Date: 2012-04-22
From: Gatlinburg, TN

To: devil fork gap
Miles today: 100.0

I feel like I'll say this every week, but what a week this was. I upped the average to 17 miles a day and covered 102 miles in 6 days. I'm pretty happy with that and my spirits are good so I'm thinking I'll try to keep the 100 miles a week avg my minimum. Ive lost 20 lbs since march 25th which will be helpful the week after next when Elisa and I go to Baja. I want to at least be the "guy with the unkept beard and scraggly hair that looks kinda like a terrorist next to the hot girl" not the "fat guy with the unkept beard and scraggly hair that looks kinda like a terrorist next to the hot girl".It's really interesting how hikers eat. It's the absolute polar opposite of normal people. Calories are suddenly your best friend. You don't even consider buying items marked as low fat or low salt. The only low you want is low weight (I find myself testing the weight of everything I buy in my hand before putting it into my basket thinking, "Do I want to carry this 50 miles?"). So things like ramen and the entire line of little debbie snack cakes are in nearly every pack. I had a hiker tell me a few hours ago to switch from little Debbie cosmic brownies (a staple "food" on the trail) to the honey buns which are lighter and higher in calories. A few days back I bought a large bag of spice drops, basically pure sugar, and ate one every few minutes until the bag was done. It was like going from 87 octane to race gas, I made 18 miles from 11 am to 6:30 pm over three big mountains, but I crashed hard when I came down off the sugar high. I very much wonder about the health effects of these foods. On one hand in my mind I'm thinking they are just burning up and giving me tons of energy, on the other is trying to explain how I got type 2 diabetes while hiking the AT. Gonna have to google this and figure out what to do.On the second night of this week's hike I planned to stay at standing bear hostel. It was great. I got a hot microwave pizza, all the clean water I could drink and a fire that someone always had going. That said they had a good resupply with the exception of the one thing I really needed, more canister fuel for my stove so I could make some hot food for the next few days. I figured I'd just boil water in my pot on a fire and I'd be fine.... More on that later.This week was the first where I had to hike for a few days straight in the rain. Honestly it's not too bad for a few hours, but once your feet get wet and you're slogging around in wet boots it's definitely less than optimal. On Tuesday I hit a thunderstorm and had a tough call whether to stop and tent in the rain or push to a shelter that was on the other side of Max Batch bald, a place I didn't want to be on during a storm. About a mile before the bald at a forest road crossing I ran into 3 hikers huddled under a tarp with a huge fire going. Turns out that even in heavy rain denatured alcohol will get smaller stuff burning and they just kept feeding the fire bigger and bigger stuff til it was nice and large. One of the three hikers had a friend nearby and was coming to pick them up since they were sick of the rain and, more importantly, the lightening. They told me that someone died up on Max Patch last year from lightening and they really didn't want to chance it. So I stood in the rain for about an hour (no more room under the tarp) with a nice fire waiting for the storm to move on. I was timing the lightening and when 15 min had passed without a strike I was thinking it would be safe (as I write this I think that's totally retarded. It's funny the choices you make after hiking for hours in pouring rain). About the time that happened a hiker named Will walked up and wanted to come with, so the two of us set out. Max Patch is a large bald and I was the tallest thing for miles around on what felt like a half mile of grassy mountain top. I'm not too proud to say I was pretty scared. I was moving at the very tip top pace I can keep and was super happy to reach the tree line. We hiked on to the shelter and I tried for a long time to light a fire with my hand sanitizer but the rain was coming down really hard and it wouldn't catch. Will lent me some canister fuel and I made some hot food, changed into my dry long johns and slept like a rock.So aside from lightening mother nature has some other interesting ways of threatening your life and generally keeping you on your toes, like snakes for example. You see snakes on the trail all the time. They are usually harmless and each and every time they scare the hell out of you. Every once in a while, like for example Thursday when I was resting by a large pond, you run into a large water moccasin. These snakes are correctly described by southern herpetologists as being "reaaal ornery like", and this particular one, instead of doing what most snakes do and slither away at top speed looked liked it was in the market for some of my spice drops. I feel like they should add "pee your pants" to the "human fight or flight response" because that was definitely an option. I immediately screamed like a little girl,  flung about 20 spice drops out of the bag in my hand, grabbed my hiking poles turned water moccasin killin' sticks and prepared to defend myself. Now maybe it was the sugar or the huge shot of adrenaline, but against any form of logic or reason I began moving towards this large snake as it was noisily charging towards me though the leaves on the bank of the pond. I got about 5 ft away as the thing just slid down under a log by the water. Disaster averted, no snake steaks for dinner... I went back to look for fallen spice drops.Later on this same day I got a great video of a dung beetle rolling a remarkably huge turd along the trail. I've never seen a dung beetle in person and I was surprised to see how big it was and even more impressed with the size of the ball of poop it was toting. I'll upload the video and my photos to my fb and g+ so you can check it out if ya want. You meet a lot of really interesting and cool people out here. 99% of folks are super cool, the majoriy of them are either kids coming out of college or folks who are retired. I hiked a few days with a guy who writes trail journals for the AT. He went to prep school and Harvard with Bill Gates, really interesting stories.This next week I'm really looking forward to meeting up with Phil and Jim, two good friends from Nashville. We'll hike Fri - Sun at a relaxed pace though some great spots and then I'll be off the trail for a week. Can't wait to leave, but I think I'm gonna miss it.