Mileage: Mile marker 2.8 to 15.8
Starting Spot: Stover Creek Shelter, Georgia
Ending Spot: Gooch Mountain Shelter, Georgia
Slept in: Half set up tent
Weather: AM snow, PM breeze
I knew it was cold out when I woke up because I was a little chilly in my 10 degree sleeping bag but I didn’t realize how cold it actually was until I looked past my sheltermates and saw snow on the ground! I had slept with my water bladder in my sleeping bag to prevent it from freezing (always a dangerous move) and several people had issues that morning trying to get at their frozen water bottles. I found out first hand that denatured alcohol stoves don’t like the cold weather and it took me about 4 tries to light my cat food can stove before it heated up enough for some lukewarm oatmeal. It may have been a user error but I’m going to blame it on the fuel and weather this time…
The three girls hiking together that I met the night before had asked me if I wanted to join their party. They said they were only going 5 miles that day which unfortunately wasn’t going to cut it for the adrenaline I had in me since I had set foot in the south two days prior. I thanked them for their offer, packed up my frozen gear, slid my feet into my cold boots and took off. I hiked through gorgeous rhododendron forests frosted with ice and crunched over semi-chilled rivers. I didn’t realize I had hit a road until I almost got hit by a military Humvee going up to a military base in the mountains. The military vehicle explained the machine gunfire I heard the day before and coupled with stories from fellow lady hikers who had met some of the camouflaged rangers doing exercises in the mountains, I figured I didn’t really need to have immediate worries about moonshinin’ hill folk toting around automatic guns. The story goes that the rangers only reveal their presence to lady hikers and remain completely still and hidden when men walk by. That being said, I did not meet any army rangers while hiking but then again I kind of look like a crazy person with my dreadlocks. I guess I’m okay with that!
I spent the afternoon hiking over rolling ridges that plunged down into valleys of blue north Georgia mountains and dipped back up on the other side to spectacular views of the foothills. I stopped to eat lunch and watch buzzards with 5 foot wingspans soar over the valley and paused again to take a nap on a sunny sandy creek bed just because I could. I finally hiked into a crowded camp around 4pm.
It was the moment of truth. The shelter was packed and noisy with a group of chatty 60-something-year-old thru-hikers so I would have to stay in my tent…the tent that I kept promising I was going to practice setting up before I left…the tent that I had never actually set up before. This wouldn’t be a big deal since I’ve set up all types of tents before in all weather conditions except this was a tarptent. A tarptent is a single-walled siliconized nylon fabric sandwiched on either side of a mesh ventilation strip that relied on precise tensioning and staking or you’d wake up in the night coated in a pool of your own condensation. It was supposed to be the latest and greatest of ultralight technology that I could afford and somehow the whole thing was to be supported by a single hiking pole at a specific height that I couldn’t remember. An hour later I thought I had something rigged together that might pass for a tent and headed up to the campfire to make dinner.
I brushed off the comments from the clearly more experienced older guys such as, “Little lady I was grey when you started setting up your tent and now I have white hair since it took you so long!” and “I thought it would be dark and you’d still be setting up your tent hahaha.” I smiled and fake-laughed along with them but in my head I was ticked off.”Wait and see who’s laughing when you’re all at home because of your cockiness and I’m the only one here to summit Katahdin.” Little did I know that I would wake up to a condensation rainstorm inside my tent from my breath soaking my down sleeping bag that 22 degree night. I also didn’t know that it would take 4 days and 2 instructional videos til I got my tent to not rain on me at night… Talk about eating a slice of humble pie.
Sitting around the fire were a few people I had met the night before – Wrong Way, a directionally challenged ex-FBI agent who had thru-hiked before; Wet Dog, an older Marine turned surfer; Franky the Sleeper, an anesthetist from South Carolina on his second thru-hike attempt; Jess, a neuroscientist turned organic farmer from New Hampshire (and soon to be my trail sister!); Denali, aka “the High One” (for green reasons) from Atlanta; a couple named Mackerel and AYCE (short for All You Can Eat aka a thru-hiker’s first place to find in town), a nurse and long-distance runner from NJ, and many more.
As we huddled around the flames, Franky the Sleeper made some joke about not wanting to sit near me and moved to the other side of the fire. The smoke kept following him and not once me so he said I must’ve done some voodoo magic and put a curse on him. That’s when I showed him the two finger puppets my friend had given me before I left Asheville as a joke gift “…so that I would have friends to talk to on the trail.” That sealed my fate. Everyone burst out laughing and the trail name “Voodoo” stuck. We spent the next few hours laughing our heads off and watching “campfire TV” as we started to form my first Trail Family.
As I went to bed in my tent, I was grateful for the nice friends I had met at the campfire that evening and the fact that it was actually warmer in my tent than in the overcrowded three-sided shelter. The stars were out, my hair was smoky from hours around the flames telling stories with Jess, Colleen, Mackerel, AYCE, Wrong Way and Connor and I was somehow starting to become strangely enamoured with this much simpler and slower way of life. It was the first time in who knows how many years I had metaphorically speaking “really stopped to smell the campfire.”
Pictures below are from top to bottom:
1. How I felt when I woke up on the AT my first morning
2. Hoarfrost on the ground while hiking
3. Remnants of the light snow dusting on our state-of-the-art composting privy. That seat was a cold one my first morning!
4. Hiking selfie on a ridgeline – it almost got warm!
