We made the reservation with Bear Stop to pick us up at 8:30 to get us out of this foresaken town. With 5 days off, we managed to get caught up on all our correspondence and calls to family and friends. I’m sure I surprised a few people with an unexpected call. With our packs all bundled up and ready to go, we decided to have one more AYCE to make sure we were completely carbed up.
Stickers, Lady Bug, and Patches checked out of their room yesterday and went to Cicis until they knew if the road would open and they could get a ride up to Newfound Gap. We stayed with them until they left at 3. In all that time, we didn’t eat any pizza. When we were ready to eat supper, Cicis came to mind since we’d already been around it most of the day. Like beer, Cicis pizza is calories for fuel. Also, like beer, it is not a zero emission fuel for the hiker body. In fact, it’s much closer to converting your truck to a wood burner—you’ve got more byproducts to get rid of other than just the gas emissions. I will need to keep emptying the “tank” for a few days to get rid of the solid waste byproducts. Mark my word; I will never eat at the Gatlinburg Cicis again as long as I live.
We were introduced to a new, very useful word by Bear Stop. Driving up to Newfound Gap, we would get behind some slow moving vehicles. He would call them “tourons.” A better word has not been invented for quite some years—tourists + morons = tourons. I’m sure this is a term that will come to wide use by our extended family in the Branson area.
It was a sunshiney day with tons of people out—I know, we weighed them all. We were passed by just over 5 tons of people. The weather forecast for today was sunshine and 40’s with a low of 33 tonight. It was only 25 when we started hiking, but movement was very refreshing after the last 5 sedentary days (as long as you don’t include food shoveling as a sedentary movement—interestingly enough, I didn’t drink a single alcoholic drink. The same can’t be said for Bunny; she did have 2 beers one night with her pizza.)
A February start date held appeal to us so that we would be ahead of the bubble starting from Springer Mountain in March. With everyone being forced off of the trail for some combination of 1-5 days, we now have an artificial bubble where all the early starters are now bunched up. We hope that within a few days, the majority of people will be ahead of us once again. In any case, there were “tons” of people (to put it in simpler terms, at least 40 people) out and each and everyone of them passed us on the trail. Not only were there a lot of frustrated thru-hikers, there were tens of day hikers (on a Thursday?—spring break, not all college kids only think of drinking and debauchery at the beach).
Approaching Charlie’s Bunion, about 4.5 miles into our day, Bunny asked if we were going to take the side trip to Paul’s Bunion. This threw me for a minute as Paul Bunion is very near and dear to me. Paul is the bunion on my left foot which is getting large and painful, while Babe is the bunion on my right foot which gets a little blue at times. We dropped our packs and headed out to just be completely overwhelmed by the crowd. I would undoubtedly hate to hike in the AT bubble.
When we finally arrived at the shelter, it was completely full with reservations. The Smokies, apparently, don’t want or care about thru-hikers. They make a lot of crappy rules for us that don’t make any sense other than seen as they want to screw with us. All thru-hikers must stay in a shelter and cannot set up a tent unless the shelter is full. If people come in with a shelter reservation, they get priority and as many thru-hikers as required will get kicked out to give them space—it doesn’t matter if it’s 11 at night and you are already asleep. If you set up a tent before the shelter is full, you can get a ticket. Here’s the kicker, we never know how many reservations have been made until the people show up.
Last week when the weather turned bad unexpectedly, the NPS wouldn’t do anything to help out any hikers. Several people I know were walking down the road to town (15 miles) and the NPS work crews and rangers would pass and not even bother to offer assistance. The Smokies NP is now my least favorite National Park. Mt Rainier and the Grand Canyon bend over backwards for hikers while the Smokies have an open distaste towards hikers. I will never willingly come back to this park. It wouldn’t bother me one bit if the AT got rerouted around the park. Other than Clingmans Dome, it’s not worth the headache.
After dinner, we talked with Finnegan, Tractor, Techno, and Just Cynthia. They all agree that the Smokies are openly hostile to thru hikers. I understand that when the bubble comes through, there can be a lot of problems, but they are doing the equivalent of profiling—all thru-hikers are bad. Complete BS. Go after the bad hikers and embrace the rest of us dropping dollars all along the trail. Apparently, the federal government still hasn’t learned anything from the concentration camp fiasco of WWII (not that we are in any way being treated as badly as the Japanese-Americans were, but there are broader lessons to still be learned).
Bed by 6:30. Full sunshine outside, but it was getting cold and we had all of our chores done. Since we couldn’t sit around the shelter and talk, we didn’t have much choice. There was a distinct lack of level spots to set up tents, so Bunny and I chose a relatively flat spot in the woods in about 8” of snow. The low was only supposed to be 33, but it got below 30. More than the air temp though, was the ground temp. Setting up in the snow with very little below to insulate us from the ground just sucked the body heat right out of us. It’s going to be a long, cold night.
EFG