I definitely heard mice last night in the shelter and I found mouse droppings on my waterproof phone case! Uurgh! I also discovered later they'd chewed a couple of holes in my down jacket - not happy.
It was another brolly day! Our worst weather day so far, but not too bad a day overall really. It rained during the night and we awoke to a very misty damp day. We started hiking at 9am and it started raining more or less straight away. We had quite heavy rain in the morning which turned to damp mist from midday onwards. We had another long uphill climb today, up to Big Bald 5516ft, the highest we've been since in the Smokies. It was very muddy in places today on the trail and quite slippy, especially on their downhill. From Big Bald it was down to 3200ft to Spivey Gap. We were back in a frosty winter wonderland again temporarily, the wind and mist had created hoar frost again on the trees. We also passed some interesting rock faces today too. Spivey Gap is where we had originally pinpointed as somewhere to camp at about the 15 mile mark. It was very damp, dark and misty there though so we carried on another 4.7 miles to the next shelter.
As soon as we'd climbed up over the next hill the sky's started to brighten and the mist cleared so we'd made a good choice to carry on. It was a long winding downhill, along an interesting ledged path. We startled some type of grouse, or it startled me along the way. The path seemed to go on for ever and ever though, especially because we were tired, we would have appreciated it more had it been earlier on in the day.
Eventually it headed uphill to our shelter spot for the night, No Business Knob Shelter arriving just before 7pm. We stopped to fill up our water supplies for the night 0.3 miles before the shelter as there is no water actually near the shelter. When we arrived Caribou was already there plus 3 other section hikers. Its only a small 6 person shelter so we pitched our tent as we knew Meepel was hiking in behind us, she turned up just after 8pm luckily, just as it got dark. Plus we wanted a mice free night! We've decided shelters are definitely only for wet weather nights. It was a long, quite tough and tiring day today in the damp conditions but worth it, as tomorrow we now only have just under 6 miles to get to Erwin, our next resupply town.
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