Smoky Mountains are behind us

We have now walked 238 miles of the AT. Only 1940 miles to go! We are now able to walk 14 mile days and still feel fit at the end of the day.

We have spent the last 7 days in the Smoky Mountains which rise to over 6000 feet and form the border between North CArolina and Tennessee. We had one day where we were walking on a ridgeline which was only one metre wide - with TE to our left and NC to our right.

The highlights of the Smokies

Staying in the shelters - you are not allowed to camp in the smokies, you have to stay in the shelters which can sleep about 20 people. Before this we have been camping and keeping much more to ourselves. Now we are amongst the hordes and mingling much more and enjoying the company. The AT is a community which is 2100 miles long and a strip 10 miles wide, and as you move amongst the hikers you keep reconnecting with people you saw a few days ago, and will see again. Think of it like a cloud, always moving and changing shape. For 4 days we have been walking with Food Network and Pocohontas Mode, but they left the trail 3 days ago to hitch into the nearby town of Gatlinburg, so now we are ahead of them, and expecting them to reappear at any time as they walk faster than us.

Seeing our first Black Bear - 30 metres ahead on the trail looking straight at us, he decides to amble off to the left 20 metres into the bushes and watch us walking by. Very close, very big - to me anyway - and very fluffy. Nobody else in our cohort has seen a bear so we are very privileged. We met a ranger - called a ridge runner - who said the bear is a burglar not a robber. You hang your food at night high in the tree so the bear cant steal it, but he is not likely to attack you for your food.

Climbing Clingmans Dome - with great views into 6 states. At 6,643 ft it is the highest point on the Appalachian Trail.

The route between Pecks Corner and Tricorner Shelters - a wonderful sunny day and a narrow ridge walk with great views, followed by deep forest andconifers covered in moss reminded us of the forests in Lord of the Rings.

Some other stuff 

The forests of the Smokies are dying en masse. This is being caused by coal burning power stations in Tennessee. The air pollution weakens the trees and then they are attacked by insects. Apparently the authorities are now spending billions trying to clean up their act, but the forests are skeletons. Really sad when you read how a few amazing forward thinking individuals were able to prevent the logging companies from destroying the forests in the early 1900s, and to put them land into the national park.

Digby left his reading glasses behind at Tricorner shelter. We have sent out a message via the AT grapevine and we hope that they will turn up somehow - we will have to see if trail magic really works.

Digby teaches 'Food Network' the words and tune to Walzing Matilda and he plays it on his ukele. We have to explain every second word in the song - what is a swagman, what is jumbuck, what is a billabong - the americans dont speak our language.

We have discovered 'section walkers' are a great resource - hikers out for a few days or weeks or a month only. They always have spare food, and when they say, does anyone want ...... we always say yes. At one shelter Digby cooked pancakes for 10 hikers from some donated pancake mix, honey and dried strawberries. the section walkers were going home - it was too wet, so we got the food. Thru hikers never turn down food.

People we meet on the trail

This is an attempt to describe the type of people we are meeting on the trail - apart from the boy scout groups which seem to have disappeared since the school holidays finished.

In the early days there were lots of jocks - the young college grads all trying to outboast each other about the highest mountains they had climbed etc. These have all rushed past us, and we think that the jock wave is about 200 hundred miles ahead of us, all vying to be the first thru-hiker to complete for 2010.

We have already heard along the trail grapevine about people who we met on day 1 and have already dropped out. One young man - Jeremy - from Louisiana, who stopped walking on the second day because it was the Sabbath and he wanted to respect the Sabbath while on the trail, did not make it to the next Sabbath. He was so overwhelmed by the number of people on the trail he decided to go home. We think that there were about 40 people a day coming through at that time.

Now it is about 15-20 people coming through. Everyone has trail names - ours are Wizard from Oz and Tripper. We met an old man who looked the spitting image of Father Christmas with out the red suit - about 75 we thought - he started hiking on March 15 - taking his time. His name is MAM - stands for Miles are Miracles. We have seen a few really oldies - long and wiry with varicose veins - walking at twice our speed.

We have not seen any married couples - sometimes pairs of friends or singles who team up on the trail. For a couple of days we hiked with Fast Food and Mr T - both young men who were unemployed and who thought that hiking the trail is a good way to wait for the job market to improve.

Diesel was in the military and now retired. He hiked the trail right through in 2004, and is now doing it again. He has Parkinson's Disease and watching him try and cook and pack up with the shakes is really hard. He says his trail name means that he is slow to get started, but once he is up and running there is no stopping him. An this is true. He left at 5.00am this morning to catch the 9.00 am suttle from the mountain.

Pocohontas Mode is a very fit young woman covered in serious tattoos on both her arms and legs. The back of one leg has a sentence tattooed into it but I dont know her well enough yet to ask her about it. Her trail name comes from getting into the zone when you are walking - imagining that you are back in the forest when the Indians roamed the land and the spirits were free.

Sugar Ray has a broken nose from throwing a rock over a branch to hang his bear bag of food for the night so the bear would not get it. The rock came back like a boomerang and banged him on the nose.

I could go on but this is enough to give you the idea - everyone on the trail has a story. You get to meet and then remeet people and make friends.

Our mobile phone saga

We decided to get a mobile phone with internet access for the trail, and took our super duper sony next G phone with us to the US. A visit to the mobile phone shops in Atlanta - and we learn that the best coverage on the trail is with Verizon - which has their OWN phone sevice with CDMA. Our phone is no good on their system. We can use AT&T service, and buy a sim card BUT you can't get reception on the trail with them most of the time. So we decide to go with Verizon. Then we have to have a plan. The easiest way to do it - is under the auspices of Mike and Theresa's account - otherwise we have to have a passport and a utility bill with an address in the US which we don't. M&T are happy to have us on their plan, so we go with it. We buy an extra super battery as well.

The next day we go to leave and have to go back to the verizon shop - the super spare battery doesn't actually fit into the phone - it needs a special cover - they dont have the cover. Verizon swap over the phone battery and give us a similar size one for free. We are on our way.

Three days later we have made 2 international calls and one tweet into facebook, and the phone dies on the screen - you can still make calls but no picture to see what you are doing.

We walk for three days and arrive at Neels Gap where we can mail the phone back to M&T so they can get us a replacement. We then walk another four days and arrive in Hiawassee. We walk into the motel, the guy looks at our name on the registration card and says, "there was a guy here yesterday looking for you to give you a mobile phone". Mike has driven a hundred miles to hand deliver a phone and he has missed us. We think where would he have left the phone - maybe the post office. We visit the post office - no they had nothing for us. The post master - called Brenda - lends us her mobile and we call Mike and Teresa and leave a message on their phone to say we are here.

Then we go off and have lunch in Daniel's Steakhouse. An hour later we emerge and find the postmaster Brenda has been driving up and down the road looking for us - she had rung the other motel, Mull's motel, and they had the phone, so once she knew where our phone was all she had to do was find us - which she finally did! We wander over to Mull's Motel to be greeted by a very old lady, wearing handmade knitted stockings to her knees, who says yes she has our phone for us!!! We tip her $2 and take the phone. Let's hope the phone saga is now finished.

We are overwhelmed with how the locals have put themselves out for us - and very appreciative.

PS We check the messages - there is one from a debt collection agency chasing a debt - whose number have we inherited??