Date: 2007-12-08
From: Iron Mtn Shelter

To: Watauga Lake Shelter
Miles today: 13.6
Weather: light rain

mi. 13.6sleep shelterdest. Watauga Lake Shelter day 149 Definitly should have packed in more water into camp. I left my gatoraid bottle in town, so I had 1 less liter of water capacity. I also haven't been drinking a lot lately. Last nights camp was definitly dry. Oh and there is no water today until the lake 14 miles away. That made for an interesting day. No warm drink in the morning. I only had just over a liter of water left. I took off south just behind Deluxe. Without the alarm we were still hiking before 8am. I may have to work on this alarm thing they have going on. We checked a couple springs along the way. Still no go. I was feeling dehydrated, but I wasn't worried about making it to camp. Yesterday Deluxe and I were talking about all the crazy things that happen to us along the way. He said that he wouldn't be surprised if someone asked us to go to the Bahamas for a few days, or something completely off the wall like that. Pretty much my thoughts. Well at the shelter half way through the day we saw something bizzare and were not overly surprised. We met Goatman there. He lives close to here and was up for the night. He has sectioned the trail all the way up to VT. Oh and he hikes with a goat. I really cool goat with horns. Walking up I saw it looking out of the shelter and thought at first it was a dog. Nope a goat. The goat has hiked all of it with him. It was the coolest thing. You could hold your foot up and it would back up and run into it with it's head. That was a good 20 minutes worth of entertainment there. I could have done that all night. He said he doesn't really carry anything more for it. Just a little food. It can drink up and !eating plants along the trail. Yet another example of how you never know what you are going to see from one day to the next. From there I was hiking pretty much alone. The crazy thing was here was me with little water and it was raining out. Enough that made it uncomfortable, yet not enough to make any drinking water available. The trail went down to the Wataga damn. This was really cool. The best part was that the fog was rolling across the damn. It looked close to smoke. I took a ton of pics. I got to where the trail went away from the lake. I could have went a ways down the bank. But it didn't look to fun. The water was really low. One wrong slip and I would be swimming way over my head. The guide said the shelter was on the lake. Yeah it isn't. It was a good couple hundreds yards up. I got there to find Deluxe sitting there. Good thing there was water there. Both of us were about or out of water. He let me use his nalgene to get water. That helped a bunch. Obilivous rolled up he didn't get water at the lake either. Funny how none of us had water, I had about 2 cups, and none of us got any water at the lake. Had the shelter been dry we would have definitly been doing a water run back to the lake. I scored another ground sheet at the shelter. It had the cutout from a tent. A lot thicker than my other, probibly about 4 mil. My other was .8 and resembled plastic wrap. Catz even commented that his only shelter was plastic wrap. I definitly ate up and drank up the whole night. The best part was I was asleep by 9pm.