The Knacks

Our first camp site, where we dined on a fine meal of beef jerky simmered in water with cous-cous and dried apples. We—by "we" here, I mean "I"—had a communications breakdown on who was supposed to bring what, so my night to cook was very much improvised. And just to make it more exciting, the recent rains had left everything so wet that we were completely unable to get a fire going.

Words to the wise...

...but our other choice was to hike back to our starting point and swim.

And the best was yet to come.

After this, stop, we came across a series of crossings, all of which were wet. I slipped and got my shoes soaked on the first one. Tony took a spill and tossed his camera into the water on the second one. The camera eventually recovered, but we don't have many pictures from the last day.

Everything was straight up. We—by "we" here, I mean "Tony"—had some confusion with the map and trail guide. What was supposed to have been a moderate 5- or 6-mile hike turned out to be an 8-mile extremely vigorous climb. Up. When we got to the top of the mountain and connected with the Appalachian Trail, the mileage sign pointing back to where we'd started that morning had a bigger number than the whole distance we were supposed to have covered.

Tony spent most of that day cackling gleefully while I contemplated taking a shortcut to the bottom: Let gravity do the work and the rangers could just pick me up. I survived, though. I got passed by a little girl (12? 14?), but out-paced a park ranger. I'll give you that the park ranger's job duties mostly involved parking cars if you'll give me that the little girl was obviously an athlete.

Tony did finally get his camera working near the end of the third day. Here's a view he stopped to enjoy while I got started on down the trail. He caught up shortly.

Yeah, I'd probably do it again.