Date: 2008-02-19
From: Springer Mountain Shelter GA

To: Hawk Shelter GA
Miles today: 7.6

Day 2 ¢ Tuesday, February 19 ¢ Hawk Shelter GA ¢ Miles Today: 7.6   Total Miles: 7.8Last night at Springer Mountain Shelter, we had lows in the mid to upper 20s with winds gusting pretty hard - probably at least 40mph. The water bottle hanging on the bear pulley was frozen solid. The bottle of water that we had in our tent was partially frozen. The good news was that we had a very dry night so the inside of the tent was almost completely dry. We just had a little bit of frost on the poles but hardly anything to even mention. Because it was to be a short day, we just hung around in the tent until about 9:00, then stepped out of the tent for a quick breakfast before hopping back in the tent until about 10:30. It was cold out there!While we were hanging in the tent, we heard some people approaching and a gentleman came by and said "Hello". We stuck our heads out and met a future thru-hiker, Cousteau. He's in his mid 50s and will be starting in about one month. He plans on averaging 22 miles a day in order to finish before a commitment of some sort. Does not sound real feasible or fun to us. Today we were supposed to do 7.6 miles but ended up doing 8.2. But before you go thinking we got lost again, hold on - we'll talk more about that later. The terrain today was fairly gentle; a lot of level areas with just a few ups and downs. We met another thru-hiker today, DonkeyLegs. He is originally from New Zealand but has lived in California for the last 8 years. We both seem to be starting out with low mileage. He is here with us at this shelter tonight. The weather today was pretty nice; windy but much less than last night. The temperature this afternoon got up to about 49 degrees. As for the extra mileage today. No, we did not get lost; we decided to take our time and take a blue blaze - or side trail - to see some waterfalls. We passed two groups of day hikers who asked us if we had seen the falls yet. We hadn't seen any falls and didn't see it marked on our map. It turns out that the parking area on the forest service road is on one side of road and the falls are on the other side of the road. The people just assumed that the falls were on the side of the road that they parked on! We walked about a 1/2 mile up the AT and found the side trail to the Longcreek Falls. We decided to take the detour and check them out. Because of the recent rains, the falls were flowing nicely, complete with a double cascade down the rocks. Unfortunate that the day hikers missed this set of falls; they were pretty nice.We arrived at camp about 3:30, set up the tent and filtered water. For dinner we used twice the amount of chicken, corn, peas, milk and hemp seed because we forgot to use it last night. We don't want to hump all this food with us so we had a very large dinner tonight. We are eating pretty much everything allocated, and only have one bag of extra gorp as we¢ve been eating Peggy's cookies and special gorp rather than ours! It¢s 5:15 and we¢re in our tent, which is pitched on a knoll. It¢s windy; the tent is flapping quite a bit. It's around 40-44 degrees. The forecast is for below 30 tonight, but we should be fine - good and dry. We're having a blast!