Day 37 - 7th May - No Business Knob Shelter - Erwin, Tennessee - 6.3 miles

We have a long descent to Erwin, which takes nearly 3 hours following a well made contoured trail, winding its way gently down the steep slope. We can see the town directly below us, and hear the train whistles as they pass through the town, and it seems as if we are so close, and yet it still takes all morning. We meet a new hiker on the trail called 'Moped'. He doesn't stop talking and walks backwards in front of me bombarding me with questions about everything he can think of . I find it exhausting. The poor boy has no social skills, and I feel that I am being used as entertainment to fill in his hours of walking.

We arrive at the hostel called Uncle Johnny's in the late morning, and are able to get a private room with a double bed. It is a busy place, and hikers are coming and going everywhere. We get a shower and organise our clothes washing. We meet up with Stickbuilt and Tater again, and join the lunch shuttle to the Pizza all you can eat buffet. Some hikers eat 12 slices of pizza.

We dash over to the grocery store to shop and the lady at the checkout says how amazing that we have come all the way to the USA to walk the AT and to shop in their grocery store and how wonderful our accents are! This is a dry county so we can only buy beer and a mixed sweet bubbly concoction called smirnoff ice. The afternoon is spent sorting food, going through the hikers box to see if there is anything useful - we find a carabiner, a plastic sealed bag and a ladies medium black polyester hiking top. I weigh myself on the scales - 127 lb. We organise our food for the next 5 days and watch Stickbuilt with envy as he unpacks a mail package from home, with all his hiking food already in sachets for each day.

Stickbuilt opening his mail package

Digby packaging our food for the next 5 days

Our washing drying outside our cabin

For dinner the shuttle takes us to a different location and we eat chinese with Stickbuilt and Tater Chip and learn a bit more about them. Tater Chip comes from Alabama - his accent is so strong we can barely understand him. He is shocked that we want to drink alcohol whenever we come to town.

Day 36 - 6th May - Low Gap to No Business Knob Shelter - 15.6 miles

Today's highlight is climbing to the summit of Big Bald at 5516 ft, with amazing views of ski lodges from the ridge. It is very windy so we don't linger on the top.

 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'.

Day 35 - 5th May, 2010 - Flint Mt Shelter to Low Gap - 15.9 miles

Our first three miles of the day in less than 1 hour to the road. We are starting to get faster and are so proud of ourselves. It was flat and we were fresh, but we still did the fastest three miles we had ever done on the AT.

Just above the road, on the climb to the ridge are two graves. Some fake flowers and a headstone on a small knoll. One grave is a woman born in May 1865, and died in April 1965, one month short of her 100th birthday. We climb another hundred feet, past a waterfall in a damp gully, where one hiker is having a shower. We reach a small level campsite, and a closer inspection reveals it is the site of an old homestead - there is the fireplace, the timber log cabin walls, and an old wood stove rusting in the forest. The headstone is the only reminder of who lived here, and when she died it was demolished into a pile of rubble.

We follow an open ridge - the AT is illegally used by deer hunters in the deer hunting season to carry out their carcasses. They use chainsaws to cut the trail to fit their machines - 4WD motorbikes. We meet two trail maintainers who look after this section of the track and despair at the illegal use of the trail by the deer hunters. There is no enforcement of the laws, and the maintainers watch the deterioration of their section of trail.

We stop at Hogback Ridge Shelter for lunch with Stickbuilt, Taterchip and Kindling. Kindling shares his recipe for an exciting lunch - take one tortilla, spread it with peanut butter very thickly (and then lick the spoon), place sliced pepperoni on top of the peanut butter and then roll, eat and enjoy. Kindling consumes three tortillas made as described. We watch in fascination. On the next shopping expedition we start carrying peanut butter and tortillas. We already eat pepperoni as a mainstay for lunch. We discover this is a great taste sensation, and it becomes a standard lunch for us too!

We cross a major highway and this is quite exciting - the roar of the traffic on the overpass while we go underneath.

The trail passes underneath the freeway.

In the middle of the afternoon, as we climb the last ridge to the campsite we meet two hikers heading in the opposite direction with 7 dogs - all German Short Haired Pointers. I am missing Kimmy and feeling dog deprived, so I can't believe my eyes when the pack of dogs comes down the hill. This is one of my favourite encounters on the trail. It is a couple - he owns three of the dogs, and she owns four. She sleeps with her four inside her tent. His dogs sleep outside his tent. Imagine doing this Australia!

Hiking with a dog pack

We make camp at Low Gap and Kindling joins us, but Stickbuilt and Tater Chip stop a few miles short. This has been the longest distance we have walked on the trail so far, and we are exhausted. At 9.30 pm the nightstalkers pass through. Not sure where they have been and why they are behind us, but they probably hitched a ride into a nearby town from the road crossing the trail.

It is a pattern that we experience again and again - fast young hikers passing us, and then passing us again, and then passing us again. We just keep walking at our snail pace. The younger generation take the deviations off to civilisation to eat hamburgers etc.

Day 34 - 4th May - Little Laurel Shelter to Flint Mt. Shelter - 12.7 miles

We have now covered 304 miles since the start of the trail, and feeling invincible. It is a wonderful day, walking a rocky ridgeline with great sweeping views over the plains below, to towns whose names we don't know. It is hard climbing over steep rock slabs with heavy packs, and we travel slowly. It takes us 4 hours to travel 5 miles.

This ridge was hard work to negotiate

The number of hikers is dropping off - today we see less than 10 people. One of the people we meet again is Mountain Camel, who had been walking with Diesel in the early days. You may recall that Diesel had Parkinsons Disease. We learn from Mt. Camel that Diesel dropped out after a day in the Smokies because he had run out of medication, and was not able to get a resupply, and had the shakes so badly he almost dropped off one of the steep cliffs. Mt. Camel is hoping to complet the whole trail, but is claiming bits of the trail he had already walked in the last 12 months as completed, and not needing to be walked again. Some of the 'pure' hikers were challenging his claims as a true thru-hiker. Mt Camel is very defensive. Welcome to the world of trail politics.

We find a bear print, but no bear.

We pass the famous 'Shelford' graves on the descent to the shelter. This is our first introduction to the Civil War. Two young soldiers fighting for the union are killed when they try and return home to see their family in the south, in 1863. We learn that the war is  not as clear cut as north vs south. Plenty of people in the sth fighting for the nth and vice versa.

The Shelford graves are still maintained by their descendants

We set up our tents at Flint Mt Shelter, and Stickbuilt and Tater Chip arrive to camp. We have not seen them since the 24th April, when they left the trail to visit Gatlinburg and meet up with their spouses. We enjoy their company. Stucco cruises in at about 6pm, but she won't stop. She has already walked 21 miles today, but thinks she can squeeze another mile or so before it gets dark. I am sad that we will not get to share her company. She is a driven woman!

Stickbuilt and Tater Chip

Flint Mt Shelter

In the middle of the night, around 1.00am a group of young men arrive, and with much noise and disruption to all those asleep, proceed to make camp. We call them 'the night-stalkers'. They are completely inconsiderate of everybody else - they feel so pumped up, having walked through the night by torchlight - they are so 'brave'. I make a promise to myself to make as much noise as possible when I depart in the morning.

Day 33 - May 3rd - Rich Mountain to Little Laurel Shelter - 11.4 miles

We wake up to a heavy downpour, and the tent is flooding under the floor. In the whole 6 months we never solve the water problem - when it rains, the floor is wet. We try numerous waterproofing agents but it is never solved. The tent is great - a Mont tent. Pity about the floor. Digby talks about contacting Mont and telling them about the problem - maybe one day....Now 12 months on,  we are dry,  it's not a matter of life and death anymore. We have other issues crowding into our lives.

Packing up in the rain with a wet tent is quite tricky, and the wet tent is very heavy to carry. The mist on the mountain swirls around us. As we walk along the trail in the mist, the rain eases. It is slow going with heavy packs. At the first shelter we meet two young women hiking, one covered in tattoos wearing a special hiking skirt with a skirt waterproof cover, and the other is our first and only African American that we meet on the trail.

Spring Mountain Shelter

There is a gentle series of climbs and descents through the day. We discover quite a few ladies pink slipper orchids along the trail, and enjoy the forest.

Woodpecker damage - we were excited to see this!
No woodpeckers in Australia.

We reach the shelter at 4.40pm and pitch the tent to dry out, and beg some seam sealer from a section hiker (only walking a section of the trail, not the whole trail). There are three other hikers at the shelter - all with wet tents, all spread out to dry in the afternoon sun.

We meet a hiker with a dog, 'Powder' travelling with Russell (the dog). Russell has no manners, and an owner who does not make him behave. Russell's bad behaviour becomes legendary along the trail, and gives all dogs and dog owners a bad name.