Day One (part two) 8/17/2016

Springer Mountain Shelter

I arrive at the campsite exhausted and sore. It was dark and much later than I expected on arriving, so I decided a hot meal was not on the docket for me to cook. I sat down on the shelters steps, acknowledged the shelters residual odor from thousands of hikers, and wolfed down a cliff bar , a bag of jerky, and few sips of Ol’ Smokey Tennessee Moonshine that I insisted on bringing. Once I brushed my teeth, I then stuffed my bear mace, SPOT Tracker, 50 ft of paracord, and a carabiner in my pockets.I grabbed my oversized food bag and headed over to the cabled bear hangs. For those of you unfamiliar with hiking in bear country, you have to hang your food in a tree so bears can’t get it. I don’t think I have to explain why it’s  bad idea to hide the food in your tent.

To lighten the load on backpackers, organizations like the Appalachian Trail Conservancy put up cables in trees to hang your bags with. I brought my own cord to do this, because after about ten minutes of attempting to use the provided cables, I realized Springer Mountains cables were broken. So I put my own bear bag contraption together and started throwing the end of my line over the tree. You can almost picture what happened next in the dark. First throw, just short of where it needed to be, and got stuck in a type of branch that I call the wishbone. I  like to imagine that I was about as mad as a Papa Bear when he found out all the porridge was gone at Goldilocks’s house ( I’m not eve sure if that is how the story even went, but I bet that bear could have been as mad as I was). It took me awhile, but I worked it lose and finally got it hung up.

I ran back to the shelter, set up my sleeping bag, hung my osprey backpack up, then turned my faint red head lamp on and started reading. Out of nowhere I hear it. Scurrying little vermin were moving about the shelter. They’re about 3 inches long, 2 inches tall and about the size of a small camera. They had thin fur coats with a grey hue. When I shined the light on them, they stared back with unflinching dead yellow-green eyes. I could hear them all scratching, clawing, chewing….. This shelter was infested with rats. It was hard to get much sleep because every half- hour or so, one of these furry little creatures would crawl over my cseeping bag or run past my ear. Eventually, I was able to close my eyes and drift off to dreamland, but a difficult night it was indeed!

Here are examples of how bear cables are supposed to work with my food bag.

Day One (part one) 8/17/2016

Amicalola Falls Visitor center to Springer Mountain. Wow. It was a lot more arduous that I had imagined. To prove it, there is a steaming meat pie of throwup about half way up the steps to the falls.

Oh, the falls. How beautiful they were. So beautiful in fact, that I will be writing a special post just for that later. Anywho, back to the trek. The climb, as said, was truly difficult. A relatively easy incline spans the length of the Appalachian Approach Trail from the Max Epperson Shelter (the first nights shelter I stayed in when I arrived) all the way up to the stairway that leads to the base of the falls. The stairway stands steep, like a fire escape for 150 steps until you reach the base of the falls. It then connects to the main stairway that maintains the precipitous grade from the path before, only to add 425 more steps. It took me 2.5 hours to hike the .7 mile stairwell of the great falls. Once I reached the top I leapt for final relief from the grueling, but satisfying climb.

Atop the falls was the most gorgeous panoramic view of the mountains I have ever seen. Valleys of lush green fields of broccoli topped looking trees were adjacent to the mountain and seemed to touch the clouds. From the vantage point of the falls you saw none of human kinds destructive nature. You only saw the raw unfiltered beauty of mother earth taking it’s last stand to show us grandeur before we decide to tear it down.

I realized that I’ve gone off into great detail about the views from atop the falls; that is inevitable, because it is breathtaking, but I will digress back to my story. Once I finished gawking at one of natures wonders, I headed up to the next trail head and found that I still had 7.1 miles of very strenuous climb left. I looked at my watch to see that it was already 1:30pm. This was heartbreaking, but I persevered nonetheless. I climbed, and I climbed, telling myself ‘Just a little bit further”. I admit I gave up on that thought a few times, reasoning that there was no way this couch potato of a body was ready to climb a mountain. Yet, for some reason, anger took hold and asserted the thought in my brain of ‘there is no way you are camping on the damn approach trail two days in a row’. So I persisted, and eventually, I made it. It was dark and damp. I looked at my watch and it read 8:20pm. At last, 2000 feet later, I was standing on the top of Springer Mountain, the very beginning of the Appalachian Trail.

 

 

The first night on the AT

Welp, the first night on the trail. Not quite what I was expecting. It all started in the morning when absolutely nothing would go right. Granted, I thought it was a good idea to enlist my shakedown for the day prior to the hike, not my smartest move. Due to my relatively poor planning skills I ended up landing myself in the Amicalola Falls shelter around 9pm. This led to worse…and much worse results. First off, I couldn’t find the damn shelter because it was nine at night. I eventually found it 15 minutes later. Then there were some little things. For instance, a bug that got inside the mesh enclosed shelter absolutely loves my headlamp. Of course I can’t really turn it off because I’m not an owl, so I deal with the roided out bug from hell and pretend I don’t feel it crawling on my legs. Which leads to the other minor, but very aggravating annoyance. It is as hot as Florida in mid-July here. I feel like I’m in a slow cooker, roasting until I brown. They probably should rename this place Satan’s shelter, but enough about the heat, I only brought it up to explain why there’s a large mammoth hiking along my knees: no sleeping bag.

These next two factoids of fun are funny for you, but not for me. One them, are hideous, 50 shades of grey spiders. Big ones, wolf ones. If you knew me, you would know that I’m a mild arachnophobe, and this, this is a nightmare. They are everywhere in this god-forsaken shelter. I was lucky enough to find a creepy dark spot in the corner where I can’t seem to find any, but who knows, there’s probably a lovely nest of spider palooza waiting to open while I sleep. And, the last problem….As you remember I got here at night, leaving me unable to hang this scrumptious bag of delicacies I have strewn throughout my pack. Now, I’m in a shelter, alone, with a 13 lbs bag of food, separated by a measly, mesh fence. It would be an understatement to say that I was sleeping sound. The truth is, I am snoring like a baby, without a care in the world that I’m in densely populated bear country with a bag so pungent, that I can smell it myself from 5 feet away where I’m sleeping.

Lets just hope that tomorrow things go a little bit smoother, and I have a little less “funny” things to tell you. For now, sleep tight, and don’t let the monstrous flying beetles bite.