Date: 2016-04-04
From: Stecoah Gap

To: Fontana Dam
Miles today: 15.6
Weather: clear sky

Bryson City was pretty much kaput yesterday (Sunday) afternoon after our hike. The Nantahala Brewery and the Italian restaurant were about the only things open in town - but that was enough. We brought a couple carry-out dinners into the brewery and paired them with NoonDay IPA. All was well.We left the Fryemont this morning in the dark and drove to Princess¢ NoBo starting point at Stecoah Gap. Then I took the car to our end point at Fontana and headed SoBo back toward her: a key-swap day. Yesterday we heard rumors of a very cold evening, low 20¢s. That was not even close. Hi 30¢s at the start, climbing into the 60¢s by lunch, with very little wind. We¢ve actually had a series of really great hiking days.Today was a pretty fun hike in both directions. Princess had the hardest climb, up Jacob¢s Ladder. This certainly isn¢t the longest or highest climb, about 700 ft up in about a half mile. But it feels like it¢s straight up. With a heavy pack, it can be hard to just stay on your feet, much less move forward. There are some log steps and the rest is hard packed dirt. For Princess it was at about the 1 mile mark into her hike, for me it came close to the end of my hike. The previous 2 years I¢ve done it NoBo, so I climbed up. This was the first time I¢ve gone downhill, and it was a little creepy. I was pretty certain that if I ever tripped or slipped, I¢d never be able to stop sliding down the hill. Fortunately, I didn¢t. I met 3 NoBo¢s headed up and 2 of the 3 were stopped trying to catch their breath. The other fun point for me was Bushnell Knob. It¢s pretty rocky with some fun sections picking your way over fallen trees and around ledges and a little mud. A taste of Maine, good practice. The rest of the hike was neat, I had a steady climb of about 2,000 ft and some great scenic views of Fontana Lake and the surrounding hills. And I took more photos than usual, the sky was beautiful. I met Scooter and Shaggy, this will probably be the last time we see them since we¢re jumping forward. And I saw probably 40 other hikers heading NoBo, no one going SoBo. After we finished, we headed for Hot Springs, our next base. Along the way we checked out some of the local roads up toward the AT, but without much success. So we continued to Hot Springs and went straight to the outfitters in town. We¢ve used their shuttle services for the past 2 years and we hope to use them again so we can do some hiking together along this stretch of the AT. They are very accommodating and we have a tentative schedule for the rest of the week. We¢re headed out at 6:00 am tomorrow and we should be able to hike together.I don¢t remember if I¢ve explained our jumping ahead, so I¢ll try now. We managed to get a group hiking permit (via a lottery) for the John Muir Trail in California starting Sept. 5. The JMT should take us about 3 weeks and we¢ll have to go a week or two ahead to get acclimated to the altitude. We still plan to finish the AT, but we want to summit Mt. Katahdin before we leave for JMT since the Katahdin weather is fickle after September and they often close the trail at some point in October. Our current goal is to summit Katahdin by the end of July. So we¢re going to jump ahead and then come back in October to finish the sections we bypass now. Today we jumped about 5 days ahead by skipping the Smokey Mountains. We planned to do this anyway since we can¢t slack through this area. We have friends who want to camp, so we¢ll come back in the fall and spend 3 nights in the woods with them. But we need to skip much further ahead. We already have plans to return to Norfolk for several appointments on the weekend of April 16, so after the weekend we plan to resume hiking at Harpers Ferry in WVA. This means we¢ll postpone almost the entire state of VA until after JMT. As of now, our JMT crew is Princess and I, Ranger and Howie, a friend and former colleague of Princess. If one of us drops out for some unavoidable reason, we have several possible alternates including Spartacus from last year. Princess has wanted to do the Pacific Crest Trail for 2 years. Much of the JMT is coincident with the PCT. So this helps scratch that itch.