Date: 2003-04-25
From: Brown Fork Gap

To: Fontana Dam, N.C.
Miles today: 11.4
Weather: light rain

Erin says:Onward to Fontana Dam! Today we woke up at 5am! Okay, so I didn't sleep very well at all last night. My allergies were hellacious. Awful. Craig had the earplugs on. I felt so bad for the couple also sharing the tentsite with us, I must have kept them awake with my nozeblowing. Even with the Zyrtec prescription allergy medicine kicking, my allergies wouldn't leave me alone. I tried to prop myself up as best as I could with all my clothes and the top of my pack, but it was really hard to breathe. Very congested. So I finally woke at 5am and convinced Craig to get up too.It was very foggy and misty out, weird to be getting coffee going and grabbing our food bags from the tree in the dark! The sun was up when we left camp at 7:05am. Early morning hiking is so incredible - such a different world. The forest was so vibrant in deep greens and dew with fog blowing in all around us. So many white wildflowers - at least 6 varieties blanketing the forest floor. I saw a wild turkey (I think) that startled me along side the trail. It quickly flew off. If you are the first hikers on the trail in the morning, you get the fun and exciting task of breaking through all the spider webs along the trail. They are plentiful and somehow manage to cling to everything! So we brushed webs off our bodies and wandered about in the morning dew. Pretty cool. My early morning hiking excitement waned when I realized that we still had more climbing to do. I expected it to be mostly downhill to Fontana Dam from the elevation guides on our maps (always wrong!). So I struggled up the hills and cursed at each coming climb. Where is Fontana Dam? We got to the last shelter on the trail and caught up with Spiff, a friendly and lanky guy from PA who we have seen here and there. He informed us with startling certainty that Fontana Dam is a dry town in a dry county. This dampened our spirits quite a bit. Both Craig and I crave a good brew after days of hiking. My spirits sunk even lower when I saw Spiff reserving a room at the Village Inn from his cell phone. I worried that there would not be rooms available by the time we got there, and we don't have cell phones to call from the trail!After endless (seeming) miles and lots of winding turns, we could see the actual Fontana Dam. At 790 feet it is the highest dam east of the Mississippi. It took forever to get to the road, we could see the dam, but the trail would wander around mountainsides and then away from where we figured our destination was. We got to the road at 12:05pm - we did 11.4 miles in exactly 5 hours. Pretty decent!We had no luck with a quick hitch at the Fontana Marina, only motorcycles coming by. Finally a van/camper picked us up. He'd passed us before, then came back to get us- but first he had to drop off his wife and kids at the Fontana Dam Visitor Center in order to make room for 3 smelly hikers and their packs. Really nice guy and very sweet of him to do that. He dropped us off at the visitor center where we were able to reserve a room. Phew! $34..... of goodness.We quickly learned that Fontana Dam is a quirky and dull place. We walked from the visitor center to the Texaco Station and learned that the Texaco is only open on tuesdays and wednesdays. the man who worked there was very slow and strange as it took him nearly 5 minutes to give me change. we moved on to the Post Office and General Store. Fontana Dam is a resort village, and the post office, general store, and laudromat are all connected in one long building with a great front porch. We stopped at the post office to pick up the food box we'd sent to ourselves from nashua (because there is no grocery store to resupply food with in F.D.) We also picked up our "bounce" box that has "town clothes" for us to wear. And we got a care package from my mom and sister!!! All very exciting. We moved on to the general store - an odd assortment of non-refrigerated beverages, rental videos, gift shop items, and food odds and ends. We definitely hit F.D. in the off season. Craig got strawberry soda; I got orange soda. We also got some honey mustard potato chips! And coffee! However, trying to carry our coffee, soda, chips, 3 bulky packages, and our packs up the hill to our motel room/cottage proved quite difficult.It was all so exhausting that we got to our room, showered, and konked out on the beds. We awoke in time for dinner at the ONE restaurant in all of F.D. - the Peppercorn. They had an all-you-can-eat buffet there that we partook in. (Funny side note - in our A.T. companion book it lists buffets as AYCE restaurants... Craig said to me, "I've never heard of an AYCE restaurant before, and there are a lot of them!" He didn't catch on to the all-you-can-eat theme.)After dinner entertainment proved to be one of the high points of our F.D. stay: one thru-hiker was having a toe issue and all the other hikers gathered round to offer suggestions on how to heal his ingrown big toe. Some of the hikers were going to try to perform a little surgery, and we all sat around to watch. The hiker iced his toe first, then used a pocket knife to dig in. EWWWWW! He opted to just use some epsom salts to soak the toe and not try to dig the side out of the skin because of the possibility of infection. I can't believe how exciting it was.Back to our room to relax and catch up on our fill of Weather Channel. It was lightning outside - we were glad to be safely indoors.