Date: 2017-10-19
From: Beauty Spot

To: Erwin, Tennessee
Miles today: 10.3
Weather: clear sky

Miss Janet is one of the names synonymous with the AT.Partly this was from her running a famous hostel in Erwin, Tennessee, for years. After closing the hostel about 10 years ago, she swapped to doing mobile trail magic by using a minivan to follow the nobo herd from Georgia to Maine and then, once most of the nobos are done, would head south to do the same for the sobo herd en route to Springer.And a significant part of this notoriety is that she's one of the trail's true characters and even though she's never done much more than a few short hikes, she serves as an example of how the AT's longer history has resulted in a different social ecosystem that had developed around it.She is, in short, a trail tragic.That's not meant pejoratively. And when Dirt announced today that she's lined us up to stay with Miss Janet at her house tonight in Erwin, I was inestimably grateful because my philosophy about this trail has been that I've wanted to experience every facet of the hike and that includes meeting as many of its characters as I could.Dirt had initially called Rob, the mohawked trail magician with the dodgy-in-any-other-circumstances white van we'd met a few days earlier. But the decision of the Second Breakfast Club to slackpack back to Erwin tonight meant he was full and he offered Miss Janet as an option instead. Between us and our rendezvous with Miss Janet was 11 trail miles. I'd managed to successfully cowboy camp last night for the first occasion on the whole AT. (And since I'm writing this months after finishing the trail, I can also state this was the only successful occasion in more than five months)It helped that the temperatures were warmer than Overmountain shelter and I didn't even need to use my sleeping bag liner. The katabatic effect meant there wasn't any frost on the ground around our hilltop camp but there was once we'd descended a few hundred metres.Usually our delayed departure in the mornings in caused by cold-weather inertia but today it was also caused by the awesome view from our campsite across a fog-filled valley towards Mt Mitchell. At 2037m/6684ft, this was the highest peak not just in North Carolina but in the whole of the Appalachians, although the AT circles around it rather than going over it.The trail was mostly downhill and fast, with lots of water available in the second half. By lunchtime, we arrived at the meeting space where Miss Janet was dutifully waiting. It turned out that she no longer had a home in Erwin but her uncle's home in the town was caught up in some kind of will-dispute with the wider family and she was able to use it while that was grinding its way through the courts. That's where we were staying.Most of the Second Breakfast Club were slackpacking back to Erwin from either Spivey Gap (11 miles) or Sam's Gap (24 miles) but two other sort-of sobos, Buck and Rogue, were there. Like quite a few other people we'd met, they'd abandoned the idea of a pure hike and were mostly yellow-blazing around.Miss Janet was kind enough to drive us to Walmart to resupply and also to get the supplies make a huge communal meal for everyone that night. We then went to possibly the worst Mexican restaurant I'd ever been to -- given its location right next to the Walmart, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.After that, there were the familiar chores of any town day: showers and laundry and repacking.Once everyone was back, the house was full of hikers and as boistrous as one would imagine. The other groups are fun but they also tend to suck all the air out of the room and after more than four months in the hills, my capacity for big noisy crowds has certainly diminished. I escaped early and hid in the back room where Dirt, OK and Happy Feet are also camping.Life is good.AT fact of the day: We thought we ought to send a message to our sick colleagues, showing them we were thinking about them. For reasons that are not immediately obvious, this turned into sending a photo of OK drinking an enormous frozen margarita, albeit with tears added in post-production to say we were sad they weren't here with us...