A picture nor a thousand words is worth the experience of seeing the beautiful in person. Which is ironic considering my reason for writing today. Over the past week we hiked through the Great Smoky Mountains, and nowhere has this premise felt more prominent to me than it did looking at the great smoky mountains.
The night before we entered the national park, we slept at the Fontana Hilton. Which isn’t what you would assume unless you are familiar with the area. The shelter has all the amenities; from toilets and showers to trashcans, and it even has a phone charging station running off solar panels. It doesn’t work but it’s the thought that counts.
Anyway, the night we stayed there was a thru-hiker’s dream. A trail angel (someone you makes it a point to show love and kindness to those hiking the trail) brought us beer and McDoubles. Some guy was playing the guitar for us. He wasn’t hiking the AT. He just came there to play the guitar. After about a month of hiking this trail I have learned that random, absurd encounters like this kind of happen all the time on the AT.
That night I could see the Smokies from where I laid in my sleeping bag. The moon was full and the Smokies’ shadowy ridge line cut up into the dark ocean peppered with stars burning bright far beyond. There is simply no way my iPhone 7 could have captured this image. And even now my words fail to express how it felt to watch those black peaks slice through thin clouds passing swiftly across the night’s sky.
The next morning we woke up at sunrise.
And then walked across Fontana Dam, there were five of us walking together that morning. Longterm, Simple man, Sherpa, Lil Belle and me. Yes, we met another Sherpa.
kinds of trees we will encounter along our way to Maine. The day we entered the park we found ourselves in mostly familiar territory, with the pines and the oaks and the hemlocks. Even the uphill and fog felt familiar.
It wasn’t until the second day that I started to notice a change in scenery.
At some places along the trail, our path was completely frozen over.
The smokies are also home to the tallest mountains that one climbs while walking the Appalachian trail. But what really stuck out to me was the hardwood forest trees found at the heights of the smokies.
Another thing that sticks out is meeting a man by the name of “fresh ground” He is a trail angel who has dedicated their live’s to feeding thru-hikers. He drives his van along the trail year round and cooks for unexpected hikers as they emerge from the woods. As we exited the Smokies on our last day of the 72 mile trek, he was on the other side with his van/cooking set up and he made us the best breakfast a hunger hiker could dream of.
From the other side,
Pan and Bell
from the other side 