Day 49 Campsite @mile 635.9 to Bailey Gap Shelter

Today's miles 18.6.  AT miles 654.5.

This morning it was a shortish uphill from our camp spot onto a long thirteen mile ridge line section in Peter's Mountain wilderness area.  We passed a bizarre shaped electricity pylon which looked like it defied gravity.  The ridge seemed to go on forever.  Doyi, (Cherokee for 'outside') another thru hiker we'd briefly met in DQ yesterday passed us. We also saw Bullwinkle and Nazcar again going in the opposite direction, we bumped into them yesterday, they are hiking a 300 mile section from car to car each day, sleeping in the cars at night.

The trail was good underfoot initially but the last three or four miles of the ridge line plus the downhill section afterwards were a minefield of tree falls. There were so many tree falls that it was confusing in places, detouring around them and working out where the trail had disappeared to, it was quite slow going climbing over and around them.   We are obviously ahead of the trail maintenance teams for this area.

From the ridge it was downhill to Stoney Creek Valley.  We had a few light rain showers between sunny spells, plus a hail shower which was odd as it seemed too warm for hail.  We stopped at Pine Swamp Branch shelter on the way down to shelter from a rain shower.  There were four retired section hikers there, two brothers who we'd met briefly at Woods Hole hostel plus another couple of guys.  We stayed and had a nice chat with them for a while.

It was another mile and a half to our intended camp spot at 'The Captains place'.  To get to this camp spot though meant crossing the river by a zip line.  When we got there we both took one look at the zip line and the very fast flowing high river and thought, we're not going across that!   We'd have ended up very wet, the weight of us and our backpacks on the zip line swing would have had us dragging through the water.  It was only another three miles to the next shelter, Bailey Gap shelter, so we continued on to there instead arriving about six thirty.  Everyone else in our little bubble of hiker friends were planning on staying at this shelter anyway so it was a better option in the end.  There was one other guy also staying there.  We pitched our tent on the only available levelish tent spot as the shelter only sleeps six and there were eight of us.