We started at the Old Mountain Campground (short video), turned our car in at the airport, caught the Max to downtown and then to the Greyhound station.
Next was a shuttle and we hoped to get in ten miles with a hostel on the next day.
Weather is warming and is a lot better than the 19 degrees we hit at the ruck.
The shuttle got us to the historic fire tower at the top of a local mountain and forest service signs led us to the trail.
The trail is well marked with aqua blue blazes about every fifty feet. The surface is good, though covered with leaves and pine needles it does not invite turned ankles from roots and rocks.
The Appalachian Trail has a lot of erosion on it. Places where the trail is all large rocks and gaps. People sometimes complain about how if they could just move the trail a few feet it would be dirt instead of rocks.
Of course that would last until trail use eroded the new location. But this trail doesn’t have enough use to erode down which makes it softer and better as a trail.
About six miles in there is about a four mile road walk with a general store about a third of the way.
Road walks are hard on my feet compared to trail. I tend to try and walk on the shoulder. Luckily much of this one is on dirt roads.
Not much at the general store, but it has snacks and soft drinks and good hearted people who make water available to hikers. At about mile ten the trail leaves the dirt road and heads back into the forest.
The trail no longer crosses the meadow talked about in FarOut as a perfect camping spot but we found a good place as the sun was setting.
We had started after lunch and covered over eleven miles before sunset at five o’clock pm. Our stop was a campsite at between 12.1 and 12.2 miles down the trail and we woke to gentle sporadic rainfall the next morning. We waited the rain out until 8:00 when the sun began to come out.
Then we started hiking again.
