Date: 2016-05-04
From: Allen Gap

To: Hot Springs, North Carolina
Miles today: 14.7
Weather: overcast clouds

We had to take off a few days for personal reasons, but hit the trail again today. We decided to make up the section of the trail that we missed last week due to the wild fire North of Hot Springs rather than leaving behind 15 miles. Ironically, the Conservancy ruled that due to the fire, the shuttle miles counted towards completing a thru hike. We decided instead to try to pass every white blaze! Call us purists. In a conversation with our shuttle driver, who has hiked the AT, the PCT and part of the CDT, we learned some of the differences in trail culture among the big 3 trails in the US. For the Appalachian Trail, people tend to want to pass every white blaze marking the actual trail. For the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail), the goal is a continuous foot path from Mexico to Canada. Hikers don't care as much whether they are on the actual trail or just a nearby road (when fires, etc. force you off). On the CDT (Continental Divide Trail), you really can "hike your own hike", with several official starting and ending points and often nothing more then an imaginary line on a map and your GPS/compass to guide you through miles of remote wilderness. Since we had done both the section leading up to hot springs and the one following Allen Gap, there was no reason to carry our hiking backpacks. We did what hikers call "slackpacking." Basically, we hired a shuttle driver to bring us to one side, and then pick us up on the other. This allowed us to carry just one light day pack with some food and water. Now this is hiking! Some people try to finish the entire Appalachian trail this way. There is only really one 100 mile section in Main where you can't make slackpacking work, but it would get expensive fast. The shuttle cost us $142 and the hotel was another $55 each night. Plus, when you slackpack, there is usually a restaurant to eat at. Definitely a treat for us, but not something we can do every day. Since we had the luxury of slackpacking, we chose to walk this section of the trail from the North to the South (opposite our normal hiking direction). We did this for several reasons- cell phone service was sketchy at the drop-off location which would have made it difficult to get a pickup, there was a restaurant at the end, it was mostly downhill which made for a more enjoyable hike, and most importantly, it allowed us to get a sense of how many Northbound hikers there are. Since we were walking against the flow of traffic, we decided to count each person walking by. From ~10AM when we were dropped off until ~6:45PM when we finished our very leisurely stroll, we passed 82 hikers in a span of less than 15 miles! The hike also allowed us to see first hand the extent of damage from the forest fire. The name of the fire was "the silvermine fire", and it gobbled up about 6000 acres of the forest. Fortunately, in the sections where the trail passed, mostly just the undergrowth was burnt. The canopy of the trees, along with nice green leaves, were all still very intact. There was a fire tower on a side trail at the top of "rich mountain." We decided to climb up it to see the forest fire damage. To our surprise, there was little evidence of fire damage. All we saw were green healthy trees. From the town there are a few sections visibly on neighboring hills where the trees were burnt up as well. The trail finished with a section called "lovers leap." Steep and rocky, we descended down to a path along the French Broad River that lead us into town and back to our favorite restaurant, the Smokey Mountain Diner. Our waitress was so kind as to let us use her phone to call our shuttle driver for our pickup. We enjoyed a delicious pizza while we waited. Our shuttle driver picked us up and brought us back to Uncle Johnnie's Hostel at Nolichucky in Erwin for our second night there. We are staying in a comfortable private cabin with a space heater. We're enjoying a cozy night here as the temperature should drop pretty low tonight.