Date: 2004-05-17
From: Dennis Cove Road (Kincora Hostel)

To: Vandeventer Shelter
Miles today: 17.5
Weather: light rain

A minor problem this morning - in the melee yesterday someone mistakenly took my hiking poles and left me theirs. Rather than trying to sort it out I just left with the different poles. They're somewhat heavier than mine were, and have a shock absorber system. I miss my lightweight poles.I hiked out with Rainbow about 8:00am. The rest of the crowd were going back out to do trail work for another day, but we managed to overcome our guilt for not helping and hiked away. The very first part of the day was through Laurel Gorge and past Laurel Falls, a very scenic part of the trail. Of course once you're in a gorge you have to climb out, in this case over huge boulders. At one point Rainbow had to take off her pack and let me hoist it over after her. But we made it and climbed the trail back to the ridgeline that the AT seems to be required by law to follow, steeply up the innocent sounding Pond Flats, a flat-topped mountain.As we took a break near the top, Will walked up. He had been ahead of me, but took a couple of days off for TrailDays and had left Dennis Cove Road shortly after us from a different hostel. As we caught up on where everyone is and what happened at Trail Days we left Rainbow behind. Frank, a recently retired Navy CPT, also arrived with Will.A note about Rainbow - she's an example that keeping your wits about you and having some grit can save your life. One of the early posts in her Trail Journal has the details of her accident, so I'll just give the highlights. She was hiking (alone) in the White Mts of NH on a weekend last Oct as part of preparation for her thruhike. She slipped on a patch of ice and tumbled off the trail onto a ledge below, breaking several ribs in the process. The ice on the trail and the broken ribs prevented her from getting back up on the trail, so she crawled into her sleeping bag, pulled her tent around her and spent the next two nights there, melting snow and icicles for drinking water. No one came by. On Monday the temps had risen enough to melt the ice and she managed to get back up on the trail, throwing a rope ahead and pulling her pack up after her. Then she got the pack on and hiked out 10 miles over several mountains back to the visitor center to call her family. After she got home and was able to relax her survival instinct, shock set in and she spent several days in the hospital recovering. Waiting for the ribs to knit delayed her thruhike start by a month, so she started in Hot Springs, NC instead of from Springer Mt, GA. She'll come back to the first section if time permits. Quite a story of survival.Will and I continued down to Watauga Lake. This was the end of my long-ago foray on the AT that I described in the first post. So I'm actually rehiking the next 40 miles up to Damascus, but in the opposite direction as last time. I talked to Sarah and a friend for a few minutes while eating at the Watauga Lake shelter. They're finishing a three-day section hike from Damascus. I found out later from a shelter journal that Sarah turned 22 yesterday.From there it was on to the Vandeventer shelter, climbing steadily up the spine of Iron Mt, which runs practically to Damascus. This is the shelter that Mark and I named the Rat Hotel on the previous hike because of the mice that ran around all night. I didn't hear any this time. But one feature of the shelter was the same - it was a half mile down a steep trail to the spring. The option was to haul enough water from about 1.5mi back on the trail. I made the trip down the ravine.John from Syracuse, NY came in later. He's the guy who helped me haul the section hikers' packs to the Little Laurel shelter north of Hot Springs after they ran out of water and abandoned them. His brother got off the trail there with a stomach problem and is now several days behind. At the shelter tonight are myself, Will, John, Frank and a serial thruhiker named Grey Wolf who came to TrailDays and is spending a few days afterward on the trail. Frank pitched a tent out back because of a concern about snoring - it wasn't clear whether the concern was about his or ours.