05:00 A.M. wake up for our toughest day yet. It was another Frosty morning and today we didn’t have a fire. We were very cold, but we needed to get an early start.

There is a section of the Appalachian Trail that requires you to have a bear resistant canister for your food if you are going to camp there overnight. So, we could get fined if we camped in the area without them. I had planned on buying bear canisters during preparation, but we could not afford them. This leaves us only two options:

1. Skip the section entirely

2. Hike the section in its entirety

Guess which one we chose…

Unfortunately, the section happens to be 7.4 miles long and the highest mountain on the Appalachian Trail in the state of Georgia sits right at about mile 5.

We left our camp at Lance Creek at about 08:30 A.M. Hiking 7.4 miles isn’t too bad, right? But add 25-60 lbs and 2-5 mountains and “bad” does not describe the pain and suffering each step up, or down, inflicts on the muscles, joints, and city-soft fleshy pads we call feet.

Hour after hour we inched our way forward, stopping only long enough to eat some snacks (and have some smokes of course). Up and down, turn after turn, the day dragged on.

Then, at long last, at about 4 in the afternoon, we hit…

The bottom of Blood Mountain. Over the next 2 hours and 45 minutes we climbed up and up.

We don’t have the endurance or the stamina to just walk steadily up a mountain. So, this is how we get up a mountain:

I, who walk in front, take seven steps forward and stop (hunched over and winded) and wait. Then everyone else takes seven steps forward to where I am and then they stop and wait for me to take another seven steps forward. Seven and seven we rise into the clouds.

At 6:45 P.M. we reached the summit of Blood Mountain.

On Blood Mountain

View From Blood Mountain

With one hour before sunset and 2 miles to go, we got our butts off that mountain. But in the mountains, “down” isn’t always easy… Down STINKS!!!

We hiked down for an hour as it got darker and darker. There are spots where we had to crawl over car sized boulders. Thank God the trail smoothed a little as we turned on our headlamps to see the trail. Then our night hike began.

We hiked and hiked to the light of our headlamps. Now we were really moving at a snail’s pace for safety. Then we saw some lights through the trees in the distance. But as we walked they never got closer. We couldn’t see that we were walking towards it because we were walking along the edge of a horseshoe shaped valley.

After what seemed like ages, we crested a hill at the end of the valley and finally saw the lights of Neels Gap come into view! We made it; at 10 P.M.

So now what? The hostel at Neel’s Gap is $17.00 a night per person. Wolf Pen Gap Country Store is $20.00 a night per person, but with Off working there he can offset the cost.

Off called them and they wanted him back to work so they came and picked us up.

We went back to the Wolf Pen. Got there at midnight. There was hiker there who helped us carry everthing upstairs. He gave us food and drinks and moved his stuff around so we could all sleep in the same room. Everyone else settled in and crashed. I spent the night listening to music on the porch with our new friend: Bohemian Gypsy Nighthiker. I went to bed around four in the morning. Long, looong day…