D 4&5

Sunday 3/26

• Miles traveled: 6.7
  
• Shelter: Whitley Gap Shelter 1.2 miles off trail with Bear and Double Duty
  
• High point: hiking in the fog
  
• Low point: not many views

Gathered our things at the cabin and had leftover pizza for breakfast. YUM. We shopped at the outfitter at Neels gap (both of us noting how strange it was to be shopping through a store in the woods), checked out the famous boot tree and headed up the mountain into the fog. 

Can you find the hikers again? We walked through the fog most of the day stopping to look into the distance into nothingness. It was quite surreal and once it cleared as we walked through certain areas it was like putting on glasses. 

It cleared up in the afternoon and got a few views on our 1.2 mile trek off trail to the shelter.
 Shelter was small but nice. It had a good water source and lots of mice. They didn't get to any of our stuff so we figured they were nice mice (like Gus in Cinderella). We shared the shelter with Double Duty and Bear, both thru hikers from the Carolinas. It was nice to watch the sun set and have a warm nights sleep.

Monday 3/27

• Miles traveled: 12.1

  
• Shelter: tent at blue mountain shelter

  
• Highlight: arriving at shelter

• Low pt: PUDs

It was a very warm day. We hiked in t-shirts and shorts for most the day. We climbed out of the shelter about 8am, trying not to wake the others. 

We hiked down to hog pen gap for a glorious breakfast of grits and hot sauce and we found some trail magic snacks behind the sign. 

We hiked up and over Poor Mountain but overall it was a cloudy morning with no real views. Lots of PUDS (pointless ups and downs). We stopped for lunch and realized the fuel canister was VERY LIGHT. Unfortunately the remaining food was rice which needs hot water and ramen which is OK cold (or dry as Russ likes it). We then proceeded to make our plans into town for fuel.

We ended up hiking 12 miles today. After looking at the weather and the threat for severe thunderstorms, we pushed passed the planned campsite (on a open ridgeline) and headed to Blue Mountain Shelter. We put our tent just outside the shelter and settled in for the night. We were pretty exhausted as the miles tend to catch up with you.

Saturday day 3

Day 3

• Miles Traveled 15.6
• Shelter: The Luxurious Blood Mountain Cabins
• High Point: Tie Between The View From Blood Mountain And Pizza
• Low Point: The Brutal Descent Off Blood Mountain Into Needs Gap

Day 3 was a doozie. Climbed out of the shelter before dawn. Hit the trail with our head lamps on. We knew storms were expected Sunday evening so we wanted to push 15.6 miles to Neels Gap for shelter and we did just that. We knew we had quite a day ahead of us because we had the highest mountain in Georgia ahead of us, Blood mountain. It was a great day. We passed two gaps with trail magic breakfast to push us through our day. Definitely pushed us to our limits but the payoff was awesome. After climbing Blood Mountain we had some amazing views. The decent into Neels gap was pretty brutal on the knees but we were pretty happy to see the famous mountain crossing store. Immediately I dialed the Blood Mountain cabins to see if they had availability and they just had someone cancel and they had a cabin open up. It was our lucky day. Hot pizza, laundry, shower were completed in that order and then a very goods nights rest.

The first three days...

The first three days were a whirlwind. So far we have hiked 30.1 miles and our spirits are stil high.  I am having a lot of trouble uploading photos so I may just create a post Editof photos when I can.  Thursday 

• Total miles walked 8.1
• Shelter: tent at hawk mountain shelter
• Highlight: long creek falls
• Low pt: Russ' midnight trek to the privy 

We were the16th people to sign the register on top of Springer Mountain Georgia. We have made the first obligatory phone calls to parents and family we are making our way back to our packs at the car and we then began our 2188 mile track to Katadin. The first person we met on the trail was a ridge runner name Lydia from West Tennessee who attended Union College about half mile into the trail and she asked us some questions and informed us about leave no trace policies. The trail was familiar as we hiked this section last fall with Barry fortunately the weather was about the same. We did make the side trail to see long creek falls. Made it to the shelter and set up our tent.  Probably won't recap every day just excited to get our adventure started and to share it with you.  Can you find the hikers in the photo? Friday 

• Total miles walked 7.8
• Shelter: shelter at gooch gap
• Highlight: meeting over 30 hikers at the shelter
• Low point: excessive shelter snoring

It was our first night staying in the shelter. It was a good experience. Met a lot of nice people. 

Saturday was a big one so I'll save it for the next post. 

TOMORROW

We are headed to Georgia, right now. My stomach has been doing flips the whole way. Excitement, anxiety, terror and happiness have filled this week.  We couldn't stand sitting at home so we hit the road on Monday and provided some trail magic to thru-hikers near Roan Mountain. We hiked a bit and then just sat by the road sharing snacks, sodas and cold beers to tired hikers.  We met 8 hikers. They began their journey around the middle of February and have hiked over 380 miles. They have hiked in sunny 70° days and slept through 18° nights waking up to feet of snow.  They were in great spirits and had nothing but encouraging words to share with us when we were supposed to be the ones encouraging them!  For us there is nothing left to do but sleep and hike. 

Together, man.

Here we are. 3 days away.  THREE.  Besides "where do you sleep?" and "what do you eat?" the next most frequent question we get is "Who is going with you?" Answer: no one.  We are going together. We come as a pair, you know. 😊 But other than us...there will over 1,000 other hikers on the trail at various locations when we get started and over 1,000 yet to begin their thru-hike. We don't personally know any other AT thru hikers but have joined online communities through Facebook, met other hikers through Instagram and have been introduced to other previous thru-hikers by some really great people. Plus (and probably the best part) we will meet so many great people out on the trail.  At this point we are pacing. We are eager to get started but feel like there is something else we need to be doing to prepare. We bought a bunch of food today and packed a few drop boxes to ship to ourselves in the first few weeks as we learn what we need and what is not worth carrying. We also displayed it all on the tailgate at the dollar general because well we are rednecks and we had nothing else to do.  We really need to be walking somewhere. PS: THANK YOU ALL for your inquiries about sending us packages. Once we get on the trail, we will be posting our location and the next stops and addresses where we can pick up mail or packages. If you do send us something please comment on the post so we will make sure to stop by the post office that is holding our package.

Test. This is only a test.

I wanted to test posting from the blog app. All of my posts from here on will be posted from my phone.  They may (let's be honest, they will) contain grammatical errors, misspellings and probably a few incorrect math problems just to cover my bases. 😊 I am not perfect and auto correct isn't either so thank you for understanding. Now for a pretty photo of an awesome cake my company surprised me with to test photo posting as well.  8 days and counting...

“There’s a million things I haven’t done… just you wait.” A. Hamilton

What are we going to do?

Russ and I have put in our resignations at our employers and we are planning to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, or AT for short. First and MOST importantly to Russ, you must pronounce the name of the mountain range and trail correctly.
Appalachian      a-puh-LATCH-uhn

For you visual and audial learners…

As you can see below the pronunciation of the trail is about as split as the political
parties in this great nation (possibly the only political comment in this blog).

The AT is a hiking (only) trail through the eastern seaboard along the oldest mountain

range in the US. The trail spans 2,190-ish miles and traverses 14 states. The trail
begins at the top of Springer Mountain in Georgia and ends at the top of Mount
Katahdin at Baxter State Park in Maine. We estimate that the entire hike will
take us about 6 months. Yes, we are doing this together.

There is quite a bit of history about the trail online. You can read about it HERE.

The most frequent FIRST question we get asked about the trail is, “Where do you sleep?”

Every 8 – 10 miles along the entire length of the trail are shelters (262 of them to be exact). Most of the shelters are three sided structures the size of a one-car garage in which 6-8 people can fit inside. They have a roof, floor and usually house mice. These shelters can get crowded. (SURPRISE! We aren’t the only ones crazy enough to do this.)

We will also be carrying a 2-person tent. We have split the weight between us. Russ has the

tent and footprint and I have the tent poles. This will be our option for
shelter when we don’t want to stay in the provided shelter if the shelter is too
crowded or we want to camp elsewhere along the trail.

We are going to THRU-hike the trail. This means we will hike from one end to the other in one calendar year. The alternate would be to section hike the trail, meaning we would bite off one piece, be it big or small, at a time over a number of years. We are looking forward to starting and finishing this endeavor THIS YEAR. (positivity right?)

THE ODDS: The odds are not in our favor. Legend has it that one in every four hikers attempting "thru-hiker" status will make it all the way from Springer (GA) to Katahdin (ME). Hiking as a couple isn't going to make it any easier for us. But the odds have improved over the past few years to almost 30%, so we plan on improving the numbers in 2017. We have a few more attributes in our favor but thats for another post.

We know you probably have a bunch of questions. We are going to try to answer them over the next few posts and if you have one in particular please leave it in the comment section and we will try to answer it.

Betsy