Moist Musings

I wasn't planning on posting a new blog post yet but I am sitting here in my tent while mother nature is continuing her effort to wash mid march hikers out of her woods. In the last three days I am not entirely I have clearly seen the sun. The first morning was quite foggy (see photo #1, I am going to attempt to refer to photos like this but if the order gets messed up in the posting just try and figure it out). After today it just seems normal to have about 50 feet of visibility. Photo #2 was taken today at roughly 11 am. As you can see it is basically the exact same.

Basically everything is at least a bit damp. Thankfully my sleeping bag is more dry then anything else. With days of rain it gets difficult to find time/locations to dry things out. At the moment my "house" is a bit crowded with attempts at drying (see photo #3). Despite the less then welcoming weather things are going fairly well.

The second day of travel involved the first actual elevation gains of the trip. While the was a reasonably challenging climb it felt odd to get to the top and have the exact same vegetation as at the start of the climb. It is going to take some getting used to seeing huge trees at 4,000 ft. I took it pretty easy and only did roughly 8 miles to Gooch mt shelter. Somewhere between 30 and 40 other people decided the Gooch shelter was a good spot to stop for the day.

Today took some real thought about distance. The shelter I would have liked to hit (blood mt shelter) is in a 6 mile stretch of the trail that you need a bear canister to camp in. This meant I had to either camp before hitting the bear zone or push on through it. Pushing through would make for a pretty tough day since right before Neels gap (where the bear zone ends) is Blood mt, which is the highest point along the trail in Georgia. I decided pushing 15+ miles and ending it with a big climb would be a bad idea on day 3 so I am camped at Lance creek. The result is two mild days, 8ish miles today and 7ish tomorrow.

So far the overall attitude of people on the trail has been awesome, with quite the variety of individuals. I assume it is unique to the group that I have been staying roughly with but women out number men. I had heard it was pretty extreme in the other direction so I have been quite surprised. I feel this post is a bit rambling but I don't really have anything else to do, sitting here in the rain.

Oh, I met a few groups of deer today. They were clearly not frightened of humans and crossed the trail within 10-15 ft of me each time. I sorta got a photo of them at one point (see photo #4). Well, on to Neels gap to have a shower and hopefully dry out a bit at the hostel there.