Date: 2016-10-26
From: Fontana Lodge (Dam Visitor Center)

To: Mollies Ridge Shelter
Miles today: 10.7
Weather: clear sky

10/26 Day 4: Our shuttle ride that was supposed to be set up for 7:30 am was a no show. We needed to get onto the trail as soon as possible because it was going to take us a long time to get to Mollies Ridge Shelter. After filling up 6 liters of water each, and adding the 7 days of food, our packs were outrageously heavy. Blister¢s had to be 50 pounds and mine had to be 44 pounds. That is 14 pounds more than I generally have to carry following a resupply.I asked a maintenance man if he would mind giving us a ride to the dam for $20 and he obliged. We stopped by the post office on the way and put all of our extra food into the hiker box located inside. Blister forgot his block of cheese in the refrigerator at the hotel.We got dropped off at the dam and the height of the Smokys hit us right in the face. You could see the fire tower at Shuckstack which loomed 2100 feet above us and 4.4 trail miles away. We crossed the dam and got some cool photos and then continued on a road walk, totaling almost a mile. We took the obligatory pictures at the Welcome to the Smokys sign, and finally entered the woods. So far, the climb into the Smokys was not as bad as the climb out of the NOC. We just slowly and methodically just kept putting one foot in front of the other and went up up up. There weren¢t much for landmarks to gauge our progress so we just kept at it. The walk seemed to climb a bit over a shelf, skirt the shelf with a couple switch backs, only to reach another shelf to do it all over again. We finally reached a boulder jumble that looked like a throne. This put us 1.4 miles from Shuckstack fire tower. The trail started to flatten out a little bit, but still climbing. Just prior to the fire tower it really got steep, but only for a short period. There were some very nice views from a rock shelf that had to have been blasted or chipped out of the way to make room for the trail, kind of like what they do when building a freeway.We finally got the the fire tower and were happy to rest and eat lunch. I climbed up into the fire tower and got some amazing views of the lake, the dam and the mountains to come. The leaves were much more full of color than the section from the NOC to the dam. The fire tower was a bit rickety and really wobbled while I climbed it. While eating lunch, we met a local lady who decided to take a day hike with her AirBnB guest, Pierre, a guy from France. She corrected me by telling me the locals call the NOC the ¢En Oh See¢ when I was calling it the NOC ¢knock.¢ Pierre was a skinny guy who was hiking a lot of miles fast. I believe he was possibly going all the way Spence Field Shelter. Blister and I laughed later that he sounded like Sasha Baron Cohen¢s french character in the movie Talladega Nights, ¢I will get you Wicky Bubby.¢ They left before we did from the fire tower and I got to say, ¢Au revoir Pierre.¢Following lunch, and a nice rest, our afternoon consisted of mostly climbing, but and a few drops as well. We crossed paths with ¢Handmade¢ who had a unique homemade backpack that looked like it had sawed off wooden oars for supports. Apparently he was some Harvard kid who was out living life on the trail for a while. He had hiked from Harpers Ferry to Katahdin, turned around, and was going to hike to Springer and then back to Harpers Ferry, essentially doing the trail twice in one year. Amazing, especially hiking in jeans and Chaco sandals. On the way past the side trail for Birch Spring Gap tenting area, we saw a ¢Beware of Active Bears¢ kind of sign that we agreed was just put there to scare hikers into hanging their food properly. Hiking on, the top of the long climbs finally came upon us at Doe Knob, at around 4580 feet. We had climbed 2880 feet by this point over almost 8 miles. Around this point, we entered Tennessee for the first time, with much less fanfare than the GA/NC sign at the last state crossing. As a matter of fact, no sign existed at all. The only reason we knew we were in Tennessee was because AWOL¢s guide indicated that. We dropped to Ekaneetlee Gap, where we were told there was water. Again, not knowing how far down the mountain the water picks up made going to look for it not a risk we wanted to take. I still had 4 liters to get me through the first night, and we were told there was water at Russell Field Shelter which would only be around 3 miles the next morning form Mollies Ridge.We started the climb up to Mollies Ridge shelter and were so happy to see it when we finally got there. This was a long hard day of climbing with heavy packs. We set up our spots in the shelter not knowing if anyone else was going to be there. While eating dinner, a heavier guy in his early twenties stopped by for a few minutes and related a story to us that he had been throwing up all day as he climbed out of the dam because he thinks he had a bad biscuit at McDonalds. I was very glad he was not staying in our shelter. The last thing I wanted was to get a virus or stomach ailment with 6 more days of hiking. For the day, we climbed 3,610 feet and dropped 708 feet.Hiker midnight was upon us and we climbed into our racks to go deep in slumber for the evening¢¦around 8 pm. Around 11 pm, I saw a headlamp enter our shelter and what appeared to be a girl with a large mass of dreadlocks on top of her head set up her sleeping pad on the lower deck and went out and hung her food bag. I thought perhaps she was a thru hiker who was using all her waking hours to hike. More on my misperceptions in the morning.