Castles made of sand (Week 2, Part 1)

There is a particular kind of trust that builds slowly on the trail, almost without you realizing it. A mile here, a double-digit day there, a downhill you ran, a bear choke you nailed on the first pitch. You start to feel like you’re getting somewhere. As if the thing was really working. Like maybe you were made for this after all.

North Carolina has an answer to that.

The second week was a week of small accumulations, of trails arriving silently, of community coming together around campfires and lodge common rooms, of bodies beginning to remember what they were designed to do. And then, just in time, fourteen days later, just as Georgia was settling into the rearview mirror, the border was crossed and the mountains changed their minds about me. Everything I thought I had built vanished in one humbling afternoon of back-to-back climbs and the first real rain of the trip.

Castles made of sand.

Day 8: Zero in Blairsville

A day zero is not what non-hikers imagine. You always have to walk, but not much, maybe 4,000 steps, and nothing with a backpack on your back. What it really is is a day of housework. Laundry. Loading everything. Body care. Fuel. I also wrote two full articles that day. (If you’re reading this, you’re welcome, I think?)

I slept late, really late, and completely missed the hotel breakfast. It’s worth every minute.

At the barbershop, the barber recommended Nani’s across the street while I was waiting for my zero guard bell, so I went. The owner immediately marked me as not from here. Blairsville is a small mountain town of less than a thousand people; He just didn’t recognize me as a local or a regular customer. I didn’t look too disheveled yet. The sandwich was good. Honestly, the rice and beans were the highlight of the meal. Back at the hotel, I trimmed the sides of my beard with the scissors of my mini Swiss Army knife. A hilarious image, I’m sure, and probably a trick to boot.

Then the ice baths. I made some ice baths in trash baskets and soaked my feet in them, which was excruciating, until a Google search informed me that I wanted water closer to 50°F than 32°F for a therapeutic effect. More unnecessary suffering, actually, when you think about what a hike is. The adjusted temperature really worked.

To the uninitiated, a zero day can seem like wasted time, a day of rest, like playing hooky. It is not. It is the day when you treat the body as if it were a piece of equipment so that the equipment continues to function. But more than that, it’s the freedom to do whatever you want, including nothing, if you want. That freedom is its own kind of luxury here.

Dinner at El Manzanillo near the hotel. Early to bed. Georgia wasn’t going to walk alone.

Day 9: Tesnatee Gap to Chattahoochee Gap

Rested legs and trail legs are not the same. The climb up Raven Cliffs Wilderness made that clear immediately. Rigid, fresh from scratch, the climb was steep and relentless, a trial by fire for legs that had spent a day in a horizontal position. The body finally remembered. He always does it. You only need a kilometer or two to remember it.

After that it became more cruising. We bumped into a group of local women spending a few days near Suches, a nice short exchange about how lovely the local area was around the Above the Clouds hostel where I had stayed a few days earlier. Then it was mostly Matt and I, a section hiker, talking about life, family, nature, and why we were here doing this. The kind of conversation that makes miles disappear.

At Low Gap Shelter I picked up the food packages someone had left and packed them up. I also found a smoldering fire and put it out. Some people ahead of us on the trail were apparently treating nature as if it would cleanse them. I wouldn’t do it. (Don’t be like those people, please.)

I already wrote about what happened at Low Gap that day. If you haven’t read it, the short version is Now I Have a Route Name. The longer version is worth reading.

The day closed at Chattahoochee Gap, 10.6 miles, my first double-digit day on the trail. There I drew water from the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River. The same river that meanders through Atlanta, drained by the millions, beginning here as a cold trickle in the mountains of North Georgia. The headwaters felt like a mile below the camp, but were probably only 150 vertical feet. If, as Einstein stated, space and time are relative, then foot pain is the mechanism by which time and distance dilate.

The wind hadn’t let up since Jarrard Gap and I was starting to notice a pattern. The hollows tend to concentrate and the funnels rise over the hills and into the next valley. Something to keep in mind when choosing where to camp. A lesson he was still in the process of learning.

Day 10: Chattahoochee Gap to Cheese Factory Site

A flash of color caught my eye from around the corner in the trees at Spaniards Knob Campground. My first assumption was rubbish. After the containers of food and the smoldering fire the day before, I had begun to expect the worst from whoever was ahead of me on the road one day. I went to check it out anyway.

It was a hat. Candy Corn’s hat, forgotten by accident. I recognized her right away, a hiker I’d met in the early days outside Gooch Gap, memorable in large part because of the Rainforest Cafe bucket hat she wore on the trail. It’s not an item you forget. I put it in a side pocket of my backpack and carried it to Unicoi Gap, where a group from Blairsville had installed magical trails. I gave it to another hiker who was headed to the same lodge as her. A little errand, pretty easy. But I almost didn’t go to check it out.

Trail magic in Unicoi meant food, which meant I ate too much, which meant the climb into the Rocky Mountains immediately afterward was exactly as unpleasant as you’d expect. They all passed me. Same old story. I briefly met a mother and her son at Magic, the son hiking and the mother for the first few miles, both from Minnesota. We crossed paths a few more times during the day. Enough to exchange nods and feel a small kinship with the Midwest so far from home.

View from near the top of the Rocky Mountains

At the top I ran into Hot Sauce, a hiker I met on the Gooch Gap climb in the early days, and the first familiar face I’d seen since returning to the trail. He told me that he likes camping, but he gets tired of all the walking on a hike, which is a very specific and honest thing to admit. He also reduced the weight of his backpack from 53 pounds to 25, the transformation from weekend camper to hiker occurred in real time and can be measured in pounds.

That night I got my bear to hang right on the first cast, and it was a really solid hang. Having backpacked exclusively in northern Minnesota, where a PCT is also considered the gold standard, I had more prior experience than most that paid dividends here, even if it had been over five years since I last backpacked. Apparently one of the only abilities I brought to the trail translated directly into one of the daily minigames. Because that’s what a hike really is. It’s the Oregon Trail, but the mini-games are: collect and filter water, pack your backpack, rotate clothes, check humidity and wet clothes, backpack and tent, hang your food bag, cook, pack and eat snacks, walk (of course), use the bathroom, plan shelters, transportation and resupply, and try to remember everyone’s name.

The night was cold and windy. I had my hat, gloves and a puffy blanket inside my sleeping bag and was perfectly warm. Outside the stock market was another matter entirely. There’s no shame in staying put until the wind dies down, or at least that’s what I told myself all morning as I listened to everyone pack up and leave the deserted camp.

Day 11: Cheese Factory Site to Sassafras Gap

The next morning I unzipped the fly and the freezer did the rest. Whatever heat the sleeping bag had been through all night was gone in an instant. Emma, ​​the ridge runner covering our section and a fellow Minnesotan from Duluth, was nearby knocking down a fire pit someone had built with rocks. By the way, don’t do this. The roots underneath can catch fire and attach to a tree, starting something much larger, or simply kill the tree entirely. None of the results are Leave No Trace. We chatted for a while and I asked him for advice about the coming rain. His response was essentially that if you were already thinking about it and planning ahead, you were probably prepared enough to handle it. I chose to take that as a compliment.

I had made a deliberate decision not to pair Tray Mountain with Blue Mountain and Rocky Mountain from the day before, and that decision was paying off. Tray was out early, out of the way, and the day already seemed manageable. Somewhere in there I passed a sign for something called Swag of the Blue Ridge, a name that completely confused me and that I never looked up. A certain song stuck in my head for most of the afternoon. This, right here, is my… Swag. Blue Ridge Booty.

When I reached Sassafras Gap, my feet were protesting. The water source at Addis Gap, about a mile ahead, was almost a mile away from the road. I decided to stop dead. Steve and Gizmo were already camped there; I had met them just a few days earlier over lunch at Low Gap, the same afternoon they gave me the name of my trail. Gizmo was Steve’s father and accompanied him on the first section of his son’s hike. I was told about Stanimal’s flexible packaging offer and called from Trail that night to extend my reservation from one night to two.

The wind was still blowing. Third or fourth night in a row, although the forecast said that he would finally die before morning.

Then later came the Lion King, Hot Sauce, and Samwise. Lion King I knew Kallin and Evelyn from the beginning, their trail name a cheerful bastardization of their real name. Samwise was Tyson, who I met on the second day at the Stover Creek Shelter when I had lunch with Evelyn and Kallin. The trail briefly reassembles around a titanium wood stove inside the permitted fire pit… For safety.

Sometime in the early morning the wind finally stopped. In that silence the owls arrived. A parliament of them, shouting over and around the camp that night and into the next morning. After windy nights that made the forest seem indifferent and noisy, the owls felt that nature offered something in return.