shelter, a man and a woman hiked up from a nearby campground. They were going to meet their thru hiker friend, Tracks, at that shelter either that night or the next morning. He was coming from Newfound Gap, about 27 miles away. They said Tracks had gone from Hot Springs to Newfound Gap in two days (it took me four)!

The man went down to the spring to get some water, and when he came back he said he had seen a bear down there. Then when they went to hang their food, the bear showed up again. It calmly walked an arc around the food cables (while Ori-Lou ran out with his camera), then found a comfortable place to lie down and watch the food hanging process.

Like most popular parks, there is a problem of habituated black bears in the Smokey Mountains who have successfully stolen (or been given) food in the past and now associate hikers with good times. At one point most of the shelters had chain-link fence across the front to keep bears out. I heard the reason they took those fences down was because instead of keeping food away from bears they tended to encourage people to feed the bears through the fence!

The bear kept prowling around out by the food cables. As I got into my sleeping bag, the man went out banging a pot and blowing a whistle hoping to move the bear along. It ran off, but not much longer, as I was falling asleep, I heard a rustling on the bench in the shelter (about ten feet from my head!). I thought there was no way it was the bear. But then I heard it again and looked up, and there was the bear nosing around a cup and the coffee press we had left on the bench. I said, ‘Hey!’ and it looked up at me with a guilty face like a dog who was caught doing something it knew it wasn’t supposed to do. Then my dad looked up and shouted ‘Hey!’ at it, then everybody yelled at it, and it ran out of the shelter. We hung the coffee press and never saw the bear again.

In the middle of the night a thunderstorm rolled over. Ori-Lou was sleeping on the upper level of the shelter and got the whole lightning show through the windows on the roof (he actually got the whole shelter experience that night — bear tried to steal his coffee, mice ran over his head, and a thunderstorm). There was one thunder which shook the entire shelter for several seconds. By morning the rain had stopped, and when I got up Tracks, the thru hiker, was there! He had apparently arrived at night just before the storm.

Our final day of hiking was almost 14 miles including another few climbs and then a loong downhill to the Fontana Dam visitor’s center where Ori-Lou’s car was parked. Before the final downhill stretch was a short side trail to an old fire tower on Shuckstack mountain. Ori-Lou and I climbed up to the top. It was one of the tallest towers I’ve seen on the trail with views in all directions; we could see Fontana Dam down below us. That night the Lous treated me to a night at the lodge at Fontana Villiage, dinner, and resupply from the general store! In the morning they walked with me for a little while, then sent me on the last leg of my journey. Ori-Lou documented the whole hike with his camera.

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Shuckstack Fire Tower

Two nights later I found myself looking for a campsite somewhere just before Winding Stair Gap (the place I had planned on was already occupied by several tents). At Winding Stair Gap is a highway which goes into the town of Franklin, NC. I decided I would go down to the gap, try my luck at hitching for a few minutes (because town’s are fun, and I already stopped caring about my budget), and then head up 3.5 miles to the next shelter. I had my thumb out for about a minute before a jeep pulled up for me. The driver owned a convenience store and produce delivery company in Franklin and was on his way home from making deliveries in Atlanta.

I stayed at the Budget Inn, which was across the street from an outfitter store which sells Darn Tough socks. I walked in with two smelly, holey pairs of socks (one pair I bought in Vermont on my hike last year), and walked out with two brand new pairs a minute later without having to pay a thing! Can’t beat the Darn Tough lifetime warranty. My right foot is doing noticeably better with the new socks and the extra cushion they provide.

The Budget Inn advertises free hiker shuttles on its website… but apparently they don’t do that after May (which makes sense, but they could have been more clear about that — the room even had an information sheet listing the times for the free shuttles in it). So I hitched back out (after several unpleasant miles along highways), this time getting a ride from an electrician who maintains cell towers out in the woods. When I told him my trail name, he asked if I was an electrician or engineer and then we talked about Nikola Tesla for awhile. That was fitting because the audio book I’m going to start next is a biography of Tesla! He told me his name and to look him up on Facebook (so did the guy who gave me a ride into town — Franklin likes the Facebook).

I hurried to get here to Hiawassee on time to do a zero, hitching in to town without problem thanks to three day hikers who were leaving the trailhead parking lot shortly after I got there, only to find out there were no vacant motel rooms in town! In desperation I even tried the expensive places, like Holiday Inn Express, where the man at the desk said he had called every motel he could find and there wasn’t a room available within 100 miles. Apparently there are several Fall festivals going on, including Oktoberfest in the nearby town of Helen, GA, which draws lots of people on the weekends.

I didn’t have much time to explore to find a good stealth urban camping spot (and there are cops all over Hiawassee — maybe thanks to the whole Oktoberfest thing — who I think would have been moving me along all night), but the manager at the Budget Inn (owned by the same guy who owns the inn in Franklin) allowed me to sleep on the lawn there for $9 (I talked him down from $10, because I didn’t quite have $10 in cash), and he let me into the staff shower so I could get a shower that night. It was probably for the best, since I had just spent an unplanned night in a motel a few nights earlier. In the morning he got me a room as soon as one was available.

The inn is right next door to a Subway restaurant, and about half a mile up the main road is a place called Georgia Mountain Restaurant which has a good all-you-can-eat breakfast bar for only $7. So it was a pretty awesome zero day.

There was a time, not long ago, that I was almost too shy to hitchhike even when I needed to for resupply. Now I’ve hitchhiked a few times for no good reason whatsoever… almost just to meet the people who stop to pick me up. That’s some personal growth. But there is a thru hiker, Golden, who stayed at the inn last night and who has a ride back to the trail later this morning, so I don’t have to worry about that.

I will meet my dad on Thursday, the 25th, just north of Springer Mountain and walk to the end with him. I already have my ticket to fly from Atlanta to Denver on the 26th.

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