Date: 2005-04-26
From: Campsites by stream, (NC/TN?)

To: Overmountain Shelter, (NC/TN?)
Miles today: 17.5
Weather: overcast clouds

Standoffish section hikers at Overmountain: There¢s no room up here. The peasantry can go down below.Dave: There will be no douchebaggery in the court!I woke to ominous clouds on the horizon. The boys were all ¢How do you feel about an 18 mile day?¢ and I was all ¢meh, depends on the weather.¢ I figured I¢d get to the Roan shelter and take it from there. I walked alone again nearly all day and deduced by day¢s end that my hike would be a dramatically different experience if I, too, were a six foot tall boy with no body fat and an ultralite pack. The morning¢s first five miles went by slowly, and I stopped for a snack at the Clyde Smith Shelter and then pushed on ¢ it was 6.4 miles to the Roan shelter, and it wasn¢t raining yet; it was even sunny by turns, but the clouds were getting closer. The last three miles up Roan were a pain in the ass ¢ up and up and up, in that ¢This has got to be the top, right? No? Well, that¢s got to be the top, then, right? Right?¢ kind of a way. And up at the higher elevations, the ground was snow-covered, and the sky was getting darker. Bassline overtook me just before the shelter; Captain Chaos arrived while I was taking a Kool-Aid break. I pondered my next move. It was 4:30, and the weather was starting to get nasty, and I was at a shelter already, and Overmountain Shelter was another six and a half miles away. On the other hand, the shelter I was already in was a drafty old shack which also happened to be the highest shelter on the trail. In other words, it was cold. And in addition to being 1600 feet lower, I also knew that almost everyone else I¢d hiked with at all ¢ both sets of GLGE, Nick, Dave, Cyclehiker ¢ would be at Overmountain. And in addition to that ¢ though I wasn¢t sure how much I cared ¢ Overmountain was supposed to be some whoopdedoo wonderful shelter, a big old renovated barn, the alleged best shelter on the trail. When Bassline threatened to put me bodily into my sleeping bag, the balance was tipped. ¢I¢m getting off this ridge,¢ I said, and I headed down the mountain, shoes squelching in the snow and mud. Once I get down this mountain, I thought, at least I¢ll be out of the snow, and it¢ll be warmer. I picked up the pace.There was not anything fundamentally unsound with my reasoning per se, but I¢d forgotten to account for the wind factor. And so as soon as I reached the bottom of Roan, at Carver¢s Gap, I emerged out from the shelter of the trees and into a howling gale. There was a sign on the roadside saying WILDLIFE VIEWING AREA, and I laughed, if a bit hollowly. The fog was so thick I could barely see my hands, let alone wildlife; besides which, any wildlife with a shred of sense would be safely at home in a treetrunk or whatever if it knew what was good for it. Come to think of it, I¢d probably be better off in a treetrunk myself. But I wasn¢t about to head back up that mountain.Lucky me, the next three miles of trail were all over balds: big, open, grassy, rainy, muddy, unsheltered balds, hissing with fierce wind and all peppered with cheerful little signs saying, ¢No camping here!¢, in response to which I hissed, Fat chance anyway, turdbrain, and sloshed through the mud with my poles planted in the ground at forty-five degree angles, trying to keep myself from blowing off the trail in the wind while also ducking the sleet that had begun pelting my neck. I¢ve never been so glad to enter a stand of trees in my life. It didn¢t make any difference as far as rain was concerned ¢ I was already thoroughly soaked ¢ but the wind, finally, was blocked, and the canopy did a decent job of screening out the sleet.So I kept on going, slip-n-sliding my way along the trail, and I thought back to the day of the storm before Hot Springs, with Pacman expounding on his desire to invite extreme weather conditions, that so doing would somehow test his mettle. I remembered saying something like, Yeah, fine, whatever, but you don¢t have to invite the storms. They¢ll show up on their own. And they were here now, and I thought, well, consider my mettle tested then, so all right, weather, do your worst! I can take it! Towanda, etcetera! And then I fell in the mud ¢ really, solidly, undeniably fell in the mud ¢ not once, nor yet twice, but three times. So wags the world away.There was, I knew, an intermediary shelter between Roan and Overmountain: the Stan Murray Shelter. And while I hadn¢t intended to stop there, I began to think, as I fought my way through the sleet and the wind and the mud, that it might not be an unwise course of action to stop there for the night, and dry off that much sooner, and catch up with everyone else in the morning. Again, potentially solid reasoning, but the trouble was, and I realized this as soon as I reached the Stan Murray Shelter, that the Stan Murray Shelter is a piece of crap. It¢s a tiny warped rotting shack and the floor might as well have been a water source, that¢s how deep the rain was flowing over it. Some old guy had set up his sleeping bag in the one dry corner of the shelter. Nice guy, but a little deaf. I asked him if knew what time it was, and he handed me a pen. Forget this, I thought. I¢m not staying here. Overmountain¢s 1.7 miles away and it¢s allegedly huge and spectacular and blah de blah and all that and everyone I know is there and if I go now I can still get there before dark. And it¢s not as though I can possibly get any wetter than I already am. So I kept going, and finally I stumbled in, just before dark, and with a thick bank of fog rolling in behind me. I almost missed the side trail to the shelter in the first place ¢ it¢s not well marked; and once I headed down it I almost couldn¢t see the shelter ahead of me, visibility was so low. But there it was at last, a great red barn filled with people and tents set up inside. I shook raindrops off my jacket, like a wet dog after a bath. The socks around my knees oozed muddy water. ¢THIS SHELTER BETTER BE ALL IT¢S CRACKED UP TO BE, IS ALL I¢M SAYING,¢ I yelled.¢Breaka!¢ said people. ¢You made it! We wondered whether you¢d show up. We thought maybe you¢d stay at Roan. Or Stan Murray.¢ Pacman said, ¢I knew you¢d roll in. I said, She¢ll show up. She¢ll get to Roan and she¢ll figure out everyone else is headed here, and then she¢ll decide to push on, and then when the weather got bad, she¢d figure she was already out there, you know, no turning back now. And no-one in their right mind would stay at Stan Murray. And to catch up. I figured you¢d be thinking, I¢ll show them, those bastards.¢ I wrung out my socks. They dribbled on the floor. ¢Something like that,¢ I said. I put dry clothes on, and made hot couscous, and leaned against Serenity for warmth.I still think Pacman¢s dare-the-elements-to-destroy-you-so-that-you-can-show-them-who¢s-boss M.O. is kind of stupid. (He knows how I feel.) But I¢ll give him this: though I¢m drenched and tired and I think I pulled a muscle in the arch of my left foot tearing over those balds, I¢ve also got the residue of a strange sort of exhilaration in me. Here I am. I worried, before I left, about how I¢d handle being cold and wet. And the answer is, You get cold, and you get wet, but then you warm up, and you dry off. And you¢re still standing. Sure, I¢d have liked it better if it hadn¢t been sleeting on my neck three hours ago. But that only makes me wish the weather¢d clear up, not that I were anywhere else. I wouldn¢t go home for a million bucks. I wouldn¢t trade this for anything.