Day 36 - Wading the Appalachian Trail

Saturday, May 9th - Got up at 6:00 am to again check my email at the Hiker Kitchen, but
could not log on (found out later that Marco had used the wrong password the previous night, so I was locked out of my account til he fixed it). Did check weather.com, and saw that we had a large line of rain and thunderstorms coming at us, looking like it would arive around 8:30 or so. It was rather dismal looking outside, so it seemed rain was a certainty (again, sigh). At 6:45 I returned to our "cabin," and Mark and I finished packing up. I also finished boxing up the rest of our un-needed gear, and left it in the room with $15 cash for Brady to mail to my house at his leisure. All together, probably 5 pounds less stuff for us to carry.

Left around 7:40, and headed down for the trail magic at the "brown house by the A.T." In fact, we were the first to arrive, at 7:50 or so, but they were already ready for us. Quite a spread, with pancakes, bacon, hot muffins, fresh fruit, coffee, sodas, etc. One of the servers turned out to be the same guy that sold Mark his A.T. maps at Harper's Ferry last March; small world.... They were planning on serving three meals, all day long. Within 10 minutes about 30 people from the Kicora Hostel showed up, plus a few more straggled in from various nearby campsites. Oddly enough, many people were reverse hiking or slack-packing today, getting a shuttle out past Pond Mountain and returning for a second meal at the Trail Magic and another cheap night ($4) at Kicora. A few indicated they were going to stay at the Trail Magic all day (which I personally think is rather abusing the privilege). We left at 8:30 or so, with thank you's all around, and headed back out on the trail.

Very interesting walk - along the Laurel Fork creek, through some small gorges cut by the creek eons ago, past a really impressive waterfall, and along a creekside trail that was two foot or less wide, the cliff to one side and the creek on the other. Also past some neat flowering plants; some with very unusual colors. Then a very long uphill up Pond Mountain, pretty tough, especially near the top. Many of the slack-packers passed us on the way back to the Trail Magic (hustling right along, I will add). Grabbed lunch on top, with a partial view of Watauga Lake, a huge
TVA project lake. Since we had 2-3 bars, I went ahad and activated the new phone, and added the hundred dollar card while I was at it - but made no phone calls yet.

Headed down to Watauga Lake, where we ran into intermittent showers and an unexpected surprise to find that the trail was under water in about a half a dozen places. We managed to work around some of them, but in the end we switched our boots with our camp shoes and waded two stretches, the first of which was about 30-40 feet and up to my thighs. Sure wish I had thought to get THAT on camera: "Wading the Appalachian Trail" as the caption. Should have brought a fly rod. Took about an hour and a half to walk what should have taken 15 minutes - the hairiest part was avoiding the extensive poison ivy and briars during the workarounds. I think the local ATC has some work to do here....

Finally worked around to the Watauga Lake shelter (which we bypassed), and started climbing up to the dam, reaching it within about 20 minutes. Very impressive spot; we grabbed a few photos as we crossed over it on an access road. Then we had a VERY long uphill, tough going, to get up to the ridgeline again. Intermiitent rain and drizzle, very humid - quite a slog. We didn't bother with raingear, due to the humidity and still fairly high temperatures. I think Mark said it was about 7 miles of mostly uphill, with about a 3,000 foot elevation gain net; it took us almost 5 hours to finish it. Got plenty of great bird's eye views of the lake along the way. We did 17 1/2 miles getting to the Vandervaleer Shelter. The shelter turned out to be full, and the few campsites nearby were also taken (the ridgeline was quite narrow here), but the people there told us that there was a decent tentsite down about 300 yards along the trail to the water source, so we backtracked about a hundred yards and headed down a very steep and slick trail, and found the site, in a saddle on a connector ridge. Two tents already there, with a fire sort of going, but (barely) enough room for the two of us as well. The water turned out to be another 200 yards further down the draw, on an even steeper trail. I took care of that chore for both of us, and it took almost 25 minutes. Misty, increasingly windy, and chilly in the saddle, plus we were out of daylight, so it was a hurried setup and dinner, and a late bearbag. Amazingly, our fellow campers (a solo guy and a trio of girls) were cooking in their tents, and after waiting too long decided against hanging their bear bags at all (they WERE going to hang them above our tents at one point, til Mark said "I don't think so!") Fortunately the fire smell kept us all safe, despite their carelessness. In the tents around 9:15 or so. Long day!
- Bob