Clean Clothes and a Shower, Good Things

I successfully held myself to roughly eight miles a day until Neel Gap. It made for some short days but I wanted my legs to get accustomed to the pounding of hiking everyday. My typical day involved getting out of camp around 10 in the morning the hike for a few hours. I would stop after 8 miles even though that would usually mean I would be stopping around 2 in the afternoon.

The past few days have been just about ideal for hiking. It has been sunny with a high in the mid 40's. That is the perfect temperature to hike in my kilt and a tshirt without me getting too hot. This does not sound like it will continue. Tomorrow it is supposed to rain and then the temperature will drop quite a bit. Tuesday night might have a low in the mountains of 15 degrees with an inch of snow. Hopefully I can hit Deep Gap Shelter on that day since it has a real four walls unlike most shelters that are just three walls and a roof.

In the last couple of days there have been some fantastic views. I had kind of forgotten how far you can see when there are no leaves on the trees. One of the better ones is the top of Blood Mt. which is the highest point the trail hits in Georgia.

Today I made it into the hostel at Neel Gap. The las time it was here it was run by a guy named Pirate and it was dirty, strange and an amazing way to show that the trail has some crazy people but they are generally quite nice. Now it is all redone, has nice wood floors and is run by the people at the store. It is still a good place to get clean but I feel like something is lost by losing the craziness.

Lastly, something I have noticed so far is that the diversity, what there is on the trail, is a lot different at the beginning. Now basically everyone at least claims to be attempting a thru hike of the trail. Some people, including me, are willing to admit that circumstances can change and others are die hard Maine or bust. What makes everyone different now is their gear, speed and experience. Later on in the trail peoples speed has normalized to be closer together, people's gear is all worn and dirty making the differences harder to spot and everyone is an experienced thru hiker after a thousand miles or so. Later in the trail though there a lot of long and short section hikers that are also on the trail. Then the thru hikers all become the experienced grizzled people on the trail forming a more cohesive group when looked at as a whole community. Hopefully I continue to notice little things like this that sort of escaped me last time while looking at the situation from only the present.

I just noticed I didn't do specific mileage and sleeping locations for this post. It seems like something most people don't care about but if people want that kind of info leave a comment below and I will do that in future posts.