Date: 2004-05-15
From: Tri-Corner Knob Shelter

To: Standing Bear Farm
Miles today: 18.1
Weather: scattered clouds

In the morning we were among the first to rise due to the location of our bags in the common area of Tri-Corner Shelter. It was either get up or get stepped on while folks potentially dropped their packs on us. It was a gray morning. There were too many people to have any hope of getting to know anyone, so subconsciously, we didn¢t even try. Breakfast was disturbed by a horrifying event. The spring was not even 20 feet from the shelter just off to the side. A guy in his mid twenties walked up the small grass slope above the spring and took a leak. Aaaaah! My water bottle was already full but what was this guy thinking. This was the second time that I found myself at a loss for words in the face of a gross environmental tragedy. Don¢t get me wrong, I seldom hesitate to spread the Leave-No-Trace word during casual conversation. But to admonish someone caught in the act and with an audience is beyond my abilities so far. Besides I was still a bit disgruntled about the full shelter, not to mention a bit tired after a long day and short night.Adam and I hit the trail while most shelter dwellers were still milling around in the damp and gray. We may not have left together but we were not far apart either. We hiked at times apart and at times together all day. It was probably at the Snake Den Ridge Trail junction that one of us stopped to talk to some older guys who had stopped there. The other one of us caught up shortly. These guys were regulars here. They insisted that we should take a side trail found a mile or so up the trail that led to a unique tower. It was on the Mount Cammerer Trail. They pointed out a knob on a distant ridge. The skies were clear now and the view was nice through the trees. We moved on.There were some scraps of a plane wreck in the trail. It was kind of surprising. The pieces were all painted green so it was probably a military plane. There was nothing in the guide books about it either.The illusive Mount Cammerer seemed further off than advertised and there was no way that the thing those guys had pointed to could be it. We had certainly passed that by now. We did both want to check it out even though it was a half mile off the trail. Finally getting to the trail junction, I dropped my pack and took my camera, snack sack and water bottle on down the side trail. It went up a bit, down a bit and then flat for a while. Then it climbed a little peak and headed down the other side. This was becoming a bit disconcerting. Then suddenly, there stood the tower. It was an octagonal stone tower with a railed deck all the way around. It took some rock hopping to get to the steps. The door was unlocked and there were windows to afford a 360 degree view even from inside. This had been a fire tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corp, CCC, back in the late 1930¢s. There¢s a photo of the interpretive sign. WAdam showed up shortly and we had lunch part 2 here on the deck out of the wind.From the Mount Cammerer Trail junction the AT begins a long graded descent to the edge of the Great Smoky National Park and into Davenport Gap. We would loose 3,000 feet of elevation in the next 5 miles. The pitch was perfect for running or what I call a ¢gravity walk¢. Gravity Walk:Running involves adding energy. A ¢gravity walk¢ just lets gravity pull you down the hill. Your feet just bounce off the rocks while your legs act as shock absorbers to prevent a fall. It¢s kind of like falling down the mountain with out landing. This mode lets me do 15 minute miles. The danger is Gumby legs or rubber legs. When the legs get too tired they can just collapse out from under. This is a bad thing. Usually a trail doesn¢t maintain the proper grade long enough for this to become a problem. Maybe the run goes for a mile or two, a half hour at the most.Well, 5 miles meant more than an hour of pounding on the legs. That would be too much.. Whoa. (Hey, that was some one¢s trail name.) Luckily, there were some trail workers about half way down who gave me an excuse to stop for a bit.This trail crew was actually a group of volunteers from a horse back riding club. This was one of the few sections of the AT that allow horses. Surprisingly it wasn¢t littered with horse hockey. That was nice and a real tribute to this club. They were doing some pretty heavy duty rock work. I thanked them and commiserated with tales of my adopted trail near Mount Washington. One of the guys gave me an apple and I was off. It shouldn¢t have surprised me but a few hundred feet down the trail, it did. Their horses were tethered to trees off the trail. Cool.The jog continued on down to the northern boundary of the National Park. Now, there are two hiker hostels in the Davenport Gap vicinity. The first, Mountain Momma¢s, had been a landmark on the trail for quite some time. It had been recommended to me for it¢s burgers by some. Of course that doesn¢t do a lot for a vegetarian. Some complained that she was a bit extreme in banishing alcohol and foul language. That sounded great to me, being uncomfortable around both. It was the guy who said the place felt a bit like ¢Deliverance¢ that had the biggest impact. Adam had heard about another place, Standing Bear Farm, and was planning to stay there. He had given me directions but I hadn¢t written them down. Neither of these places was right on the trail. Interestingly, Mountain Moma¢s is in North Carolina while Standing Bear is in Tennessee. Not that that would have had anything to do with Adam¢s preference, being a Tennessee native.Standing Bear sounded like the place for me too. The trick was navigating some civilized sections of the trail here. The trail broke out onto a sizable paved road on a curve, right beside an intersection with a dirt road. There were no blazes to be seen from here in any direction. A few steps to the left showed the road heading up over a bridge. To the right the road curved down. No one wants to go up hill again at the end of the day with such a long down, so I took a right, down to the next intersection. Still there were no blazes or signs. Blast, time to turn around. Back up the hill and over the bridge there were finally some faded blazes on the guard rail. Next, this road intersected with a ramp coming in from the left but the trail went right, toward another ramp. Ah, this was Interstate 40. That was cool. I thought to myself, that could take me all the way to Denver but now I see it would actually be Albuquerque. No one¢s perfect.The White blazes on the Interstate sign posts and the concrete bridge abutment led me under I-40. On the other side they led up a small road and then turned off into the woods up some steep long stairs. It seemed to me Standing Bear Farm should be near here. Heading off the road into the woods seemed to be a bad move. While pondering my situation standing in the middle of the road a minivan or SUV came down the little road and stopped beside me. It was a man and his son. We had met on the trail earlier, maybe at Cosby Knob Shelter. Yes, they had stopped in for water. Actually, I stopped there for lunch part 2 and met a couple of thru-hiking guys there. One was from Ireland and the other was from Australia I think. They were cooking a big meal. Some one had convinced them it was better to eat big in the middle of the day. There¢s no question that wouldn¢t work for me. As soon as I start hauling up a mountain, my digestive system shuts down. It¢s not a good feeling. The big meal goes at the end of the day for this guy.The father and son were just out for a short day hike in consideration of future hikes on the trail. Now they offered me a ride to Standing Bear where they had spent the night and I accepted. It was just a half mile up the road. They dropped me off and wished me well. The kid was maybe 12 and quite enthusiastic about the trail. That was nice.Standing Bear Farm Hostel was an amazing place. The whole place was hand crafted of logs and rough cut slabs. There was a bunk house with a wood stove and covered porch. Below that was the kitchen building with windows all around. Just below that was a little building about the size of an outhouse. It housed a stacked washer and dryer, a notebook computer, a phone and a chair. It was the most amazing little shack. These buildings were all nestled around a fire ring in a stone patio area. Across the drive there was a little cottage built bridging a brook. This had a normal double bed in it and was quite quaint. A bridge crossed the brook and led to the showers and the privy. Just down the drive, a barn with a door to a basement room provided a hiker store. There were shelves stocked full of Lipton Dinners, granola and candy bars, instant oatmeal, cocoa, toilet paper, cheese and all kinds of other foods thru-hikers would want. Oh, and then there was the freezer full of frozen pizza and the fridge full of soda. Every thing had a price on it. The whole place ran on the honor system. Just keep track your self and leave the money in the box on the outside of the bunk house before you go. A bunk for the night was just $15 and included shower, laundry, kitchen, phone and Internet. The opportunity to wash my clothes, send my 2nd Email Update and make some phone calls did not escape me. The calls included an attempt to talk with someone at Arora Solar regarding my late charger. The result was a voice mail. Another call was to make reservations at Sunnybank Inn for me and Adam in Hot Springs. This placed had a great reputation. Adam had tried to book it on another adventure but they had been full. The guy taking the reservation wanted to know where I was calling from. He really didn't believe we could make it in 2 days. I assured him we would be there. The good folks that owned, built and operated the place, Curtis & Maria, lived in the house across from the barn. They have little ones and also have a restaurant in Newport. I don¢t know how they could keep it all going. Curtis showed me around and offered a ride into town if I needed anything. I didn¢t. This place had all I needed or could hope for. Well maybe a faster Internet connection would have been nice but this was nowhere. Adam showed up before long. We had come 18.1 miles today and it was still early. Actually I walked 0.6 miles less than that due to the unexpected ride to Standing Bear. It seems the trail paralleled the road and crossed it just 200 yards from here. Oops, that was a mistake. There was another guy there too. He was just starting his adventure. He had done the part south of here last year. He was maybe 19 or 20 but seemed pretty unprepared. He had long blue jeans and a cotton shirt. He looked to be out of shape and over weight. He was staying in the brook cottage. We didn¢t see much of him. Who knows what became of him. Hike your own hike, right.A letter was waiting for Adam on a bulletin board on the porch of the bunk house. It was from a girl he had ¢made friends with¢ a week or so before setting out on the trail. He had told me about her on the trail. This was pretty cool. He wasn¢t expecting it at all. I wasn¢t expecting this place to be so well stocked. Leaving NOC my pack was loaded with eight days of food from Ingles in Bryson City. That was only five nights ago. This would have been a fine place to resupply for the one night to get to Hot Springs. Of course it was still tough to believe the daily miles passing under my boots. Food planning should improve in the future.Guide Books:Now for a word about guide books, there are plenty of AT guide books out there. The question is which one and how many should a thru-hiker carry. This hiker didn¢t spend much time preparing. The ATC website, www.appalachiantrail.org, offered a package of three at a discount. This package included the "AT Workbook", "The Thru-Hiker¢s Companion" & the "AT Data Book". The Workbook for me was useless, it contains a bunch of forms and lists for doing mail drops. For some that would be very handy but not for a guy not doing mail drops. The Companion has lots of nice good info. There are notes on every shelter including the number it sleeps, the location of the water & privy and often some historical aspect of the shelter or its locale. It also has info on facilities and services available in trail towns along the way. Maps of the larger towns are included. At the beginning of each section it lists a bunch of distances. The Data Book is just that, a list of every point of interest to a thru-hiker accompanied by the distance from the beginning of that section of the trail and the distance to the end of the section. There are also a series of one letter codes associated with each place. The codes indicate things such as: water, shelter, camping, lodging, meals, groceries & road crossings among other things. So what is a ¢section¢ anyway. The ATC also markets trail guides and maps of the entire Appalachian Trail. This would be way too much for one book or one map so they have broken the trail up into lots of sections. Sections often end at state borders but some states are so big they have several sections. Consequently, both the Companion and the Data Book are set up in sections just like the trail guides and map sets. Oddly the Data Book starts in Maine and goes south to Georgia. This is odd because about 9 out of 10 thru-hikers start in Georgia and hike north to Maine. That¢s right the vast majority of us have to start at the back of the Data Book and read it backwards, bottom to top and back to front, talk about confusing. The Companion however starts in Georgia and proceeds to Maine.To find the distance from my current position to the next shelter or where the next night will be spent requires subtracting two distances found in the Data Book. Successive calculations are the norm when planning the next day and it gets even worse when trying to find the number of days to the next resupply. This is challenging enough for a weary hiker but add to that reading the book backwards and it is a recipe for screw ups. This comes from a guy who actually enjoys math and doing calculations in his head but enough is enough. It¢s also annoying to be dealing with two books all the time. Frequently the Companion would just stay in the pack because it was too much hassle. On the fifth day of the hike I started tearing pages out of the Data Book. Today¢s page would stay handy in the camera pouch on my hip-belt where it could be referenced at any time with no hassle. Taking the pack off and putting it back on just takes too much energy, besides it requires stopping. That¢s no fun. Alright, so Adam was carrying a different book and so were lots of other thru-hikers. It seemed to be a lot easier to use. It was "The Thru-Hiker¢s Handbook" by Dan ¢Wingfoot¢ Bruce. Wingfoot was Dan¢s trail name of course. This book was basically a cross between the Data Book and the Companion with a few twists. First, the Mileage Index, the part that most closely resembles the Data Book, starts in Georgia, not Maine and goes north not south. That was a huge plus right there. Northbounders could read the pages top to bottom and the book front to back. The shelters were all printed in boldface making them easy to pick out of the list. Beside each shelter were the distances both north and south to the next shelter. Wow, less math to do and it¢s addition not subtraction. Another nice thing is that beside each place name is its elevation. Oh, and a huge thing for me and probably all thru-hikers is that the distances listed are from Springer Mountain in Georgia and to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Who cares how far it is to the next section or state border. There is also a bit of crucial descriptive info included in the Mileage Index, like ¢spring behind big tree¢. Additionally there are a few more codes referring to services in town. Where ever there is road access to hiker services in town there is a page number referencing a Hiker Note in the back of the book. The Hiker Notes include pretty much the same stuff found in the Companion along with town maps. The nice thing is that it is just a flip of the page away and you know what page number to look at. There's no need to have a second book like The Companion. In all fairness, The Companion does offer lots of background and historical info on places and things along the way. That stuff can be very interesting.This was definitely a better way to go. I needed to get this book. Maybe the outfitter in Hot Springs will have it though Adam was doubtful. He had ordered his from somewhere.