spence field shelter to double spring gap shelter

it was pretty cold last night, and i spent a lot of it fighting my sleeping bag and joint discomfort. my sleeping bag neck closure system pretty much pops open every time i move, so i have cold air blasting down my bag until i close it again. joint discomfort is just when i’m trying to sleep. when everything is warmed up and on trail, it’s great, but at night when my joints get cold they ache and twitch a bit.

the morning was cold, but i somehow motivated even before i heard quiklck moving. breakfast and some water filtered and we were on trail. quick started a few minutes before me and i didn’t catch up to him until 11, mostly because the views at the beginning of the day were stunning.

today’s terrain was more difficult than yesterday, much of it still graded, but a few places where it was definitely not passable by a horse. the landscape transitioned between cane, grass, and stunted beech and birch tops and what i’ve come to think of as the fairy landscape, which is all beech and birch and below a green carpet covered in spring ephemerals.

quick and i passed a hiker named ‘rocket’ and he stuck with us for the remainder of the day. a boston native, got his name on the first or second day when three separate times a hiker he pasaed told him he was like a rocket. the three of us lunched around a downed log, out of the wind. the sun warmed us as we ate.

we got to the next shelter and sadly for me there was no privy. i decided to hike a few minutes along the trail rather than look for a spot by the shelter. (shelters without privies are notoriously dangerous to wander around, especially looking for somewhere to do your business.) i was approaching a bald and didn’t want to go up there, so i exited the trail and started through the woods. i had thought that i could avoid the briar canes, as they looked manageable. what i didn’t anticipate was that what i was looking at were the purple canes. interspersed and far more numerous were last years brown canes. i quickly became ensnared. short version, i was able to conduct my business, but i shredded my legs in the process.

i opted to sleep in the shelter as our plan for tomorrow is to get up early and hike the 3 or so miles to clingman’s dome, the highest point on the AT, for sunrise.

i called magz and chatted with a few folks while we impatiently waited until it was late enough for dinner. everyone’s hiker hunger is starting to kick in and all we want to be doing is eating.

over dinner, bugs asked me about my trail name, as apparently she had tried to explain it to someone and it hadn’t gone well. i explained it and was subsequently barraged with questions about information security and privacy for probably an hour and a half until i finally had to leave so i could go journal. i don’t know if times are changing, or if hikers are for some reason more interested in keeping their information private, but for maybe the first time ever, no one said something like “well my information is out there already, so whatever.” interestingly that’s exactly what a hiker i met earlier on the trail who had a career in the U.S. army secops said when we talked about my passion for personal security and privacy.

unfortunately the photos are coming out of my camera in no easily fixed order. i can’t understand why all the major camera manufacturers refuse to have a reasonable date based naming scheme that auto organizes based on the name. so here are some additional photos from today.