Day 3 - 4/6/09 (Monday)
two things from yesterday:
- a quick forgotten story: while hiking up sassafras mountain yesterday we encountered a group of boy scouts. they were one of the more comical sights i have ever seen. they each wore an external frame pack with enough gear to spend weeks on the side of a winter mountain. that may not quite paint the picture i want to give you. i feel that it will be hard to really get across the enormous size of these packs. take your arms and stretch them out as wide as you can. ok, they were roughly that wide. now bring them up over your head. yep, they started at their waist and went up to about there. we discussed it along the way but couldn’t begin to come up with a scenario for needing any amount of gear to warrant the absurdly sized packs. humorously, as we passed them we asked how far it was to the top of the mountain. they replied in exhausted frazzled voices that it was quite far. they then asked the distance to the bottom, to which we replied similarly, “it’s not close.” when we reached the top of the mountain a couple hundred yards up pity was the closest thing to what we felt for them, though we had to laugh a bit.
- i forgot to mention that last nights campsite was amazing. a creek running through a clearing between a couple of hills. we arrived late and set up and ate at dusk. there were several others there already but we did not meet them until this morning. three things stuck out at the time: the old man with a fantastic santa beard, two twenty-something girls, and a chihuahua. santa caught my attention obviously because i can’t wait to be an old gray bearded man. the girls for the fact that they were the first girls i’d seen on the trail. (a couple summers back norris and i went on a road trip out west and by the end of a month in the car i was a bit starved for interaction with the opposite sex…as i lay in my sleeping bag journaling i could hear the laughter of the two girls and noted to myself that the same will most likely happen on this trip since, percentage-wise, there are usually only a small number of girls on the trail) the dog you’ll meet later.
continuing on with road trip thoughts:
- “on the road trip, the roads seemed to be the veins carrying us from city to city.” it was as if we remained within the bounds of society even here as we traveled hemmed in by road signs and billboards. “i liked the camping or other times that we seemed to get out(side) the veins. this new trip runs on a vein of dirt,” and where the road had signs, i now see grass and flowers in their place.
- it was great to hike with people today. i left camp late, after BE and the J’s, but i met the girls (Maya and Greta) and the guy with the dog (Echo and Mozart) a short way out of camp. it turns out that hiking with a chihuahua is quite amusing. mozart led the way for most of the day, occasionally dropping to the back of the pack to make sure that we were all still in line as we were “strung out along the trail Lord of the Rings style,” and when the temperature dropped he rode in echo’s jacket.
- today was quite cold…and it snowed. when we arrived at woody gap, with access to a small trail town, we were met with the news that snow was on the way for the next couple of days. we chose to move on and passed up a car ride to a nearby hostel. ”greta asked me if this was a bad decision and i said yes, but in the way that norris and i use it. the ‘this is a dumb decision, but clearly the right decision,’ kind of way.” like the time we drove 6 hours to kk’s birthday party in georgia, stayed for 2 hours, turned around at midnight and drove 6 hours back to winston. ”let you know tomorrow how the choice works out.”
