Georgia Wilderness Society
Appalachian Trail, June 2019

Georgia Wilderness Society


AT TRIP 2019 – ERWIN, TENNESSEE
UNCLE JOHNNY'S NOLICHUCKY HOSTEL

JUN 1 - SAT
  It finally has arrived, time for our AT Trip. We didn't have a trip last year because there was a hurricane in Sept. 2018, Hurricane Florence. We are going to try to extend our trip to 8 days of hiking instead the usual 5 days....hike for 4 days, then shower, rest and do laundry at the Hostel, then hike 4 more days. Since Margaret and I are retired, we are testing the waters to see if we can go longer and further. We won't know until we try. If it works, great; if not, we'll know our limits for Shirl Ol' Girl and Ol' Girl. We always want this to be something we enjoy and not a job because we've retired from our jobs. 
  I picked up Margaret at her house around 830 and off we went for our adventure. We arrived in Erwin, TN around 330 and checked in at Uncle Johnny's Hostel. We had Cabin B. The cabin had a large bunk bed, big enough for 4 people if you needed that much room. We had a refrigerator, microwave and TV to play movies. Not bad for a hostel. Once we settled in, we went to check out the town of Erwin and have supper. We found a deli called Lina's Sandwich and Soup Deli. It was owned and operated by Lina, who used to be a beautician and now lives above the deli. The food was good and plentiful. The restaurant is opened 9-6. We toured the town, not much of a hiker town, seems like the town closes pretty early. Not like Hot Springs at all. Back to the Hostel to get ready for our hike the next day.

JUN 2 - SUN
  Starting point - Devil Fork Gap to Hogback Ridge Shelter - 6.1 miles
  I woke up at 500 for my last shower until we return to the Hostel in about four days from now. I had my coffee and Margaret woke around 630. We had to get the shuttle to Devil Fork Gap at 800. The owner of the Hostel picked us up, the wife of the late Uncle Johnny. (Uncle Johnny passed last year in 2018.) Her name was Charlotte. We had good conversation and arrived at the Gap at 830.
We started hiking in a cow pasture. The weather was nice, not hot and not cold or rainy, perfect. About an hour into the hike, Ol' Girl spotted two old graves surrounded by a fence. One was a male named Joe Riddel born Aug 16,1877 and died July 9,1967 (age 90) and a lady named Dorothy Hensley born May 8,1865 and died April 30,1969 (age 104). We figured they must have been old mountain folks that had lived around these parts. Wouldn't it have been great to hear their story?  
  We continued on. We saw quite a few campsites along the Trail and one really nice waterfall. We stopped around 1030 for a rest and a snack. After hiking straight up for an hour and a half (around 1200), we stopped for lunch. During the end of lunch, we heard (we think), a deer blowing or maybe Bigfoot. 
We arrived at the Hogback Ridge Shelter around 240. Two ladies from Ashville N.C. were there with their two dogs, Goldie and Gracie, taking a break from their day hike. This was one of the nicest kept shelters that we have encountered. The privy was small with no door and with a platform we could use for washing up and changing clothes. Also it was pretty clean. There were bear cables and also fire wood stacked to burn, supplied by the Carolina Mountain Club. I guess some of the members of the Club take pride in the upkeep of this shelter. Looked like we were going to have the shelter to ourselves, but it was still early. We started doing our usual shelter chores....getting water, cleaning up and preparing/eating supper. 
This year I was trying a new way of cooking. I had dehydrated some spaghetti and was going to use my insulated cooking pouches that I had purchased from AntiGravity Gear at the Amicalola AT Kickoff. I was looking to see how it rehydrates so we could bring a bigger variety of food and have no pots and no dishes to wash. I put the freezer bags of food in the insulated pouches, added boiling water to the freezer bags, then let the bags sit while the food inside the bags cooked for about 45 minutes while we went to the stream to filter water for cooking, drinking and tomorrow's hike. After 45 minutes, we ate supper out of the bags. When we finished, we threw away the bags. This cuts down on weight and turned out really good and easy. This is a keeper! Around 500 three other hikers joined us. They were Grok/Tim, a solo thru-hiker, and two others, Squeak and Allen from Texas, thru-hiking together. 
Good hike today. Time to hit the mat. Getting up for a bathroom visit around midnight, we saw fireflies blinking all around the shelter, like the stars had come down to visit us. Pretty cool.

JUN 3 - MON
  Hogback Ridge Shelter to Bald Mtn. Shelter - 10.1 miles
  I woke up as usual around 500 am, made my coffee and listened to the birds bringing in the morning. The birds woke up Ol' Girl around 600. We started packing and got ready for breakfast. We left around 745, earliest we have ever left in the morning.
After about an hour into our hike, I heard a noise ahead of us. I brought it to Margaret's attention. It sounded like an animal thrashing and crashing around in the woods. So I got Margaret's pepper spray. We began clanging our poles together and singing at the top or our voices to scare away the "bear". Then we heard "vroom, vroom" along with the crashing and very soon saw a trail maintenance volunteer clearing overgrown vegetation from alongside the Trail. As we walked by him, I told him that I had thought he was a bear and thanked him for a job well done. 
After about 5 miles, around 1200, we stopped for lunch. We had about 5 or so miles to go. We made it to the summit of Big Bald Mountain which reminded me of Max Patch, another mountain bald, also in North Carolina, with 360 degrees of mountain views. We met two hikers on the summit that I had spoken to at the Hostel....Trucker Speed from Alabama who was only doing 1,000 miles this year and Reader from New Jersey who was a thru-hiker. He had only 320 miles to go, then he would flip-flop back up to New Jersey to begin hiking north to Maine before he went back to school in the fall. 
We arrived at the shelter at 500 pm. It took us 9 hours to hike, better than we thought we would do. We thought it would take 10 hrs. We made it in good time and were proud of ourselves. No one was at the Bald Mtn. Shelter. It looked like just me and Ol' Girl unless someone came along later. Got our chores and food done and we were settling in for the night when all at once a young girl pops around the corner of the shelter and liked to have scared the "baJesus" out of us! From where we sat, we didn't have a view of the side trail that led to the shelter, so we hadn't seen her approaching. Her trail name was Purple Haze (called this because of some purple shoes she had worn once before). She told us that she had hiked 31 miles that day! She was on vacation and was only going as far as 4 more days would take her. She had already done a thru-hike of the AT when she was 19 and had also thru-hiked the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) last year. She was only 23. I asked her if she worked and she said she used to work as a waitress, but now she had a real job at Pepsi getting orders for stores. But, if she felt the call of another long hike, she would just quit and go out on the trail. That's what it's like to be young and carefree. 

JUN. 4 - TUE
  Bald Mtn. Shelter to No Business Knob Shelter - 10.6 miles
  Up at 530 to do another 10 miles. It was pretty cold last night....maybe around 40 degrees. We slept in long pants and long sleeve shirts.....cool and windy this morning. It's hard to believe it's in the nineties at home. So far the days have been cool without rain. Margaret up at 600. Purple Haze woke up at 630 and before Margaret could get a picture of her, she was gone 15 minutes after she woke.....no breakfast or anything. We started packing up when a father and son from Athens, Ga. hiked in for a break. They had camped up on Big Bald Mtn. the night before. They had a windy night with a couple of other hikers. We left at 750. 
After about 3.7 miles, we stopped at the side trail to High Rocks. Ol' Girl was slowing down and having problems with her boots rubbing her toes. She said she felt more tired than usual, so she didn't go up the High Rocks Trail. I took the trail up to the top where there was a solid rock to stand on. From here there were more beautiful views of the mountains. This would have been a good place for a lunch break. When I got back down to Margaret, I gave her my Tevas to wear to help with the rubbing and banging of her toes. At least I could help with that issue. Also she can now say she has walked a mile or miles in my shoes. 
After about another mile and a half of hiking, we stopped for lunch at a campsite around 130 to rest and fix our feet. I had developed blisters on both of my heels. This was the first time that I had ever gotten them. We talked about making the hike just four days instead of eight, which was fine because I believe our hike should be something we enjoy. Plus, this was just a test to see if we could make it longer. Each year as we get older, our bodies change, so we must be smart and hike our own hike and enjoy it. If we can get all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine, that's great, but if we can't, that's ok, too. We are section hikers, we hike sections of the Trail, we're not thru-hikers. We enjoy what we are doing and we're supposed to listen to the Trail and to our bodies to see how far we can go. One thing we both agree on, we want to at least make it to Damascus, then flip up to Baxter State Park in Maine to climb Mount Katahdin, so we can say that we have been to the beginning of the Trail and to the end of the Trail. 
Something to think about, so off we go to No Business Knob Shelter. Kind of ironic...the name of the shelter and what we were talking about. Maybe the Trail is telling us something. 
We met an N.C. Wildlife Management employee at Devils Creek Gap. Ol' Girl asked him if we were in NC or TN. He told us we were in Pisgah National Forest, NC. and that we would be in Cherokee National Forest, TN in about an hour. He also told us that the weather forecast was calling for rain for the next 4 days....something else to consider when deciding whether or not to hike the second set of four days after a day off at the Hostel. We know we are fair weather ladies, no snow or rain, if we can keep from it. 
  We made it to the shelter by 520, did better than I had thought, not bad for two Ol' Girls. There were 5 other ladies at the shelter with two dogs. All of them were friends from different areas of Florida. There also was a German guy who had already hiked a thru-hike and was going to do the Benton MacKaye trail. One of the Florida ladies was German whose name was Claudia /Infinity, owner of the two dogs, Charlie and Roma. Claudia was a oceanography scientist from Miami and loved to talk. Maybe that's why her trail name is Infinity. A young fellow from Columbus, GA, arrived a few minutes later and set up his tent. He was thru-hiking.
  The No Business Knob Shelter was made of concrete blocks, real clean, but no privy and no bear cables. A huge fallen tree, big enough to hide behind, served one purpose and a solid tree limb served the other. We were in the Cherokee National Forest in TN. After supper we got settled in and Claudia came up with Roma and Charlie. We talked a bit, then called it a night. We would hike out to the Hostel tomorrow. We decided not to hike any further this year once we arrive at the Hostel. Like we said, this was our trial for hiking further or longer and we know that if we continue hiking, it won't be more than 5 days each trip and we will not start a hike in the rain. It's one thing if it begins to rain while we're out there, but we will not step out into it. Sometimes you have to make adjustments in hiking your hike. 

JUN 5 - WED
  No Business Knob Shelter to Uncle Johnny's Nolichucky Hostel, Erwin, TN - 6.2 miles
  I didn't sleep too good last night. Finally got up at 500 after hearing a barred owl. Margaret got up with me to see the morning come in and have coffee and hot chocolate. This has been the first time Ol' Girl got up with me during the entire ten years we have been hiking together. Maybe the uncertainty of continuing the hiking, putting it off for a bit or calling it quits got her up to see how great a morning could be. After coffee and hot chocolate, we started packing and getting breakfast. It started to drizzle a bit but didn’t last long. Everyone else started waking up and getting their breakfast. After we packed, we said our "see you later" to the 5 ladies and two dogs and were on our way around 730. 
When we stopped for a break around 1030, we could see the Nolichucky River and the town of Erwin. Rain started after we left from our break around 1130. I guess we were getting baptized from a job well done for the last ten years. We made it off the mountain and the Trail by 1200. When we got close to the Hostel, we met Grok on the road. He was heading back to the Trail to continue his thru-hike. We hugged and wished him good, safe travels. 
We arrived at the Hostel, ending our section hike for this year. It was tough, but we did it! The Trail gave us stuff to think about. We are proud of how far we have gotten. We have done 344.3 miles together in 10 years.....from Springer Mtn. in Ga to the Nolichucky River in Erwin, TN. Who wouldn't be proud? We checked in to the same cabin that we had a few days ago and took our showers in the bathhouse. Before we headed out for dinner, we saw 3 of the 5 ladies we met from Florida who were having lunch at the Hostel picnic table, waiting for the others. They were going to hike the second half of the section that we decided not to do this year. They would take out at Carver's Gap. Maybe next year. Ol' Girl and I celebrated with a steak dinner at Outback, then back to the Hostel. We headed home the next morning.
  I want to thank all the people that have been on this ten-year journey with me and Ol' Girl. We couldn't have done it without you. Are we stopping for now? Maybe yes...maybe no. If we do stop for now, we can come back anytime because we are section hikers and that's what we do, hike sections of the Trail. We just have to listen closely for that call of the Trail, saying it's time to hike or it's time to stop. Never try to do what the Trail is not saying because the Trail leads you, you never lead the Trail. Sometimes you have to realize it's time to quit or just wait. So for now, hike your own hike, enjoy your time, enjoy the people and the things you see. But we're still making plans, one way or the other. 

Shirl Ol' Girl -Shirley Williams
Ol' Girl- Margaret Clay 
Jun 1-6, 2019