Thursday, June 30th

Glasgow, VA (787.3 mi) to Brown Mountain Creek Shelter (807.3 mi)

Hiking Miles: 20

Total Ascent: 5,150.3 ft

Total Descent: 4,448.2 ft

Total Grade: 480.5 ft/mi

Steps: 51,056

One of the rules that Charlie informed us about during his instruction session was that everyone needed to throw their bed linens in the washing machine before they could eat breakfast (doing that essentially was their meal ticket). Not hard to forget and a pretty good way to insure folks cleared off their bunk, right? So did I comply? Of course not. I completely forgot to do that in the proper order as I had my blueberry pancakes first, then I packed up my stuff and removed my linens. I’ll pass that off as being too excited about having pancakes (my favorite breakfast) today. I also was thinking about my 11-mile slack this morning to start the day’s hike.

DT, and not Green, drove us to the trailhead and I immediately lead the way up the mountain; I knew that I needed to move swiftly to time an 11:30 am drop-off of my pack from Charlie at the Punchbowl Overlook.

It was a nice workout and I made it to the destination with 10 minutes to spare. The downside was Charlie wasn’t there – he either forgot (payback for the pancakes before linens?) or got caught up because he mentioned to me that he would likely be there more than 30 minutes ahead of time. 

I called and left Charlie a message, and he eventually showed at noontime with my pack, cold water, and freeze pops – what a guy! The unfortunate thing was that Stevie had run 0.2 mile ahead to check on another possible drop-off spot that Charlie may have mentioned, and in doing so tripped and scraped his knee. With the delay, I wound up losing any time gained by the slack pack, but it was a nice break nonetheless from carrying 30 pounds (especially whereas I had a few Yeunglings packed in my bag) for 11 miles.

During the time I was waiting, I did eat lunch, called Teresa, spoke with two female SOBO hikers, and chilled while waiting for the tramily to all show. We collectively reached the 800-mile marker (marked on the ground with pine cones) for the south section and we all took pics.

Later in the hike, Stevie and I took an old “AT” trail (we actually backtracked on it) in hopes of finding a “Falls”, but the bridge that used to lead to it was completely destroyed and we couldn’t reach it. We did make it to the Brown Mountain Creek Shelter where we stayed for the evening. Stevie placed 4 beers in the creek to chill and we celebrated “810 miles”. The significance of that was that DT & Smiles had both hiked 810 miles thus far on trail, and Stevie & I both had 810 miles remaining on the AT.

We relaxed a bit by the stream; I dipped my feet in the cool water and it felt great! Stevie sat across the stream from me on the bank closest to our site, and while taking pics on his phone, he accidentally dropped it in the water. He recovered it quickly and dried it out (it worked fine). And DT picked up a Daddy Craw swimming in the current.

Another Tramily (Billie Goat, Crocs, Nat Geo and Little Buffalo) joined us after dinner to talk. They showed up to the site after us and looked a bit disappointed that we had already claimed the 6-person shelter. We all sat around the table and celebrated Little Buffalo’s birthday by singing to her. In lieu of a birthday cake, it was pretty cool that DT presented Little Buffalo with an oatmeal cream pie.

DT started one of his famous campfires, and afterwards volunteered to cowboy camp on top of the picnic table due to the limited space in the shelter, and overcrowding would not have been that comfortable. The rest of our tramily (six) cozied up in the shelter for the night.