Hot Springs to Spring Mountain Shelter - AT Day 3

Waking up in Hot Springs I felt like I'd slept better than I'd ever slept, but my body still hurt and had about half the energy I wanted it to. The night before we had both felt so miserable we were tempted to try and get a ride to some place further up on the trail, just to shorten the trip a little. By day four I'd think back and wonder what in the hell we were thinking, but we were both so seriously caught off guard by how physically difficult the hiking would be, and how exhausted and in pain we were by the end of the second day, that for a few hours all we wanted to do was go home. Thankfully, we both decided it would be kind of f-ing lame to back down after 48 hours, so we planned out a new schedule, figuring we'd be a day ahead of schedule if we could keep up the pace we'd set. Eleven miles planned for our third day. With our blisters taped up with moleskin and band-aids, we walked downstairs to breakfast.

Our host Elmer was an older guy, a little gruff, but nice, and a good cook. Breakfast was wonderful, and it was nice to sit around and chat with folks who had been doing this backpacking thing for a good deal more time than we had. We were joined by Seth and Rachel from our first shelter, and also met Grace and Kathy, a mom and daughter from Texas, in the middle of a 30-day trip, who were super sweet. At our first shelter, Nick the Australian had told us about a guy he'd run into who had started walking north from the Florida Keys. (Nick wasn't sure what the Florida Keys were, but he had been led to understand that it meant the very bottom of Florida.) The guy who'd started in Florida showed up to breakfast too. Florida! I couldn't imagine wanting to walk around much of anywhere in Florida, much less straight through the whole thing. Insane, but impressive.

As I've mentioned, one of the coolest parts of hiking the trail seems to be the people you meet. I got a chance to talk to Grace for a little bit, and got a new perspective on the landscape I've always kind of taken for granted. I thought things were all supposed to be bigger in Texas, but Grace told me she thought everything was bigger here: bigger bugs, bigger trees, bigger flowers. She also couldn't believe how much fungus there was. She made one observation I thought was kind of interesting. In Texas, she said, she'd always seen people plant gardens that were layered, with terraces or plants growing up the side of something. She'd always thought it was just people being creative until she came out into the Appalachians and saw plants growing up the sides of mountains. Living in Texas, it had never occurred to her that plants cascaded, or grew up things.

Resolved to keep going despite still feeling pretty beat, Jill and I picked up some more moleskin at the local outfitters and headed back to the mountains. The AT turns into the sidewalk for the length of the town, so we followed it across a bridge, over the French Broad River, and up a mountain. Like, seriously UP a mountain.
This was our warning that the hike up out of Hot Springs would be steep. It was also insanely humid. My glasses wouldn't stay un-fogged, so I finally took them off and decided I'd rather hike without distance vision than hike with the visual equivalent of cataracts. I put the glasses back on for the views though, which were pretty gorgeous.
You can see the steam rising out of the valley. It was like hiking in a greenhouse. Beautiful, but clammy as all hell. This day was the start of our both being perpetually damp. On the list of lessons learned for the next trip: cotton is the devil's fabric.

We hiked through the mountains for a while, and gradually the humidity let up and the incline did as well. The terrain opened up and we walked through some big meadows with blackberry bushes growing like crazy. If they'd been ripe, it would have been one incredible snack.
The big excitement of the day came while we were on an overpass over 70. I got cell service (love me some Verizon) and called my dad to check in. "Seen any bears yet?" he asked. I told him that, thank God, we had not. I got off the phone, finished my lunch, and me and Jill stood up to finish crossing the highway and continue up the mountain on the other side.
And then Jill yelled the four-letter word I'd been hoping not to hear: "Bear!!!!"

She had looked down at the highway and seen a bear running across the road. Running from where we'd just come from to where we were going. I kind of freaked out. I knew we had to keep going, but I didn't let Jill get more than five feet ahead of me and we hauled ass up that next mountain. Instead of singing to keep the bears away, I started talking. And because I didn't have anything in particular to talk about, I started running through all the supreme court cases I'd taught my civics class this year, organized by relevant constitutional amendment, with descriptions of each case and their lasting significance. I realize this is incredibly lame both because a) I am embarrassingly over-afraid of bears and b) rattling off court cases is pretty nerdy, but I really didn't care. It wasn't like there was anyone around to see me anyway. Except Jill, who thankfully has the patience of a saint. Or at least she got really good at tuning out my bear-paranoia-induced ramblings.

We finally got far enough away from the highway that I relaxed a little bit. I know bears are afraid of us, and I know there was no reason for a bear to come off the highway, stalk us and hunt us down five miles into the woods. Sitting down for a water break felt great. Don't I look relaxed?
Bear sighting behind us, we made it to Spring Mountain shelter, which was the same style as the first one we'd slept in. Five wooden sections to sleep on, sloped tin roof, and a healthy mouse population. Someone had a sense of humor and attached this outlet box to a wooden post.

Our bunk mates for this evening were a dad and his grown son, who were doing three days of four or five miles each. Our three days so far had been 7.5, 13, and 11 miles respectively, so we finally felt a little better about our slow pace. They were really nice though, like everyone else we'd met on the trail so far.
There were two things we learned you need to do when staying in shelters on the trail. You have to hang your food out away from the campsite so bears can't get it. I knew about this already, and had hung food once or twice while camping. What I did not know about was protecting your stuff from mice. You have to hang your pack up so mice can't get in it, and then you have to leave all the packets of your bag unzipped so if mice DO get up to the bag they can run in and out without chewing holes in things. The shelters mostly came equipped with strings hanging from the ceiling with tin can baffles to keep the mice from climbing down the string. We were one tin can baffle short at this shelter, so the son of the father/son team wound up with a mouse in his bag. He had left a cough drop in his bag and the mouse had chewed through several things to try and find it.

All the shelters we stayed at also had privies, in one state of upkeep or another. This one wasn't actually bad, although I had to wield a spray can of deet to fend off a group of bumble bees who seemed to have made a home in the pile of crap collecting under the toilet. Surprisingly they didn't really smell bad though. There was a bag of leaf litter hanging next to each one for you to throw in the privy after you were finished. This keeps the pile aerated so it can compost, which keeps it from smelling. I was kind of impressed. Maybe not so impressed by this particular example...but I had expected to have to dig holes for that particular piece of business, so it was nice to just be able to use a toilet, however rudimentary.

This was the note written on the inside of the door.

It rained again in the night, so none of the clothes I'd foolishly hung up to dry out (from sweat) got any dryer over night. Still, I kind of love sleeping through rain on a tin roof, and I woke up finally feeling like my body was starting to get itself in gear. I'd been told that it takes until day three or four before you start feeling better each day instead of worse, and I was encouraged to actually feel energized and ready to go in the morning. I put on my cold, damp cotton clothes, put more moleskin around my blisters (which appeared to be growing, but at least not popping) and Jill and I headed out.