Monday, June 16
This morning the Trail led us up onto the long, high ridge of Thunderhead Mountain, elevation 5530 feet. We crossed beautiful open meadows all the way to the summit, where the views were tremendous. Later on we spotted two wild boar about 100 feet off the Trail. We finished the day with a total of 21 miles over some rugged trail, and although we were worn out, we were happy that our bout with blisters and injuries seemed to be behind us.
At Siler Bald LT we wanted to see some bears, and around dusk our wish was granted, as two bears showed up outside, although they just nosed around a bit and didn’t cause any trouble. All the shelters in the Smokies had similar construction, three sides of solid stone with the front enclosed by a gated chain link fence to keep out the bears. These felt like zoos in reverse, we humans on the inside.
Thursday, September 25
Continuous rain. We finally got off our rear ends and got them up Mount Moosilaukee. It was wintry at the top, with a strong wind blowing, so we kept moving. We came down a fairly easy trail into the hamlet of Glencliff, which didn’t even have a store, and continued three sopping wet miles to Wauchapauka LT that was ½ mile down a side trail. We knew that the shelter had no water source, so we filled our three cooking pots with water at a stream crossing and carried them to the shelter. Imagine walking through pouring rain carrying pots of water and you can understand how ridiculous we felt.
The wind was really blowing hard and it was cold, but at least we felt better moving, rather than being holed up at Beaver Brook like the day before. This whole time we had not seen a single other hiker, no one else was crazy enough to be out in the deluge, so we could spread out in the shelters and at least attempt to dry out. We were now 35 miles from Hanover and we hoped to cover that in two days, come blizzards or tornadoes.
