Days 35-40 – Four Sweaty and Salty Days to Erwin

The last four days have been a blur of hiking and camping, hiking and eating, hiking and trying to stay cool, hiking and sleeping.

It was supposed to be five days to Erwin, TN from Hot Springs, but somehow a few of us squished it down to four. More on that later.

In between Hot Springs and Erwin, we experienced free cookies, heat, humidity, heavy packs, dramatic exposed rocky ridgelines, knee pain, foot pain, and group yoga at a shelter.

The Cookie Lady, now a known figure on the AT, retired to the woods of NC from Ohio, and when she realized how close to the AT she lives, she started baking goodies for the hikers. More recently (after the hurricane), she started asking for donations from hikers for the rebuilding of the Hot Springs library. In exchange for a $10 donation, she gifts the generous hikers an additional treat. For our group, we received peach cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Hikers at the Cookie Lady’s cabin.

I checked the Cookie Lady’s logbook after signing. A few pages back (about 10 days before I was there), I sign-ins from familiar names! The college girls from my first days on trail are way ahead, and so are others I’ve met along the way. The feelings of seeing how far others are ahead that started on or around the same day as me were not all positive, but I was quickly reminded that I have met plenty of other really cool people that I get to hike with, even if they started a week after me!

I think I met Fail when I was in the Smokies, but I didn’t hike with him until just before Hot Springs. It just happened to work out to room together with Disney and his daughter when we were there, and then it just happened to work out to hike out together with him and Mr Cheese after our zero day in Hot Springs.

We had made a plan with Stoker all together to room together in Erwin, Tennessee in 5 days, which let us hike 15 mile days between Hot Springs and Erwin. This was our longest food carry between towns yet, so leaving Hot Springs, our bags were very heavy.

The next few days were supposed to be in the 80s. Fail, being from WA, was particularly affected by the heat and humidity, especially wearing his sun protective long sleeves and pants. 80s in WA is summer weather, and it was only April! I sympathized and agreed that starting earlier in the morning was the way for us to go to avoid the heat.

Fail, soaked in sweat and water from the small stream as we tried to keep cool.

Mr Cheese and Stoker are a little bit of later risers, and with the oncoming heat wave, Fail and I made the plan to start getting up as early as we could to hike in the morning hours while it was still cool. So, Fail and I have been hiking together for the last few days starting before sunrise, and sadly haven’t seen too much of Mr Cheese or Stoker during the day. In that time I have learned a lot about the lore of League of Legends, which was fun because I loved the show Arcane and don’t know a thing about the source material. Fail works in video game data analytics and knows just about everything about every video game out there.

Fail, being a gamer, also likes to push limits and has a competitive side. So although although while we were hiking together, he was very considerate and let me set the pace during our day, at the end of the day he would always want to push a couple extra miles. It made sense, because five full days to get to the next town was going to be rough, and we knew that by pushing a few extra miles each day we could potentially get to town earlier and have a better Nero/zero day for resupply and relaxing.

On one of the first or second days from Hot Springs, when our packs were still heavy, we were treated with what looked on the elevation map to be a nice easy ridgeline walk. Unfortunately, the elevation maps didn’t show the large, exposed rocks that were on top of this mountain. Yes, the views were nice, but it was hot, and with the sun beating down and our knees already sore from miles of hiking with our packs full of at 4 days worth of food, the large stone steps up and down along the ridge sucked.

The exposed rocky top that was very hard on the knees. I’m sure it would have been a lot of fun to climb these boulders without heavy packs!

After a long day of sun and rock climbing with packs, Fail and I finally made it to the shelter. It looked like tent city! After pushing miles to get to the shelter, we had fully entered The Bubble.

The most people we’d seen at a shelter at once on the trail. It felt like a party!

After a long day, Fail and I had discussed going past the shelter to shave off more miles from the next day, but we ended up making dinner at the shelter and started talking with the people there. We had met most of them before, and after fueling our bodies, we were feeling more social and less crazy about continuing on. As we realized we wouldn’t be moving on for the night, we started a yoga session in the grass with some fellow hikers, which turned out to be some of the most fun I’ve had at a shelter.

Somewhere in that hot exposed hike of the day, we reached mile 300. I felt pretty proud of myself for making so far, while also battling fears of my knees not being able to hike 1900 more miles. Fortunately, the yoga session helped !

Literally crawling to mile 300

After the rocky top I had to lay down.

The next day of hiking had waterfalls and road crossings.

The next morning brought a beautiful cool morning and a bald with views as gorgeous as Max Patch.

After several days of pushing into the 18 mile range, on the fourth day we were about 23 miles from Erwin. We could either do another 17 to the final shelter, and then just do a short 6 mile day in the morning to get to Erwin by brunch time, or we could push hard and get to Erwin that night.

During one of the days of hiking, there was a full miles of extreme blowdowns. The trail maintenance crews must have been through extremely recently base on the smell of the sawdust. Hiking this section with these trees on the trail would have been extremely different. Today, it was a cleared path through an entire section of forest that had been destroyed by the hurricane.

I knew it was possibility to do a 23 mile day when I started the morning, but we didn’t plan on it specifically. At lunch on that fourth day, I chose to slow down and take a nap under a tree to avoid the sun for a little bit, while Fail pushed on with Disney. By the time I got to the shelter for the night, Disney and Fail had already been there for a bit and were packing up to push on to Erwin! I stayed behind to eat my dinner, and while I was finishing up my Knorr side and tuna for the night, Mr Cheese caught up, along with Roadhog and Gaslighter, both of whom I had met in the last couple of days at various shelters. They ran past the the shelter, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, not wanting to stop to eat with those of us who were settling down for the night. They didn’t want to get stuck in the “vortex” of rest and relaxation when there were 6 more miles to do.

If I hadn’t jumped into this naturally occuring cold plunge pool earlier in the hike, there’s no way I would’ve had the energy to jump back on the trail for 6 more miles.

Instead, I got sucked into the vortex of excitement from the already crazed hikers who were pushing past 20miles just to get to a bunk for the night. Mr Cheese, Roadhog, and Gaslighter were full of energy that I couldn’t resist joining, especially knowing Fail and Disney were already heading down to the hostel too.

As previously established, I am highly motivated to hike quickly down mountains when there’s a shower at the bottom, especially when I’ve been salt encrusted from 4 days of long, hot hiking. So I asked the boys to wait 5 minutes for me, wrapped up my dinner, shook out my legs, and took off from the shelter with them, 6 miles to go before we would reach the hostel at the bottom of the hill, Uncle Johnny’s.

The journey down the hill and into the darkening evening was one I won’t quickly forget. It was delirious, hysterical, and very fast. Roadhog led the way with call and response songs, Gaslight told the 4 act tale of their day, including embellishments of sword fights and becoming mortal enemies with Roadhog somewhere around lunch. Mr Cheese added a saxophone solo to our quartet of jazzy improv at some point along the way too.

Eventually, somehow, we made it to Uncle Johnny’s. I set up my hammock in the dark, thankfully under a roof that the hostel had for hammockers so I wasn’t exposed to the rain that had started. The gang of us that had traversed down the mountain together ordered some door dash McDonald’s as a reward, and sometime between hiker midnight and real midnight, I got some rest.