Date: 2006-05-01
From: Stan Murray Shelter

To: Vistas campsite
Miles today: 12.9

Some mornings it's too cold to get out of bed. But you do anyway, cause it's warmer on the trail. We had breakfast at Overmountain Shelter, an actual red barn with views of the trees just leafing out on the hillsides in red, green, white, and brown.The trail from the balds down to the shelter and beyond is in really bad shape.   Sometimes it's a trench 2 feet deep, sometimes it's three separate trails (each made by hikers attempting bypass one of the others in mud or rain), other times it's just one trail -- six feet wide. I've seen some hikers complaining in the registers about the lack of privies in this area, but I think the local hiking club has enough to deal with. Possibly they should run a shuttle with a white blaze on it from Greasy Creek Gap to US 19E and call that the official AT while they fill in these trenches. Am I kidding? I don't know. A shuttle would probably be an expensive solution.Regardless of the condition of the trail before it, I would have hated to miss Little Hump and Hump Mountains. These highlands are some of the prettiest, most interesting walking we've done so far, with grasses, boulders, the occasional spruce, wide sky above. You get constant views, including Mt. Rogers and the craggy Grandfather Mountain. We descended through a fully leafed-out, lush green forest to Elk Park, TN, one more dusty little town. We got good cheap food at the Country House Restaurant, resupplied, and headed out. Near town, there were bags of household trash strewn all over the trail, thrown from the nearby road (if anyone knows a Mr. Richard Whitefield of Bear Branch Road in Elk Park, tell him I think he's a jerk). Bear Branch itself smelled suspiciously swampy so we waited to refill our water bottles. We discovered not far upstream that the streambank has been converted into a graveyard for the old mattresses and stoves of Elk Park. At first I thought this was just an example of people acting stupid, but later we heard that the relationship between AT hikers and the citizens of Elk Park has never been friendly -- some hikers say there was a time when some locals were hanging fishhooks along the trail at eye-level to "discourage" hikers. Apparently they didn't want the AT near their town, and maybe polluting their own woods is a good way to show their displeasure.This portion of the trail is apparently a recent reroute, and is home to the worst multiflora rose infestation I could ever imagine. It has overrun at least .75 miles of trailside, including a creek, and you can literally watch it choking out dogwoods and other streamside trees. It spills into the wooded areas out of the meadow, and we are camping with some now. It looks like the trailcrews are attempting to control it in this area, as some of the smaller bushes on the edges of the infestation have been burned. Good thing, because this campsite is gorgeous. I would like to register a complaint with the Creator: dusk in this meadow is too short. We watched a cottontail hop about, looking at all of the mountains we climbed yesterday. The birdcalls are captivating over the meadow at sunset, and even I can name some, like owls and woodpeckers. There are a million other birds, one which I hear quite often sounds remarkably like wind chimes. Can't imagine what this place must have sounded like 300 years ago, when bird populations were at their peak. Don't necessarily want to know what it'll sound like 100 years from now.