Thither & Yon

Transcription of journal page photos can be found below. A more traditional blogpost of this hike can be found HERE along with lots of pictures.

Great Smokies, you say? How about Great Soakies? (We got – and remain- a little damp today.)

We peeled out of Elkmont as early as we could this morning, which didn’t turn out to be very early, but was still early enough that we were cruising by Laurel Falls when ample parking was still available. This is a stupid-popular hike – not very long or steep and ends at pretty falls – which requires about a mile an either side of the trailhead to be blocked with cones to prevent people from parking dangerously in an effort to get access. We had planned to just skip it – who needs the hassle of that many people? – but here we were, and the parking was wide open.

We stopped. The hike is 2.6 miles, out and back. This seemed like another good test (warmup, at least) for my ankle, which had been so sore when I woke up, I decided to wrap it (yay first aid kit!) but I still couldn’t get it into my hiking boot. I was flopping around in socks, an ankle wrap, and sandals.

The hike was lovely, though the trail (advertised as “paved”) was a disintegrating hazard. More of an ankle trial than expected, though my ankle (and JBU sandals) performed admirably. The falls themselves are pretty. You approach them from their middle, so there’s water falling both above and below you, which is unusual. We got our obligatory selfies and headed back down. We had a date with the top of a mountain.

On the advice of a ranger, we decided to start our hike on the Appalachian Trail, and cross over to Le Conte on Boulevard Trail, an eight-mile trip that would allow us to go up a different way than we’d come down, IF we could talk someone into giving us a ride between trailheads.

We did. A lovely woman who’d just come down from Le Conte on the Alum Cave Bluffs Trail agreed to give us a ride up to Newfound Gap, where the AT crosses through.

In order not to hold her up, we packed our bags a bit hastily. When it started to drizzle, I discovered I didn’t have my poncho, which would have covered me and my daypack. No problem: I have my actual raincoat. I pulled it on and spent the next half hour thinking half-grumbly, half-optimistic thoughts about how waterproof my raincoat was not, how even though my socks were getting a little wet through my shoes, at least they weren’t nearly as wet as they would have been if I’d opted to keep wearing my sandals.

And then it really started to rain. Soon, there was no more optimism, only wet underwear and shoes so full of water I could hear tiny fish swimming around between my toes. There was no more trail to follow, only a stream we had to wade up and up forever. My watch stopped working under My soaked raincoat, so we had no idea how far we’d come (never far enough).

It was grim. The rain refused to stop and there was nothing to do but keep going. During a two minute break when the intensity dropped back to Mere Drizzle, we paused under a tree to fish some granola bars out of our dripping bags, and that was lunch. Seeing that these pages were mercifully and mysteriously unsoaked, my attitude improved a little.

The eight-mile hike was, in actuality, 47 miles, but somehow we finally arrived at the Lodge. We got checked in. Dustin handed the desk guy a soggy wad of cash to pay for a bottomless glass of wine with dinner. He’d earned it.

“I’ve gotten a lot of these today,” the desk guy said when Dustin apologized for the water content of his money.

(That’s the end of erasable my pen. From here out through the rest of our AT hike, you get to see what my writing looks like when I have no table to write on and can’t correct my mistakes.)

As soon as we were alone in our tiny cabin, we peeled off our sopping clothing and tried to dry off in 96% humidity. A propane heater and wooden rack gave us some hope for dry clothes eventually, though it would not be in time for the dinner bell at 6:00. Pulling wet clothing back on when you’re not quite warm yet is almost the literal worst. We’d brought spares, but in our bags they’d gotten even wetter than what we’d been wearing.

Dinner was simple but hearty: roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn bread, peaches, cooked apples, and a cookie. We chatted with some other visitors who have been coming annually for 20+ years.

“I’ve seen maybe 3 sunsets in all that time?” the man noted as we speculated on whether to make the quarter-mile hike up to the Sunset viewing point.

We went anyway. There was no sunset to be seen. We crept back down the hill into our cozy cabin and tried to arrange everything for maximum overnight drying.