Date: 2004-10-18
From: Pecks Corner	Inadu Knob

To:  Snake den ridge
Miles today: 9.0

I heard an alarm go off maybe about 6:30am at Pecks Corner Shelter. By 7am everybody was getting up, then Terry and I got up at 7:30am. Everybody had already got their stoves and had breakfast. That worked out good. We all got off, and we left before one guy at 9 am, but then he passed us when we stopped at the privy.Today is Monday, Oct 18th and we are on the trail!We woke up in a cloud this morning. Terry was waiting for it to brighten up, but it didnt. So we walked all morning in the clouds with quite a bit of wind.I'm sure there were some fantastic views out there from The Rock outcroppings, but we couldn't see them. We had some beautiful Hemlock Forest we walked through. That was quite neat with the clouds blowing through. But there is also some moisture that comes off the trees every now and then. So we're hoping not to get into anything worse than that before we get to the car. So first we got back on the Appalachian Trail at 9:20 a.m. And we made it to Tricorner Knob shelter at 12:15 p.m. We had a lunch of granola bars there. We have not seen anyone since we left camp this morning. One comment about yesterday's hike, the Fall colors were at their Peak down in The Valleys, just beautiful. Today it's clearing up a little bit in the afternoon but still quite windy. Clouds are coming and going but there are views down to the valley. We talked to a hiker trying to get water on the trail, we told him it was just a mile back to the shelter, with good access to water. We passed an older lady out hiking by herself, and to protect herself from rain she was wearing a clear tarp over her head. She had Ziplocs over her shoes for rain protection. They had a rubber band seal at the top of the ziploc. A nice lady. We are currently at Innado knob and the time is 2:55 p.m. And we're taking a nice break here. Near here we passed remains of some wreckage of a military plane, that crashed on the mountain some years ago. We will see if we can read more about that later. We left Innado Knob at 3:20 p.m. and soon walk Passed more remains of the wrecked plane. We got to the intersection of the Snake Den Ridge Trail at 3:50, and kind of started down to Cosby. We went down what looks like an old road and we just went down, down and around. We are 50 minutes into our walk down, and three people are coming up. Two guys and a gal. The one guy had a t-shirt that said Mental Health Works. They asked what time it was, and how far to the top. And when we told them, they said that fits into their schedule. We laughed later thinking they had at least 2 hours to get up on top and back down to just this point, in the middle of nowhere. They had no gear or water or camping equipment. They will have some night walking later. We came down to a creek and rested a few minutes. We crossed another Creek with a bridge, and then came out to a old road with a turnaround at the end of the road. We walked on down the road. We passed a little Cemetery off to our left. It had been 6 p.m. when we first came out to the old gravel Road. We come down to a sign that says to .2 mile to the campground. It started to drizzle now, and it was longer than .2 miles. We got to the campground at 6:20pm and Cindy is now sitting in a bathroom with both backpacks. Terry went on down to the car parking area, and will bring it up in the Cosby campground to pick me up.