Today's miles 9.9 AT miles 125.6
We had an absolutely cracking stay at the Aquone hostel last night and this morning Maggie served us amazing waffles with sliced banana, blueberry jam and butter syrup for breakfast, our first American waffles! Thank you Steve & Maggie.
We woke up this morning to a thin sprinkling of snow. It didn't last long though and had almost all melted by the time we hit the trail. Today was cloudy most of the day but slightly warmer. Steve shuttled us back to Wayah Gap and we were hiking for 9:50am. After two longer days of hiking we took it easy today. We were heading for Wayah Bald 5342 ft which had an amazing stone built observation tower on the summit. Wayah means 'wolf' in Cherokee apparently. The views where fantastic and we actually got to look back on where we'd come from. We could see Albert Mountain and Standing Indian Mountain in the distance, but only knew which ones they were by studying a map relief diagram in the tower. The trail twists, winds and zigzags through the woods so we're always changing direction. All the mountains look the same so it's impossible to predict which mountain we will be going up next or look back to where we've come from.
From the tower it was down hill past Wayah Bald shelter where we stopped for a quick break. The shelter, common with lots of shelters, had coke tins and sticks tied to string hanging from the ceiling which are supposed deter mice from getting to your belongings you hang from them!
We continued downhill to Burning town Gap where Apple, a trail angel, had set up a tent providing coffee, hot chocolate, Coca Cola and cookies to thru hikers. Our first trail magic! A trail angel is someone who helps thru hikers out of kindness and generosity, expecting nothing in return. Apple is retired and voluntarily spends a few weeks at a time on a about four different trails providing thru hikers with refreshments. We just passed by in time, he'd been set up for two weeks and today was his last day, thank you Apple, really appreciated.
From the Gap we only had a mile to go to get to our camp spot for the night at Cold Spring Shelter. We passed a couple of trail maintenance volunteers from The Nanatahala Hiking Club and had a brief chat to them. They had just cleared out the shelters privy, can't imagine that was a very nice job, but was great for us and they were making drainage channels along the trail. Great work again by more trail volunteers.
We're here tonight with one other thru hiker, Honeybun, a really nice ex military guy who got his trail name because he eats a lot of 'Honeybun's' (mini cakes). We managed to get a camp fire going, our first camp fire on trail so far right in front of the shelter and sat around it cooking dinner and chatting with Honeybun. We're braving the mice sleeping in the shelter tonight as the flat camping area is a little bit further away down the trail, plus its a bit warmer tonight, it shouldn't freeze. When it's really cold it's warmer in our tent. We sat chatting around the fire until about 8pm then went to bed, a late night for us!
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