Riffraff in the Barn

Tonight (April 25), I’m reporting in from the Mountain Harbor hostel in Tennessee. This place is legendary for its elaborate breakfasts, and S. more or less insisted that I stay here, because she saw the spread in a video and said it looked incredible. [Wife note: I mean, if I can’t have it myself, then I can at least live vicariously through Rob.] So that's why I'm here. I also needed a bit of a resupply.

When I woke up this morning at the Stan Murray shelter, there was frost on the ground. So I did as much as I could to prepare for the day without actually leaving my sleeping bag. I got up, ran over to get my bear bag, which was hanging from a tree, rushed back to my tent, and got back into my sleeping bag. I did as much packing and organizing as possible while I ate breakfast in my tent. By about 7:45, I was ready to go.

I’d looked at the map, and there's a huge descent off the Roan Highlands, which is where I was, and I assumed that would be the main story today, terrain-wise, but it turned out not to be. There were two climbs in the day that I expected to be sort of non-event climbs, but there were actually two more balds I needed to summit in the Roan Highlands before I was done with them. It ended up being an absolutely beautiful day. And when I was summitting Little Hump Mountain, I could see Hump Mountain in the distance. Just a perfect day, perfect views. It's really just so nice to be out in the mountains when there are no trees obstructing the views. It's just these beautiful grassy balds. It was a great day to hike.

On my ascent of Little Hump, Napoleon just whizzed by me on his way up. I didn't see him again for the rest of the day. And when I got to the top of Hump Mountain, Cats, the speed hiker, arrived. He reached the peak at basically the same time I did, even though he started out five miles behind me.

It's kind of funny. I'm not a fast hiker by any stretch, but I seem to be keeping pace somehow with a lot of the fast hikers. They don't do huge mileage, they just do it faster than I do. Or when they do a huge mileage day, they'll take a day off. I guess I'm just a little more consistent in the sense that I hike probably 13 to 15 miles a day and don't take that many days off. It's an interesting dynamic. I don’t expect to see Cats again, though. I think he sprinted ahead probably another 10 miles past where I stopped today.

After the balds, there’s not much to report. It was a long, five-mile descent, my feet really hurt, and I ended up, as planned, at the Mountain Harbor Hostel and B&B. It's about a half mile from the trailhead, so you have to hike down the highway a spell. They've got a special hiker entrance, and you just walk down a little trail, and then you’re here.

A very nice lady checked me in, and she seemed to appreciate my extraordinary desire to have a beer immediately. It was hot, and I was sweaty, and I don't really get to have a cold beer very often when I’m hiking, so I had a local pilsner. It was delicious and gone in approximately 10 seconds.

This place kind of has three different businesses. There’s the bed and breakfast, which is in a lovely home, and that’s where I’ll go tomorrow morning for breakfast. They have the hiker hostel, which is in a converted barn. I guess they keep the riffraff in the barn. I managed to get myself a single room, which is nice. The hostel also has a small general store for some basic resupply.

And then the third thing is they have this sort of bar and grill that's open to the general public, I think. So I guess you can just come by and get dinner or a drink and sit on their patio. I went down there at 5 o’clock for dinner and had a burger and a beer, and I sat next to a woman who goes by the name Misneach.   

That means “courage” in Gaelic. I’ve seen her several days in a row now. She'd been slack packing with her sister’s help, but now, her sister’s headed back home, so she's got the full backpack again. She's also headed north. While we were sitting at the bar, she looked down at my shoes and said, “You know, my sister has those exact same Tevas!”

They’re kind of these crazy, multicolored things, but they’re super comfortable. I found them when I was shopping for camp shoes. I figured if I was just going to be wearing them around my campsite in the evening, it didn’t matter too much what they looked like. But wearing them out in public is sometimes a tad embarrassing. I tried to explain myself by saying, “Well, I only bought them because they were literally half the price of the black ones.”

She pointed at me and said, “That's exactly why she bought them, too!” So apparently, I have the same affinity for cheap sandals as a 60-year-old woman. I guess I got that going for me.

Misneach needed to go check on her laundry, and when she got up, a guy named River sat down in her place. I met him for the first time yesterday, and he's on his second thru-hike. He's somewhat of a carpenter by trade, so we spent some time over a couple beers trading stories and talking about woodworking and exchanging pictures of different projects we've done. That was fun.

At that point, the woman who was single-handedly running both the hostel and the bar and grill had a quick break in the action, so she ran over to the general store with me so I could do a bit of a resupply. After that, I talked with Napoleon for a while. He’s staying here tonight, too, but he of course got here a few hours before I did. He was saying that the Tennessee/North Carolina part of the trail is actually incredibly difficult and that we should be happy to be done with it. This is his fourth thru-hike, so he knows what he's talking about.

So, you enter North Carolina at mile 78 of the trail. Then, you're in North Carolina for a while, and the trail basically straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee for a few hundred miles so that you're never really sure what state you're in. But now, we’re officially out of North Carolina at about mile 390, and we’ll be in Tennessee for the next 75 miles, after which, we’ll enter Virginia. So, two states down. Twelve to go.

Tomorrow, after I enjoy this legendary breakfast, I’ll hike about four miles, and then I'll hit the 400-mile mark. After that, I'll just see how far I can get. My goal is to get to Damascus on the 30th. I should be able to do it in five days of hiking. The terrain doesn't look too bad — cough, cough. You know, I’ve been mistaken before. But I’ll be meeting up with S. in Damascus, so I've got a big incentive to push through the miles.