Date: 2003-04-15
From: Brown Gap

To: I-40
Miles today: 10.7

It¢s 9:01am. We¢re leaving Brown Gap heading south.Its day 6 of our 2003 hike. We¢re going to go down to Waterville Road on I-40. Its 10.1 miles down to the Interstate. Beautiful, sunny day again. Cool here, going to be a high today of 80 degrees. A great day for hiking.We¢re taking a little break here at 10:14am; a potty break, picture break, water break. We¢ve gone by 7 thru hikers; one was a jogger doing 33 miles to Hot Springs today. Didn¢t get their names, all going uphill, working hard. We¢re headed for Deep Gap, but taking a break, taking off some clothing layers. We¢re at Deep Gap. It¢s 10:36am. Ground Hog Creek shelter is 0.2mile off the trail. We¢re not going down there. We¢re going to rest here at Deep Gap campground. Pretty spot. Sunny day. Going to be warm. Lots of white pines around. Everything is greening up. Still not many wildflowers though to look at, not like if you came two weeks from now. An old road comes in to the gap. Beautiful spot.Left Deep Gap at 11:06am. We¢re taking another break now at 11:51am on up the trail. While we¢re sitting here having our break the two Pete¢s came by. Thru hikers. At Deep Gap. One of the Petes was smoking their big pipe. Smelled pretty interesting. They had to be called the two Petes since they¢re both named Pete. No other way to do it unless they wanted to be called Pete and Repeat. So we¢re climbing up Snowbird Mt. Maybe we¢re half way up it now. Now the clouds have come in. now it¢s partly cloudy. All of a sudden it was totally sunny, now partly cloudy. Warming still. This will probably keep the temperature down.Stopping at 12:18pm for a big lunch and a rest. We¢re probably 12 mile from the top of Snowbird Mt. Nice little gap here between two bumps on the mountain. We went past Wild Cat Spring and another nice campsite back on the other bump. Haven¢t seen any hikers lately; they must be working hard coming up from Davenport Gap. Going to take a nice break here and then go over the top.We¢re still here at 1:02pm. Maybe 34 miles to the top of Snowbird from here. We¢re getting ready to go; packing up. Probably stop up there to have a view. Here we are on Snowbird Mt. at 1:30pm. It was quite a surprise. We just passed a guy just below here and asked him if we were close to the top. The guy didn¢t know where the top was. 2 minutes later we get to the top. All the trees are gone for many acres. A giant tower is there.We talked to a thru hiker named Sour mash because he tried to make friends the first day out with Slow pops(Tootsie roll) and everybody stayed away from him. Then they found out he carried whisky with him; then everybody wanted to be his friend. Very nice view from here. A little overcast but can see haze as usual. Right now we¢re walking thru this pile of trees on both sides of the trail. 5 minutes off the top and ran into a couple of guys and spent 10-15 minutes talking. They were very interesting. One is Papa Bear from Alabama, retired, and has yet to stay in a motel. But he says he¢s going to go to Elmer¢s in Hot Springs and stay there. He started at Cosby Knob this morning and he¢s going to the Ground Hog Shelter. That will be a 17 plus day. The other guy is Dirty Frank from PA. He started at Davenport Gap this morning and going to Max patch today. We talked about hiking the trails and how we are section hiking doing a little at a time. Good clouds overhead now so it doesn¢t get so hot.We stopped and talked to two gals, Flying Cricket and Sassafras. Sassafras is from Portland, ME. They¢re sisters. They¢re out having a good time. We talked about what a typical thru hiker really did vs a purist idea of thru hiking. The French Guy came by, said he couldn¢t talk very good English and went on. He looked very beat. We stood there and talked to the gals some more. The guy from Scotland came by. Going to hike for 90 days, trying to do half of the trail then come back next year and do the other half. Had a nice long talk with him too. Here comes Tough Cookie with Romeo. She used to be Juliet but Romeo hurt himself so now she¢s carrying part of his load so hence Tough Cookie. She seemed real nice. Stood there and talked a few minutes.It¢s 2:30pm. We¢re barely making it down this mountain. We just talked to Mike from MD. He¢s hiking at least to MD. He doesn¢t know how far he will go. He¢s been on the trail for 3 weeks. He¢s got blisters. Common story for everybody. It¢s getting warm out here again. The sun¢s come out. I¢m glad we¢re going downhill at least. It looks like another 4:50pm day. It¢s 2:50pm. Cindy¢s sitting on the trail changing her socks. She had a hot foot experience. Going to thinner socks hopefully. Maybe we will get out of here by 4:50pm. If we talk to anybody it will be later.It¢s 3:36pm. It¢s probably still 3 miles to go. We can kind of hear the interstate way off in the distance, way below us. We¢re walking thru beautiful woods on a sunny day. We past ungodly number of thru hikers. Couldn¢t even guess how many. We only talked to half of them. So we probably seen 18 ¢20. We talked to I¢m alright and his 3 friends coming behind him. Talked about wildflowers.Probably didn¢t tell them correctly what a Trillium was. Saw more thru hikers. They all get jammed up in the Smokies. Now they¢re everywhere.It¢s 4:37pm. Coming to the end of the trail pretty soon. We just crossed Waterville Rd. Kind of a tricky little crossing of the road at 4:30pm. Now we have to go up and over a mountain. You could just follow the road around and save yourself a 500 foot climb but, no, that wouldn¢t be on the trail. So, we¢re on the mountain, going over it. Be at the car in 10, no 5 minutes maybe. Now it¢s 4:55pm and its 5 minutes to the car. Had to stop and take a picture of a big moth. Today we probably passed 28 thru hikers going northbound. It¢s going to be really crowded up there. We¢re down almost to our car, beautiful, warm, sunny day. Another good one. Had to go down these funky steps. I¢ll take a picture of them when we get to our car. After hiking we drove back to Newport and decided to try the Best Western motel. We paid $10 more but got the buffet breakfast. Motel 6 had nothing but coffee. We ate supper at the Best Western Restaurant. It was a good buffet and the same room was used for breakfast buffet, which included biscuits and gravy.