A.T. HQ

After a well-deserved hiatus we are back on the AT... sort of.

We finished up out first month on the trail in Damascus, Virginia, about two weeks ago. Having completed three hundred miles - 26 miles of that on our last day alone - we were overjoyed to reach civilization. After a well-deserved break in a B&B, we departed for Washington DC. Days of hiking over mountains were replaced with days of hiking around museums, galleries and national monuments. The AT was never far from our thoughts though, and were even were treated to a small exhibition on the first person to ever thru-hike the AT (ie hike the whole 2100 miles in one go) at the Smithsonian.

Since finishing our first month of the AT we've been 'unfaithful' to the AT twice. First, in Damascus, we shucked our packs for the day and hired some bikes for a pleasant ride down the Virginia Creeper Trail, a converted railway line that passes farm-houses, rolling hills and bubbling rivers. Kind of like we thought the AT was going to be. This was nice...too nice, and it got us thinking about the other kinds of trail that were out there to be explored.

So while we were in Washington DC we mulled over alternative routes, which would still take us where we wanted to go but allowed us to experience some more picturesque (read: flat) countryside.

In the end we decided on the the C & O Towpath, a heritage trail which runs over 180-miles from Cumberland, Maryland, to Georgetown in the heart of Washington DC. The towpath is nestled between the beautiful Potomac River and what's left of the canal itself. Built during the 1800's, the canal was useless by the time it was finished, as the railroad had overtaken it as the preferred freight route, and after a number of years it was turned into a national park. Most people choose to cycle it, as it is completely flat, but in the spirit of the AT we decided to hike two-thirds of the trail to the town of Harpers Ferry, where it intersects with the AT.

Five days and 85 miles in, about 30 miles short of Harpers Ferry, bad blisters (and the realisation that our tent was more '1 and a half man' than '2 man') forced us to hitch a ride into Harpers Ferry, a town with more history than almost all of Australia put together. Besides being a major battlefield in the Civil War, Harpers Ferry is also home to early railroads and industry, as well as one of the first colleges in the country to allow blacks and whites to study together.

It is also the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, as it is about halfway between Georgia and Maine, and is one of the most scenic and popular places on the AT. The fact that you can spend the day tubing down the gentle rapids of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers (with beer cooler if desired) makes it all the more attractive to the trail-weary hiker.

So we have spent the weekend enjoying a break from hiking and considering our next move - do we return to the AT and head into the Shenandoah National Park, or will the bright lights of New York prove too attractive to resist? Tune in next time to find out....

An Ordinary Day

Well, we have made it Elizabethton, Tennessee, and decided to take a break for the weekend. We are back on the trail tommorrow, but have spent the intervening time eating our own body weight at the local diner here.

Now that we have almost completed our first month on the trail, and settled into a pretty regular daily routine, we thought it might be nice to give an indication of 'a day in the life' of the hiker. So here goes...

7:00am - Wake Up. Try to ignore the smell of your sleeping bag after sweating in it all night. Doze for another hour.

8:20am - Free self from sleeping bag and hope other hikers don't notice the smell. Gather water bottles and head to the spring to pump and filter the days water.

8:40am - With 6 litres of water pumped and filtered, boil water for breakfast. Hope that porridge has somehow turned into bacon and eggs during the night.

9:00am - Roll sleeping bag, deflate mattress and stuff pack.

9:05am - Remember you forgot to brush your teeth. Unpack toothbrush.

9:10am - Repack pack.

9:20am - Begin hiking for the day. Straight up hill. For an hour.

11:00am - Morning Tea - Peanut Butter Choc Chip Clif Bars or Power Bar, handful of Jelly Beans/Trail Mix.

11:10am - Check map to see how many miles you have done so far, thinking it must be at least 5. Turns out it is 2. Have an argument about not checking the map so much.

1:00pm - Reach your first shelter of the day and stop for lunch. Cheese and Pepperoni on flat bread. Again. Check map and confirm that the afternoon's hike seems 'mostly down hill'

1:30pm - Hike seems suspiciously uphill. Resist checking map again to avoid argument.

4:00pm - Afternoon tea. Snickers Bar, cookies or other trail delicacies. Tell yourself that there must only be at least 2 miles to go.

6:00pm - Shelter has yet to appear and consider camping. Rumbling stormclouds are the only thing that keep you and your tired, blistered feet going.

6:15pm - Finally arrive at shelter, where a few hikers have already settled in for the night, their stuff spread across every inch of available space.

6:20pm - Introductions to other hikers. Feel embarassed about not having a 'trail name' yet but also a little proud you don't answer to 'Moon Dog'.

7:00pm - Boil water for dinner and pour into dehydrated 'Chicken Terriyaki'

7:10pm - 'Chicken Terriyaki' actually just Chicken Noodle Soup with unidentified black stuff in it.

7:30 - Hang food so bears/squirrels/enemy insurgents don't eat it during the night. Must be 10 feet from ground and 4 feet from the trunk of a tree. This is almost impossible to do, and generally involves tying a rock to a rope and throwing said rock into the air and hoping it will somehow loop around a promising branch.

8:00pm - Read for an hour and will the sun to go down so you can get some sleep.

9:15pm - Sun finally goes down and you are about to doze off. Hiker sleeping next to you begins to snore. Loudly. Like they are dying. From asphyxiation.

10:00pm - Snorer is unrepentant. Another hiker has joined in. There is now a full on nasal chorus.

2:15am - Awake to a raging thunderstorm.

3:00am - Thunderstorm ends. Snoring recommences.

7:00am - And so it begins again....

Singing in the Rain

Just when you want to throw you pack down, sit down in the dirt and give up, the AT somehow conjures up a vista of astonishing beauty as if to say "see, it's worth it". Invariably, we have noticed, this happens at around five in the afternoon, after a whole day of back-breaking uphill climbing, so that when you do turn in for the night the last thing you remember is the view and not the walk.

This week has not been without its challenges.

We had our first rainy weather on the trail. From listening to other hikers talk (and talk, and talk, and talk they do) I guess we have been lucky up till now. At first it wasn't too bad, even kind of fun in a novel way. We got to whip out the expensive rain gear and try out our new raincoats. Gradually though, everything gets a little damp -boots, socks, spirits. Then before you know it, everything you own is wet and it's starting to get cold. The best thing to do, we have found, is retreat to the nearest shelter and get into your sleeping back, no matter what time of day it is. All you have to worry about then is the threat of lightning hitting the shelter... it has been known to happen.

The other main preoocupation of the week has us conspiring to lift our caloric intake per day - you should have at least 2000 and at the moment we are waning on about 1500 a day. This may sound kind of fancy, but mainly this is rationalizing how may snickers bars we can carry before our packs become too heavy. Of course, filling up on calories when you reach a town helps too, like we did last night, at the all-you-can-eat KFC buffet this town has. They even had kentucky fried giblets... only in America...

Culinary issues aside, the town we are stopped in at the moment, Erwin, Tennessee, is a lovely little place, set amongst the mountains and by a large river, where you can go rafting and swimming, which we plan to check out later today. Theres a movie theatre, some cute little cafes, and even an art gallery. Oh, and it also where they make the fuel for America's nuclear submarines. You can't win em all i guess.

Our other task for today is to find new reading material for the trail - Thomas has been making his was through the collected works of Henry David Thoreau, one of America's great nature lovers. This tends to put him to sleep after about two pages though, so he's on the lookout for some more suitable holiday reading. Perhaps the Bible?

After two weeks and over 175 miles, the AT is certainly not without its challenges, but at the end of the (long) days walking, its worth it.

Goodbye Great Smokies, Hello Hot Springs

Well we have finally left the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. After a brief stint in Gatlinburg, and some home-sick tears by Rudy, we headed back into the national park. Highlights included our first thunder storm (luckily we were in a shelter when it struck), and making it to the Standing Bear Hostel - a bunch of log cabins on the edge of the park with a pantry stocked with oreos, pizzas, donnuts and pringles. A hikers' dream.

After a nights rest and filling up on junk food (it is impossible to describe how much we dream about food when we are on the trail), we headed back into the woods with the aim of making it to the town of Hot Springs in two days. To do this we put in the miles - 15 on the first and 18 on the next. The last six went much more quickly for having been accosted by a strange back-woodsman, who invited us back to his place for a drink...and offered us a ride in his car. Being mindful of never accepting rides from strangers, we hot-footed it back to the woods and must have set a land-speed record. We made it to Hot Springs just in time for 4th of July fireworks.

Hot Springs, much as the name suggests, is home to natural hot springs. A former Victorian resort town, its heydays were behind it, but it still retained some of the grandeur in the form of the Sunnybank Inn, a mansion from the 1840s that now provides accomodation and meals for hikers, complete with music room, library and period antiques. There is even rocking chairs on the porch to while away the long Southern afternoons. After a two night stay, a soak in the hot springs (which are now pumped into private spa tubs down by the river) and a replenish of our supplies, we are heading back into the woods for another 4 or 5 nights, hopefully bear and serial killer free.

Two men, 30kg of gear and 701 miles of trail

So after months of anticipation and weeks of preparation we have finally made it onto the Appalachian Trail (furthermore known as the 'AT', for obvious spelling reasons).

After a mad 36 final hours of preparation, flying from San Francisco to Charlotte, North Carolina on the red eye, then rental car-ing it to Asheville (kind of like a southern Montville), we got the last of our supplies and gear, and after ANOTHER two hour $200 taxi ride, we made it to the trail head (ie where you can join the trail from the road) at Fontana Dam.

From here we thought we had a relatively easy 5 mile (8km) hike to our first shelter (a kind of poor-mans cabin, with only three sides) at the appropriately named Mollies Ridge. Thanks to us being amateurs at reading the trail guide, the first days hike turned out to actually be 11 miles - a lot longer. Rudy almost cried. Thomas powered on and quickly earned the trail name 'The Bolter' (apparently have to have a trail name as part of AT tradition). The first three miles were hell - it was hot, sunny and felt like it was directly up hill all the way. The first view made it worth it though - beautiful clear skies out to the blue tinged mountains.

Another 8 miles later, we made it to the first shelter, and settled in for the night, just us and the wilderness, which on the AT of course, means bears. Bears rule your life on the AT. There are approx. 400-800 living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where we are currently hiking, and they are never far from you mind. Like they were at 2.30 in the morning, when Thomas woke me up with a whisper of 'There's a bear in the shelter'. A quick check with our headlamp revealed nothing - but your mind sure does play tricks on you out here.

We didnt have to wait long for our first actual bear siting - about three miles onto the trail the next day, Thomas spotted two bears up ahead of us on the track - they quickly retreated after seeing us, and to be honest we were kind of relieved we had finally seen them for real. Its good to know what your up against.

So the next four days were spent going up and down the great smokies - we have done about 35 miles now (approx 50km) and are having a night off in the town of Gatlinburg, a sort of Surfers Paradise/Las Vegas in the mountains. There are about 8 different Ripleys believe it or not-stlye museums here and enough snow cones/hot dogs/fudge/taffy to send you straight to the ER.

The video is from the shelter we spent last night at - luckily this one had a bear cage, as we got a visitor about 7.30 this morning. We were sharing with three burly southerners and two very fit ladies, so we figured we'd be right. The bear didnt seem to interested in us - although he did lick the log that Thomas sat on the previous night. Make of that what you will. Until next time...