According to plan, we commenced hiking at 7:30 a.m., just as it was getting light enough to see. It felt weird to cook, eat, dress, and pack while it was still dark. Monika’s knee was still really bothering her a lot. We agreed to slow our pace even further, which took us down to about a mile and a half or less per hour. My usual pace is two and a half miles per hour, sometimes three if there aren't too many climbs. The terrain continued to be difficult today, but we were hiking through the most beautiful of surroundings. The picture above shows Cindy resting against a cool two-trunked tree that appeared to be growing right out of a rock face. It was almost like a sculpture.We planned the day into four approximately equal chunks, and we took long, leisurely breaks in between. One of our breaks was at Cody Gap, which is where we originally planned on stopping last night if the wasp incident hadn't occurred. We saw a cute little red salamander there.
At about 6 p.m., when we were still a little over a mile from our shelter, the trail crossed through the parking lot of Fontana Marina, where there was a stock of backcountry permits for Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We needed one of these, because the trail runs through GSMNP and we’d be entering the park tomorrow. So we completed and submitted our permit paperwork, using the permit number I had received via telephone 30 days prior from GSMNP's backcountry permit office. More importantly, we discovered that Fontana Marina has a real bathroom with real potties that flush, and running water. (The downside of this patch of civilization was that the bathrooms also had mirrors. Frightening.) We treated ourselves to the facilities and then sat down on a concrete bench for a fiver before moving on.
As we rested, Monika expressed serious concerns about continuing. The mileage was too ambitious for her body, she determined, and it was wreaking some painful havoc on her knee and her leg muscles. It was a rather serious moment as we sat there together, tossing around our options. Could we alter our plans? That is, scale back our daily mileage? There was really no easy way to do that, as we were on a very structured timetable in order to reach our car at Clingman’s Dome by Friday. Also, GSMNP has only a finite number of options for backcountry camping along the AT—a handful of shelters, and a handful of campsites—all of which require advance registration. It would be difficult to switch around our registration at this late date, and we couldn’t attempt to do that until we were within good range of a cell phone tower—which wouldn’t happen till we were well into the park and back on a mountain peak. So we nixed that option.
Could we shore up Monika’s knee with a knee brace (she had brought one but hadn’t started wearing it till today) and press on, hoping for the best? That seemed dangerous, because if we got ourselves into GSMNP and then had to evacuate Monika, it would be very difficult, due to the unpredictable cell-phone signal strength and sparseness of navigable roads. We nixed that option too.
For a fleeting moment I thought, well, really our only choice is for Monika to stay somewhere in Fontana for the next three days while Cindy and I finish up the trail. Once the two of us reached Clingman’s Dome we’d come back and pick her up. But Cindy (whose nurse training and compassionate mindset make her much more level-headed in these situations than I!) observed that splitting up was maybe not the wisest or safest thing to do. Not to mention the fact that Monika would be stuck in Fontana for three days with no car, no money, and nothing to do!
It was getting late (around 6:30 p.m.) so we decided that one sure thing was that we must reach the shelter at Fontana ASAP, so we decided to each pray hard for the next mile or so and then reassess at the shelter.
At around 7 p.m., we finally collapsed at what hikers have dubbed the "Fontana Hilton"—a shelter that is, by all standards, the most deluxe overnight spot along the whole southern half of the AT. Here it is:
It's sturdy, roomy, clean, and has everything you'd ever want in hiker amenities: a cement picnic table (which means you can use a backpacking stove right on top of it without worrying about starting a forest fire), a beautiful view of Fontana Lake (the picture below was taken from the back entrance to the shelter), trash cans with critter-resistant lids, and—best of all—there is a real bathroom about an eighth of a mile down a paved walkway. About half a mile away is Fontana Dam and Visitor's Center, which offers cold drinks and (gasp) ice cream. Yes, the Fontana Hilton is spoken of with great honor and acclaim by just about any AT hiker you'll ever run into. And we had the place all to ourselves.
As we got our dinner out, with some sadness we agreed together that the smartest thing to do was to end our hike early. In the morning we could use the phone at the Fontana Dam Visitor's Center to call our shuttle guy and see if he could get us back up to Clingman's Dome to our car.
As we were discussing this and Cindy was preparing to light her stove, it squirted a thin stream of white gas out of the gas line that connects the fuel tank to the burner. She gave a little shriek as my eyes widened. We both own Whisperlites and neither of us have ever been comfortable with them. The idea of highly flammable, pressurized gas and a quirky, problematic gas-feed system has never set well with us. And now hers was leaking. We both knew that a gas leak made the little contraption infinitely more dangerous than normal. We decided not to use it that night and feasted on tuna (you know, for a change), grateful that the stove had at least held out this long, and thankful that we wouldn't be pushing it to its limits by continuing on through GSMNP.
We went to bed with heavy hearts, knowing that in the morning we'd be leaving the trail.
Hiking time: 11.5 hours, including breaks
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