Date: 2017-10-21
From: Erwin, Tennessee

To: Six-sevenths camp
Miles today: 18.0
Weather: clear sky

Our hiking buddy 2am is usually the first one to get a little antsy at Team KRT's well-established leisurely approach to getting the miles in. Part of the reason might be because his family has booked their flights to see him finish on Springer on Saturday November 11 and have booked their flights -- and, more importantly, his -- back to New York state the next day. He has to do the 187 trail miles by then.Even though we have nearly three weeks to cover this ground, there's only one more zero day planned in that time and after his recent bout of norovirus-like illness, he might be thinking the margin for incapacity is a little tight. And as a newly minted engineer, he is also a little Type A in his approach to life.All this explained why he headed on from Sam's Pass today while the rest of us lazed around in the sunshine, reclining on the grass. We not only said we'd follow but even asked him to get a fire going for us at the campsite just before Devil's Fork Gap. And we meant it... at the time. But then the trail magic beer arrived...However that's getting ahead of ourselves. That morning as Miss Janet drove us back to Spivey Gap, we'd stopped at Bojangles to get breakfast. This is in itself a hint that Sweetblood had fully recovered from her intestinal distress.But since Miss Janet is driving Happy Feet on to Sam's Gap, 13 miles trail miles further than our drop-off, it didn't take a lot of persuading for her conclude that an easy day would be beneficial to her recovery. It is true that I might have deliberately planted the seed of this idea in her head, motivated by the chance to slackpack between one and the other. And since water seems a little sketchy on this section, it meant we could stockpile a few gallons there so we could top up as we came through.This plan worked a treat. Miss Janet decided to take Happy Feet and Sweetblood on a secret women's business roadie from Spivey to Sam's Gap and Sriracha, OK and I avoided carrying four days of food up a big-ass climb from the road. As has been the default in the South, the trail remained pretty good and generally well graded but it certainly hurt less to haul up the mountain with just a light pack, even though we're now ferociously fit. We headed over Little Bald, which wasn't actually a bald, and then made our way up to Big Bald, which was. In keeping with the Appalachians' trait as a bird migration corridor, we started hitting bird watching stations and mist nets monitored by ornithologists. After emerging from the tree line and just before the final climb up to Big Bald, we met a group of experts who were inspecting, cataloguing and releasing the captured birds. It was definitely worth stopping for a quarter of an hour to watch them in action, along with the throngs of day hikers out for a Sunday stroll on a gorgeous day.And once we were on Big Bald -- clearly named by a team of creative poets -- we sat and lazed around in the sun, with no apparent rush to head on. I'd brought two Bojangles cajun chicken biscuits for lunch, so I was a happy hiker. In time we headed to Sam's Gap and had a pleasant reunion with Happy Feet and Sweetblood there -- they'd also been enjoying a lazy morning in the sun -- but we were rather less enthused by the idea of shouldering our full packs again.So we procrastinated yet further and that's when 2am, who eschews slackpacking and had carried his pack the entire way that morning, opted to head on. And that's when one of the day hikers came up and asked us if we wanted anything. This was Stretch, a LASHer who'd done big chunks of the AT and who had moved to Asheville as a treechanger. He'd been out doing sketches of the trail for the latest in a series of books of trail sketches -- hence the name -- and it only took a few minutes to realise that we'd seen one of his previous books at Rock and Sole Hostel back in Pennsylvania. The world is very small. You can read about his book here: http://www.blurb.com/b/6235335..."Are you sure you don't want anything?" he asked.We said we already had plenty of water, thanks to the stocks Happy Feet and Sweetblood had brought here."I've got beer..."And that's why we didn't leave for another hour. And when we did, we'd happily volunteered to make our packs even heavier by carrying a few cans of beer. Sweetblood and I even carried one each for 2am because we felt sorry that he'd missed out.A few hours later, we were chasing darkness and opted to stop at a ridgetop campsite about two miles short of where we'd agreed to meet 2am. For what it's worth, we actually felt bad when we reluctantly drank his beers since it was unlikely we'd catch him before Hot Springs. And then about an hour after dark, Dirt got a text from him: "Guess I'll let the fire go out..."Sorry, 2am!AT fact of the day: The mathematical landmarks are starting to fly by now. It took an age to do 10% of the trail back in Maine but since then we've ticked off the one-quarter, halfway and three-quarter marks. Simple math suggests that the four-fifths mark happened even sooner and the six-sevenths mark -- which is pretty much exactly where we're camped right now -- was even sooner again. We were talking about how on our final day we'll mark the 2188-2189ths mark a mile before Springer Mountain, having crossed 2187-2188ths mark shortly before. It's what happens when you have a newly graduated math/stats major in your tramily but it's another sign that this epic hike is drawing to an end. Life is good. (Didn't seem appropriate to add that immediately after standing up 2am...)