Talldega and Cheaha

Now this is what the doctor ordered. After the extreme flatness of Florida it was wonderful to be in the hills again. Not as high or as hard as the Appalachians mind you but good solid ridges and great preparation for the southern AT. The Alabama Pinhoti is all off-road from Bull Gap to the Georgia line and has fine outlooks, beautiful ponds and streams to camp next to and shelters all along the northern half.

The first section between Bull Gap and Porter Gap had some wonderful outlooks at the area north of Sylacauga. This part of Alabama is mostly long ridges and valleys in between them. I camped at Scott's Lake the first night, despite a late morning start. It's a wonderful sport with a falls that drains the lake into a small stream. The remains of some small buildings on the north side make for nice camping with a few birds on the lake in the evening and the morning for company.

Another couple of days brought me to Mt Talladega and Mt Cheaha. Talladega has a certain mystique to it. I don't know if it was because so many things are named after it or the morning fog but I certainly felt it. It's a lovely wooded ridge with several campsites.

Mt Cheaha (rhymes with YEE-HAW) has a road, several trails near the summit and a cluster of buildings on the summit. The Pinhoti avoids all this but my host in Alabama had suggested that I follow the road the summit and I'm glad I did. After a short upslope to the summit road there's a hotel and even a store with groceries. I talked with another hiker later who had used it as a rest and resupply stop and recommended it. The summit was another mile further up along the summit road. And while there's an enormous TV tower there, there's also a lovely almost church-like stone observation tower that one can climb for a very nice view.

The real surprise was Bald Rock. It took me a while to wangle me way over to it. (Improvising on the summit trails was not the way to go since there's a bunch of them). When I found the trail I also found that it was handicapped accessible. There's an elevated boardwalk that takes you on a lovely woods trek to an observation platform and a stunning view of the surrounding area. The trail from Bald Rock back to the Pinhoti trail was not plazed or signed so I was more than a bit relieved to get back on the Pinhoti again.

Hillabee Creek had a beautiful big campsite complete with a fire ring and stone seats. I hung up my clothes and ate naked (no pictures-sorry). Solitude is a beautiful thing and the Pinhoti has plenty of it.

Heflin, AL

US-78 is a busy road without a lot of room on the shoulder. There were a couple of cozy moments with passing cars on the way into Heflin but I made it one piece. The center of town is a bit decrepit. Many of the shops are either struggling or closed. There's a Piggly Wiggly a couple of restaurants and a library on the main street. The P.O. is about a mile south of town on route 9. The only issue I had was that in their zeal to protect kids from online evil, the library blocks anything with a personal page. Unfortunately for me that includes blogger and, more importantly, Facebook. Beggars can't be choosers I guess.

Northern Alabama

This section of the trail featured some lovely lake and stream walking as well as shelters. SHELTERS!!! What a luxury and perfect timing as it starting raining after I let Heflin. As luck would have it things got more interesting socially as well. I had noticed that someone was geo-caching ahead of me. I had no idea what geo-caching was I just knew he was ahead of me. When I got to the Oakey Mt Shelter there he was with his tent pitched inside the shelter. This is a good way to get some extra warmth but not such a good way to share space. And not only did I show up but another hiker as well, this one a letterboxer. So now I was getting an earful from both of them about what geo-caching and letterboxing were and why one was superior to the other. Most of it was friendly but each one was pretty firm in his convictions.

For those of you who don't know (and I certainly didn't) geo-caching and letterboxing both hide small boxes in the wilderness. Geo-cachers find them by GPS, letterboxers by various verbal clues usually downloaded from a central website. Geo-cachers will find a box of various goodies of which they are alowed to take one in exchange for a return goody. Letterboxers do everything with hand made subber stamps. They put their personal stamp in the notebook inside the box that they find. They take the stamp from inside the box and stamp their personal notebook. And they even stamp each other's notebooks when they meet each other. The letterboxer I met actually ran the main website ad was something of a celebrity. I had seen his journal entries along the Florida trail as Green Tortuga but hadn't made the connection. He was hiking from Key West to Springer Mt, the southern end of the Appalachian Trail. We ended up hiking much of the Georgia Pinhoti together and he was a very fun and enterprising guy.

The northernmost section in Alabama is relatively new allowing the trail to stay off-road al the way to the Georgia line. I spent a wonderful evening near an overlook on Flagpole Mt looking into Georgia with a chance to reflect on where I was at this point in the journey. It was a beautiful evening and made me wish I hadn't messed up my camera back at the Choccolocco Shelter.

Part I: Cave Spring and the First Brutal Road Walk

Cave Spring, GA is a very pretty little town. The kind of town that is the perfect size for hikers. Enough services without feeling like chainstore strip-mall hell. The downtown was pleasant and compact. The only reason I didn't stay was to break up the 30-mile roadwalk. I got myself groceries, lunch, time on the internet and still hiked 20 miles. Certainly a personal best for a "town day".

The next day was gloomy and to make matters worse I got mixed up and had to walk an extra four miles to get myself back on track again. What a chore. The good news was that I was off the roads and back on the trail. The Georgia Pinhoti is a bit rougher than the Alabama section. There's more reliance on dirt roads and ATV tracks. But there are some highlights as well. The ridges are starting to feel more like the AT, Keown Falls and the trail beside them are quite neat and crossing the two branches of Armuchee Creek are a good test of skill. Pilcher's Pond is also a fun spot although I was scolded by a hunter for looking too much like a turkey.

Part II: Dalton and the Second Brutal Road Walk

If I ever needed a town day (or two) this was it and Dalton came at a perfect time. It had been mostly rainy every since Heflin without much chance to dry out so I was more than a little excited to find a room right across from the washing machines. It also didn't hurt to have dozens of restaurants to choose from. This was definitely more of a chain-storish Interstate highway stop kind of place but that was fine with me. Green Tortuga pulled into town the same time I did and we shared a couple of meals and some good laughs together. I even got to meet some of the local letterboxers and learn some more about the whole thing.

After a day of rest and resupply it was time to head out. This roadwalk isn't as long but it was still a pain. I just seemed to take forever for it to go from unpleasant business district to unpleasant residential to unpleasant rural. I finally stopped for supper at a roadside convenience store and got a ride a little further on. The problem was the road we were looking for was unmarked. We got there on the second try and I started the long trek up People's Lake Road. Blazes were non-existent and I was relying on an old map of the Chattahoochie National Forest that John Calhoun had loaned me. I had no idea if I was on the trail or not and it took me an hour or so the next day to figure out where I was.

This part of the trail travels through some rugged and beautiful country. This definitely had the feel of the wilderness and the falls and streams ascending the Mountaintown Stream Trail were a total treat. When I finally hooked up with the Benton McKaye Trail I was definitely sad to leave the Pinhoti behind
The Benton McKaye Trail is a completely different animal than the Pinhoti. This one is much easier to follow and very clearly blazed. Just as well. I had no map or guidebook, just a mileage chart I got off the internet. I often had no way of knowing where I was or how far I had travelled since the landmarks along the ridgeline were hard to nail down conclusively. I had some rain at the beginning and some snow at the end. The best part was feeling the excitement approaching the Appalachian Trail.
There weren't a whole lot of stunning views or features. It was just a nice walk through some particularly beautiful and wild woods. I did most of my resupply at a small town along the Toccoa River and at another country store just off the trail. Probably the most fun was actually walking in the snow. It was light enough that it didn't make the going heavy and substantial enough to give the woods a magical quality to it. It was my last full day on the Pinhoti
I've been leading up to this part of the trip for a while but I was still surprised how excited I was to get back on the AT. The weather was gorgeous, I was in shape and this was the opportunity I'd been waiting for to do Georgia over again ever since my thru-hike in 2001. Even so, this was the first time since '01 that I had truly wanted to hike the whole thing again. Knowing which summits to camp on. Knowing which shelters are likely to be crowded. And knowing where the tough spots were and my capabilities just completely transformed the entire experience. Despite starting on a very popular starting date, I really had the trail to myself for the first few days since new hikers tend to cling to the shelters for the first few days until they become more confident. It's been even better than I'd hoped for and leaving for the last leg on the Mountains-to-Sea trail will be hard. Even so, I had started to max out on hiking in New Zealand and it's nice to really be in love with hiking again.

Helen, GA

This is the third time I have hiked some or all of this part of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. So there haven't been a whole lot of surprises. That being said, the town of Helen Georgia was one of them.

It's a recreation of a Bavarian village right in the heart of the north Georgia mountains. German immigrants are an important part of the ethnic mix here and Oktoberfest is a popular festival in many parts of the south so it's not an entirely false creation. It's also not so overdone as to come off as disney-fied. The T-shirts and old-time photo booths are designed to appeal to local sensibilities. One thing that made it even more colorful was the appearance of a German film crew making a documentary about the Appalachian Trail. One of the local waitresses was more than a little excited to have been interviewed by them in her native German telling them all about the area and the trail. My only contact with them was having to wait while one of them tried to film a rather ordinary yellow butterfly.

Always something new and different.

Nantahala National Forest

(Loser)

Those of you who know me well know that I have a tendency to be absent minded and to forget things. This was the section where pride went before a fall in terms of my camping skills mostly in the form of misplacing just about everything. Up until this point I had been pretty pleased with myself. I hit the Appalachian Trail well warmed up after 360 miles of hiking the Pinhoti & McKaye trails plus a 200 mile stint on the Florida Trail and things were going pretty well.

However on my first day back on the trail I left my fork where I had eaten lunch. The second day my stove ran out of fuel. And on the third day I lost the bandana I had worn faithfully since I bought it in New Zealand. I was more than a little aggravated with
myself. Not that I couldn't manage. I cooked over an open fire and used a tent stake as a fork. Still, one hopes to keep it together better than that.

Finally on the last day before going into town, a hiker produced my bandana which she had found lying on the trail. I also found a small canister of stove fuel in one of the shelters to use as a backup when then next canister runs out. However, I was so excited on finding the canister that I left my water bottle behind and had to run back and get it. Time for a day off to try and get my wits back.

The Smokies-Reversing the Curse

The last two times I tried to hike through Great Smoky Mountains National Park the weather stunk almost the entire time. Not only that, on my thru-hike it was cold as well with ice on the trail, frozen boots and frozen water bottles to wake up to. When I hiked it again four years ago three out of the four days it rained and on the one day of good weather there wasn't much to look at.

Finally this time around the weather cooperated. I also took a slightly longer route to hike over one of the better viewpoints in the park, Gregory Bald. What a joy. It's especially sweet when you get to erase the disappointments of a previous trip and even have some pictures to show for it.

I hiked about halfway through the park before exiting on the Mountains-to-Sea trail which I will follow for another hundred miles to Asheville NC. Right now I'm in Cherokee, NC for a day of rest and resupply before the last leg on a trail I have never hiked before. All told I will have hiked almost 900 miles this year counting the Florida Trail portion that I did before spring training.
'A footpath for those who think they can do better than the Blue Ridge Parkway'.

This was a hard trail to make a connection with. The first 20 miles or so is a roadwalk on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Then it took a while to get used to the blazing and signage. Then the blazes stopped altogether for no apparent reason.  This was fine as long as the trail didn't split but it did and there were no signs nor blazes to be found. I had to guess which way to go and I guessed wrong putting me almost a day behind.

The one night I did get a little distance between myself and the Parkway I camped out on an open ridge only to be treated to a hailstorm with high winds and lightning. I made it through all right. The only thing I forgot to get under cover were my boots and my socks so I had damp feet for the next few days.

As frustrating as that was the trail and the Parkway goes through some absolutely beautiful country. Pisgah National Forest blows the Smokies away for scenery. And the Blue Ridge Parkway is both an engineering and scenic marvel as it winds its way through. I had a wonderful time at the Mt Pisgah Inn even though they didn't have any rooms and I camped out
across the road. Their restaurant has one of the best views around and is reasonably priced. I even saw a bear on mylast full day on the trail.

So it was kind of a short and stormy experience on this trail but I left feeling like I was starting to understand it and thinking about exploring more of it some day.  Any time I'm on the trail, all I think about is getting to town or going home.  Then when I get off the trail and wish I was back on, sleeping under the stars and living with nature.