There is a very long descent to a road, and an icy creek where we dabble our feet.
A young hiker runs past us on the descent down the mountain. We watch him rush past - it brings back memories of an earlier hiking trail, when we were young and stupid and ran down from the summit of Mt Kinabalu in Borneo. We paid for it in pain - the muscles started to spasm with one mile still to go, and it took a week to recover.
We pass the hiker half way down - he has sprained his ankle. No sympathy delivered. While we soak our feet in the river, the young man arrives, walks up to the road and decides to hitch, rather than hike the last 12 miles into Erwin. We just keep hiking - we need to stay focused with over 1800 miles still to go. Yellow blazing is not an option for us - we are committed 'purists' and will follow the white blazes all the way. Yellow blazing means following the painted yellow lines on the road - ie hitchhiking, instead of the white blazes marking the trail.
We still have another 5.6 miles to go and we are starting to feel the pain. There is a long climb following a creek. The path is a beautifully benched trail which has been cut and maintained by the same hiking club for the last 40 years.
The cut contoured path seems to go on forever. Surely the shelter is just past the next bend in the trail, but it never is.
We learn an important lesson about reading the guidebook. Just 0.2 miles before the shelter there is a water source. We have not read our guidebook and miss the important fact that says this source is the water supply for the shelter. We don't fill our bottles - we are nearly at the shelter and there will be water there. HaHa! We are devastated when we finally crawl into the campsite to discover that we have to go back 0.2 miles to the water, and then carry back enough water for dinner and breakfast. An extra 0.4 miles on top of a long day. Wizard is the hero of the day, divests himself of his pack and goes back for the water.
As the evening progresses, a large number of hikers come through, some to camp and some to keep going to Erwin which is 'only' 6.3 miles away. We couldn't walk another 6 miles, even if we had all night, we are so tired. We share the campsite with Kindling and Stickbuilt and Tater Chip. Tater Chip is disgusted that there is no privy at the campsite - 'Tennessee are such cheapskates, they can't even provide a privy'.
No privy! I guess that's why it's called 'No Business Knob Shelter'. This is where I discovered Kindling stretched out under a rock to get to the spring right where it emerged from the ground on the basis that then it would not need sterilization before use. That seemed to make sense, so from then on whenever I could get to the real source of the water we didn't bother treating it either.
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