A.T. Hike, Spring 2007 - Day 4,In Which I Did a Poor Impression of a Billygoat

Spring Mountain Shelter to Jerry Cabin Shelter, 15.4 miles

There was a very persistent mouse in my shelter last night. At one point I was lying on my stomach, looking out the front of the shelter, and the little pest ran right in front of my face, close enough that I'm quite sure I felt fur brush the tip of my nose. Due to that unnerving episode, I slept with my Petzl in my hand all night and turned it on about nine hundred times in the night to shine him out whenever he got too close.

I thought today was going to be fairly easy because in the profile on my topo map, there’s a several-mile stretch of what looks like fairly level ground. “Level” being a relative term, of course – meaning that there are certainly ascents and descents, but none of them resulting in an altitude change of more than 500 feet. What the topo map doesn’t show is that the terrain for that stretch is really not a footpath at all – it’s a series of boulders perched high atop an exposed ridge - a ridge so high and exposed, in fact, that if there is any sign of bad weather, you're supposed to instead follow a blue-blazed trail that takes you to a lower elevation beneath the tree canopy so that you don't become a lightning rod. Since the weather was perfect today, I of course opted for the ridge, not realizing at first that instead of hiking, I'd find myself “scrambling” for about two and a half hours. This is hiker vernacular for half-crawling, half-climbing like a billygoat over boulders the size of cars, your hands and feet groping wildly for any secure crevice that might keep you from cartwheeling down the side of the ridge into either Tennessee (cartwheel left) or North Carolina (cartwheel right); the trail at this point is exactly on the state line. Contributing to the drama in my case was the swinging counterweight of a 30-pound pack flopping about on my back. I was white-knuckling it the whole way during this segment, and my progress slowed to about a mile an hour. I tried to focus on the spectacular view instead of my chances of snapping a bone. Here’s what I saw to my left and to my right as I scrambled:

Finally, a grueling nine net hiking hours after starting my day, I made it to the shelter. Like last night, there is a mouse here. He made an appearance while I was eating my dinner. My biggest concern, though, is not the mouse but rather the fact that the spring near this shelter is completely dry, and I had been counting on really tanking up my water supply when I got here. I am so very thirsty, but I need to carefully conserve my water for the first six miles of my day tomorrow - first thing in the morning I have a very big climb (you know, for a change).