Day 18 Icewater Spring Shelter to Cosby Knob Shelter

Today's miles 20.3.  AT miles 230.1

The clocks went forward here an hour last night so for the next few weeks we are four hours behind the UK instead of five until the clocks change there.  We will now have darker mornings and lighter evenings for a while, it won't really make much difference to us, only when we visit a town, we get up when its light and go to bed when it gets dark.

It was a cold, windy and misty start today but by late morning the wind had died down, the mist cleared and the sun had come out.  Today was our biggest mileage day so far, 20.3 miles which took us nine hours. There were a lot of ups and downs, camel humps, today along the ridge but the trail itself was fairly easy underfoot and the ascent and descent gradients all pretty gentle.  A lot of slate paths today similar to the Lakes or Wales in the UK. We remained high most of the day constantly going up and down between 5500ft and 6300ft.  We had some great views again once the mist cleared.

There were still icy sections of the trail to contend with where we had to tread carefully, the flat sections were fine just the sloping sections more difficult.  In the sunshine it was lovely and warm but out of the sun in the shade of the spruce trees it remained quite icy cold.

Horse riders are allowed on the trail through The Smokies, we passed some horse footprints today.  At the shelters there are 'hitchracks' to tie horses to, we thought they were 'jungle gyms' or exercise bars!

After the final mountain for the day it was a long but steady downhill, past some aircraft wreckage (don't know the story behind it) to Camel Gap, up one last Camel Hump to our shelter for the night, Cosby Knob Shelter.  There were two groups of students at the shelter, when we arrived from Mississippi and Ohio universities, it's their university spring break so they're all out on a hiking trip, plus one thru hiker, Shaggy Mo. All very friendly.  As the shelter was quite full we decided to tent and pitched on a nice little spot just below the shelter.  We cooked dinner and then headed up to the shelter to chat to our neighbours. They'd got a fire going in the shelter. One of the girls had bought the ingredients to make 'smores'.  We heard about these popular campfire treats but not tried them yet so they made us some.  Smores are a large toasted marshmallow placed on a chunk of chocolate and squashed between a Graham cracker split in two, very nice.

It was a late night for us, 9:30 by the time we hit the tent but we have a shorter mileage day tomorrow so can have a lazy start in the morning.