Date: 2004-10-22
To: My first night alone...
Miles today: 0.0

Subject: A Journey North-Part Three: North Georgia is where character is built! Sorry for the stop in emails, my internet ran out for awhile and I had to resign-up. Back to Neel's Gap. Whenever I mention a hiker hostel, picture in your mind the barracks of an army base, except smaller, dirtier and maintained with entirely volunteer efforts. The hostel at Walasi was in the basement of the building and consisted of three rooms, bathroom, bunkroom and TV room. The TV wasn't hooked up to an antenna but they had a VCR and a good supply of movies to watch. I got to Neel's Gap fairly early in the day since I only had a few miles to hike. As I got there Magic was finishing washing some clothes and was heading on the next shelter. I decided to stay the night; I didn't want to push myself too hard in the beginning of the trip. For $15 you get a bunk, shower, use of microwave and all other appliances. I sorted through all my gear and my first mail drop and sent a box of stuff home that I didn't need to save weight. I made several calls home and to my girlfriend in Boone, which gave me my first feelings of homesickness. Well, night came and I tried to go to bed around 9 or so, late for a thruhiker. I turned up the heat on the propane radiator and started smelling something funny. Most everyone from the country knows the smell of an animal rotting on the road, this was a mouse, dead in the wall, and the heat was making the stink fill the entire place with rotting smell. I was too cold to turn the heat off so I just crawled in my sleeping bag after shutting off the lights. Almost immediately I heard a loud rustling sound. Mice were trying to get to my food!! I jumped up, turned on the lights just in time to see not a mouse, but a giant rat scurry under my bed. Now mice aren¢t so bad, almost every shelter you sleep in while hiking has mice that come out and scurry around looking for dropped food at night. If you leave anything that smells (food, toothpaste, pots/pans) in your pack at night the mice will choose through everything you own to get at it. I can handle the mice, with a little precaution and planning you can avoid them bothering your stuff, and after awhile they almost become cute. What I saw in Neel's Gap was less cute like a mouse and more ugly like small deformed dog. So I gathered all my stuff together and set it in a chair they wouldn¢t be able to climb in the front room. Heading back to go to sleep one of the rats was running across my bed, defiantly not gonna sleep in that bed tonight. The owners of the hostel have a dog, and that night it was staying in the room above where I was suppose to be sleeping. I'm 99% convinced that right as I tried to go to sleep they feed it a bottle of speed, from 11 to 5 in the morning it was running back and forth across the floor over my head, it sounded like people where doing construction!!   Anyways, I put a movie on and tried to sleep on the bench in the front room when one of the rats ran right across my head. It being 2 in the morning and me having 17.8 miles to do in the rough north Georgia terrain, I was getting pretty pissed. So I switched bunks, picked a top one against the wall and went to sleep as fast as I could. I woke up that morning at 5:30, ate a quite oatmeal breakfast and started hiking before dawn. For those of you who like to camp I highly recommend doing this. Hiking out of the gap as the sun came up shining bright red and the ice of Blood Mountain was one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced. Knowing that I had a long way to go over some pretty tough terrain, (North Georgia on the Trail is a roller coaster, up 100 feet, down 100 feet, up 100, down 100, up, down, up down.)   Those of us on the trail refer to those as PUDs- Pointless ups and downs, several PUD's in a row are called MUD's-Mindless ups and downs. North Georgia when I passed through it was all muddy snowy MUD's. Anyways, since I knew I had a long way to go I pushed myself pretty hard, going fast on downhills and as fast as I could and ups. Whenever I would eat a snack I would eat it while hiking to save time. This was my biggest mistake yet. By the time I reached Low Gap Shelter, 10.2 miles away, I was so hungry and tired I was shaking with weakness. I ate lunch and rested for an hour, and noticed that when I started hiking again I felt much better. I remembered two things as I climbed around that first mountain out of Low Gap. First, when hiking long distances like this you burn close to 7000 calories a day, which is like running two marathons back to back everyday. So I decided to keep an eye on the time and force myself to stop, rest, and eat every thirty minutes. The second thing I remembered was a saying thruhikers use alot: "It's all about the smiles not about the miles" If your goal is only to get from A to B, then you're gonna be depressed constantly. You have to stop and smell the roses and remember why you are out there. (There aren't any roses on the Trail yet, nor any kind of flowering, living, green plant.)   Sometimes you have to force yourself to take off your pack and sit and look at a view until you see its beauty, after 400 miles (where I am now) It's very easy to be bored with the views, no matter how spectacular. The rest of the hike that day was spectacular, I enjoyed everything so much more, and I met a section hiker who gave me and orange to eat. That night I stayed at Blue Mountain shelter. No one was there so I set up my tent, being that I was getting pissed that I was carrying it all this way and not using it. The sunset that night was absolutely spectacular!!   Blue mountain shelter is out on a small ridge that juts out so that the sun set behind what I think was Blood Mountain again. The entire sky was a mix of oranges and reds, and I fell asleep just as the first stars came out. This ends part three of A Journey North, I only covered one day and two nights, but so much happened I couldn't make it any shorter. I'll try and write some more tonight. -Grey Fox