Date: 2010-04-05
From: Gatlinburg, TN.

To: Icewater Spring Shelter
Miles today: 3.0
Weather: overcast clouds

I'm still recovering from that grueling day before last and we like to maximize our hotel time and not leave til check out, so we decided another nero sounded good. There is a new outfitter in G-burg, Great Outpost, a satelitte of NOC. They are doing free shuttles up to the gap, so we partook, tho we had to spend an hour or so waiting and looking around the very well stocked outfitter. The Happy Hiker outfitter is on the verge of going out of business anyway, I'm sure this won't help. I looked at shoes some as I know this second to last pair of my discontinued beloved Montrail Vitesse is not going to last me and I need to find another shoe. The ones I am wearing still have a few hundred miles and then I have a nearly new pair at home that I can get 6-700 miles out of.         Knowing we were only going 3 miles, we took our time and took a couple breaks, stopped and talked to a lot of dayhikers. There was still a lot of snow on the trail in shady places. This section of trail is where I first set foot on the AT during a spring break geology field trip in 1997. I'm not sure where the bug intially bit, tho I have a memory of seeing a documentary on PBS when I was 12 or so and without having any backpacking let along camping experience, I thought-"that would be so cool to walk from Georgia to Maine".         I took my first backpacking trip in my senior year of high school as part of ECO-ACT, an enviromental leadership program. A few years later in college, my dad gave me a gift certificate to my university bookstore and I went looking for an interesting book. "Walking the Applachian Trail" by Larry Luxenborg caught my eye. It was filled with stories of trail names and trail magic and created a picture of the wonderful sub-culture that has evolved around the AT. My last semester of college I had a chance to sign up to go on the spring break geology trip to the Smokies. I remember just hoping I'd get a glimpse of the AT as the vans blew by, but then we stopped at Newfound Gap and the professor made the mistake of saying we had a few minutes to go explore before we'd regroup. A handful of us took off up the AT , headed north. I remember us joking, "pick me up in Maine!" After 10 minutes or so we turned around and went back, the professor was pissed, but oh well.        Towards the end of college,I bought some gear and went on a couple solo hikes, then at the end of college and the end of geology field camp in Wyoming, I decided to head up into the Wind River Range. My pack weighed 70+ lbs, I had to set it on a stump or a rock and get underneath it to put it on. The Wind River range is up there in pure, large, unspoiled Wilderness with a capital W. I am sometimes in awe of the things I did when I didn't know any better. I had read books, knew about things like bear hangs, water purfication, stream crossings, but had no real experience with any of it. I spent 10 days up there and quickly learned to carry less crap.        A few months after that, I got a job where I had large chunks of time off to travel and play. I did a few multi-day trips in various places, some alone, some with others. A guy I worked with and I went on a few trips and we discovered we had both dreamed of thru-hiking the AT. We talked about hiking sections, but we both wanted the full thru-hiker experience, so somehow we decided about 3 years was a good amount of time to work at our crazy job and then we'd be ready to quit. I had actually totally forgot about the 3 years thing until sometime during my 2001 hike. I was no longer hanging out with the guy, but we were still in touch and he was on my email list and he was like "wow, you're really doing it!".         A funny fact about my 2001 thru-hike, it didn't start off as a thru- it was originally planned as a 6 week section hike. Fall 2000, I was living up in Victoria, British Columbia and had taken a trip up to Pacific Rim National Park. While on a October dayhike on a boardwalk through the rainforest, I began thinking about the AT. I think it was triggered by seeing an AT sticker on someone's car who lived in my apartment complex. So I was thinking, I'd really love to do a thruhike, but I don't have the time. I think section hiking it would not be as cool, but it would still be cool and I would still get to experience all the trail culture, I could lose a lot of weight in 6 weeks of hiking. When does my break in March start? Mental math= March 12.         That would be a good time to start I suppose. 6 weeks work before, 6 weeks hiking, 6 weeks work, I'd be gone for 4 months, no point in paying rent on my apartment for all that time, so I started making plans to put all my stuff in storage when I left for work in January. I started doing gear research online. Sometime in December 2000, rumors of my crew being shut down surfaced and by the time I got off work in March 2001, it was a certainty. There would be no crew to come back to. I wasn't laid off, but I was in limbo, waiting for another crew assignment. The shutdown was the result of a merger and the new company wanted everyone with large balances of paid time off to use all of it up. I had 3+ months accrued, so I knew it was likely I wouldn't have an assignment til June/July.        So when I set foot on Springer Mtn, March 15, 2001, I wasn't sure how long I would get to stay. I had to check in with work in 6 weeks. By then, I was 300+ miles north and I had full blown Katahdin fever. I was having bad dreams about having to leave the trail and go back to work. I asked for and got a leave of absence and I knew at that moment I was going all the way to Katahdin.        So here I am again hiking north from Newfound Gap. I found a soulmate who I purposely infected with the hiking bug ,who is hiking with me. Life is good. We reached Icewater Spring shelter to find several thruhikers we had not met yet. That night there was Eddy from Germany, Scat Tracker and Achilles, Sweet Cheeks, Bean, Nesta and Beaverchief, Tango and Friar Tuck, RR Scott Thomas/T-bone, and I'm sure others I am forgetting. It was a glorious afternoon hanging out on the grassy area in front of the shelter with an awesome view.         More "who HAS to stay in the shelter" BS tho with some miscomminucations with RR T-bone- two spots left in the shelter and there were two other thruhikers who did not want to stay in the shelter but had told us they would if they had to, so we set up our tent, and T-bone got mad at us cause when he asked those two guys -they wouldn't say "yes we are staying in the shelter", because they were still hoping for someone else to show up so they wouldn't have to. sigh... Two more days of this.