Date: 2004-03-28
From: Cherry Gap Shelter, TN

To: Day 24: Stan Murray Selter, TN
Miles today: 19.8

To meet my unrealistic challenge, I got up on AT Day 24 at 4:00 a.m. and was on the trail by 5:45 a.m. Since it wasn¢t even light enough to see the trail or the blazes at the start I had to go a little slow, but within a half hour or so I was literally jogging down (being careful not to re-injure my still not completely healed right calf muscle) and speed hiking up the trail. When I got to the Clyde Smith Shelter, at nearly 10 miles, it was still early morning and a section hiker in residence, Willy, was quite surprised to see me. I proudly told him of my plans and he looked at me with disbelief, whereupon he calmly told me that he was a SOBO section hiker and that the trip over Roan Mountain ¢was going to slow me down a bit.¢ He also politely told me where I could find good water sources along the way and ended with a warning to watch my self on Roan¢s ICE. As it turned out, Willy was also a Floridian, which naturally prompted me to point out that here we were two flatlanders talking about rapid mountain hiking. Well I signed the register book and took off as fast I could go.Within less than a half mile I hit the beginning of Little Rock Knob, which at 4,918-feet represented a rapid 500-foot climb and should have been a forewarning of things to come. As I descended to Hughes Gap at 4,040-feet, I could see the 6,285-foot tri-peaked Roan Mountain in front of me ¢ I guess I shouldn¢t have been surprised by what happened next. The simple fact is that climbing over two thousand feed in around two miles with a full pack after fast hiking 12 miles was both exhausting and demoralizing and prompted me to re-evaluate my unrealistic goals.By the time I had summated Roan Mountain, checked out its now destroyed former hotel site and ice-bound through hiker shelter, and carefully negotiated the icy trails down its North side to eventually reach Carver¢s Gap, I was thoroughly exhausted. Noting there was a chance that my wife might be waiting for me at this park, I checked out every car in the lot before resigning myself to the long climb up the impressive bald North of the gap. I later learned that my wife did in fact hike up this bald on the very same day as I, but I missed her by several hours.On the way up the bald, I also made a decision, namely that there was no way I was going to make my 30 mile goal and that as worried and inconvenienced I had made my wife, she and I would not be able to meet up until the next day. I knew she knew that I had enough food to survive for several more days, so her only real concern was having me wait for hours on end at our pick up site, like what happened in Hot Springs, NC. In the end, I decided to settle on a ¢mere¢ 19.8 miles and camp for the night at the Stan Murray Shelter. The truth is, I virtually staggered in, and had to rest a while before I could look around for the promised water source. I was all alone at this 5,050-foot elevation shelter site and during the night I was awakened by something new ¢ and very close to me: coyotes. Around 12:30 a.m. they began to wail for perhaps 20-30 minutes, but since I wasn¢t worried in the slightest, I rather enjoyed the ¢performance.¢