Date: 2004-03-31
From: Hogback Gap

To: Fontana
Miles today: 9.6
Weather: light rain

Packed up around nine and left the site in the snow. for some ridiculous reason i decided to take my rain pants, fleece, and jacket off after about a mile, leaving myself in shorts and a long sleeved capilene shirt. i'm a goddamned jeenyus. we stopped at yellow creek gap for a breakfast of instant potatoes even though we couldn't officially feel our fingers. just a side note--the yellow creek gap mountain road is the most littered piece of crap forest road i've seen in my life. scout troops, pay attention. so anyway, shorts remaining, we finished up and kept hiking. i took the lead for once and much to ross's bewilderment, we literally began to jog up the trail. yeah, i dunno. i just felt like run-ning. so there we went, normal pace uphill, then jogging on the flats, and sprinting downhill. i wasn't even sweating. it worked well in the cold, better than stopping to break out the pants. the fall was two flakes short of a whiteout, and in times like that you just don't stop. until you have to pee, which i did. of course, that two minute pee break cost me my warmth and my momentum. my gloves were soaked from the snow on the tree trunk which saved me from squatting, my butt had been snowed upon, and taking my pack off left my spine to a series of violent chills. i f@%#ing hate the cold. two miles to go, and i began to shiver. a little more snow on my back by the next mile, and i stopped shivering. not the good kind of i'm-warm-again stopped shivering, but the bad kind of i'm-in-the-beginning-stages-of-hypothermia-and-will-soon-meet-my-demise stopped shivering. so obviously i freaked out and began to make dumb decisions. like the one where i unloaded all of my weight onto an unsure left foot which was standing on a really wet slanted rock. and landed flat on my ass. that was a good one. i even did the whole two year old act of sitting there for a few seconds, then realizing what had just happened, then bursting into tears while twitching slightly at the fingers. so i pretty much cried for the next mile, occasionally making some broken reference to emergency blankets. ross took charge (meaning started walking in front) when i started my insane lucille ball episode, and we somehow made it to the road around 1:00. ross wanted to stop by the visitor center brochure hut thing so i could put my pants on, but i just wandered off down the road. a few steps into our road walk, the ridge runner pulled over and rescued us. one of his eyes was swollen completely shut due to a gnat incident. i didn't ask questions. seated on a towel in a warm new loredo, i began to shiver again. then i constructed complete sentences like, "i can feel my butt!" the nice ridge runner gnat-eye man dropped us off at the post office in the resort, and while i was thawing inside with my packages, rick bayley showed up outside! i love rick. rick's the bestest. especially since he took us over to the "adventure center" and poured me a cup of coffee. i love coffee, too. so i was sitting there in the middle of all the adventure, waiting for a shuttle to drive us (yes drive us) to the registration building, kinda talking to deer hunter (?), eating peanut butter cups, drinking coffee like you read about, trying not to be fascinated by the birdhouse some little girl was nailing together with her dad (if that's not adventure i don't know what is), when i realized that the warmer i got, the more pain i felt in my knees. damnit all to hell. i tried to ignore it and piled myself into a minivan, which took us first to the registration building, and then to the hotel part of the resort, fifty thousand miles away. the room was great, despite being mint green in every possible way, and we settled in to open our packages. one of ross' contained three large cans of imported english beer. lager, stout, whathaveyou. ross called rick (he decided to stay another night) to share and i ran the tub. rick came running in like an english guy to beer and we divided up the cans. ross called the old speckled hen, rick had something of which i can't remember the name, and i had warm murphy's irish stout. i think i managed to get down between three and four sips of said stout. two of which i swallowed from the bath. i love baths. fifteen minutes later, i was thoroughly thawed and ready to consume mass amounts of junkfood. so i sat in bed in my towel and opened my packages, a la christmas morning. except with chocolate easter eggs instead of candy santas. chex mix, pepperoni, oranges, snickers bars...i didn't stop eating for ten minutes straight. rick has a picture of the snack massacre in his journal, or he will soon. it was brutal. we all went for dinner with alabama (who's really from ohio, and funny as hell, which actually isn't all that funny, so i don't understand that expression) at six, and joined a huge table full of the hikers we'd seen last night at brown fork gap. they must have tried to wait out the snow, because they arrived at the resort a full four hours after us. i filled my plate with chicken alfredo and vegetables and stuff from the buffet and was content to make fun of ross and rick for their accents until the end of the meal. did you know that naff means lame? yeah, well it does. according to saint rick. after dinner, we took some showers, drank some beer, and went up to the fireplace gathering, where all the college boys without a cause were playing a heartful game of asshole. others talked about pepsi stoves, backpacks, and where else they've hiked. the centerpiece was a leaning tower of cheap beer, and the fire was fueled by green wood and vast amounts of lighter fluid, which was spewed on every few minutes, with a cackle, by one of many tall skinnies. ross and i just kinda pondered the situation, then decided that the only reaction was to go to bed.