- Miles 309.5-321.1 (11.6 mi.)
- Total ascent: 4108′; total descent: 3507′
It is with disgust that, after today’s Trail Magic, I crown the honeybun the best all-around hiking food. I thank the two ER nurses at Sam’s Gap, one of whom called herself Honeybun, for helping me see just what a strategic play the beleaguered sticky bun is.
To date, Rachel and I have passed up honeybuns at every resupply point where they’re sold, which is most of them. No food embraces excess in quite the sickly, why-did-I-eat-that way that honeybuns do. It’s a miracle they survived mandatory nutrition labels.
So what, other than being handed free food in a lean point of this resupply cycle, changed my mind? Honeybuns’ unique marriage of excess and conservation.
Weighing in at 530 calories, more than a quarter of a typical 2,000-calorie diet, our iced Duchess variety costs about $1, delivers a one-two hit of carbs and fat (protein is most important to eat after hiking), and fits in bear cans like they’re Hermione’s purse. Squished, dropped, melted, frozen, or somehow forgotten about, she eats just the same.
Honeybun must have seen the wheels turning in my head, stomach, or both, as she offered Rachel and I two more for the road. We gladly accepted, explaining that we were short on breakfast for our final day’s hike to Erwin. She assured us that we weren’t the only ones rationing in this stretch, which requires five or six days’ worth of food.
We found a wonderful site above a spring just a mile after saying a Midwestern goodbye to Honeybun. The fastest members of the “bubble,” referring to the glut of hikers who start mid-to-late March, are catching up to us. Much as we don’t like to, we’ve played guessing games with ourselves as to where hikers we see throughout the day will stop for the night. Knowing most would be going to the next shelter, and feeling a bit wet from the afternoon rain, we decided to take the combination of flat, sitting log, and near water while we could.
After I assiduously started a campfire with damp wood to dry our socks and jackets, some old friends showed up: Mule and Five Pounds, who’d sold their house to hike after their kids left home, and whom we hadn’t seen in 150 or more miles. Mule and I stood chatting briefly at first, until my fire fell over and spilled onto the leaves beyond its ring, and then at length as he and Five Pounds put up their pyramid-shaped Hyperlight tent. They’d hopped off the trail at Fontana Dam to get Covid vaccines and to tend to their affairs at “home,” where their daughter and remaining possessions live, explaining how they’d gotten behind us.
Prior to the trail magic and reunion with our pals, today was admittedly forgettable. We started hiking around 8 a.m., immediately getting passed by a group of eight that we’ve leapfrogged a few times. We ate lunch and filtered water at Hogback Gap, whose name and where large tangles of barbed wire rusted nearly dull suggested a longstanding hog problem. We made camp around 4 p.m.
We did, perhaps thanks to the rain, see fields of eastern springbeauty so full they appeared covered in snow or ash. On their outskirts rose the earliest mayapples, as if waiting their turn to take over the forest floor with while flowers.
Tomorrow, Rachel and I are aiming for Whistling Gap, just south of the supposedly haunted No Business shelter. In the forecast is the same combination of morning sun and afternoon rain. On the menu is the same combination, too, save for dinner: tuna and grits, instead of today’s mashed potatoes and salmon. But everything in front of us, literally and metaphorically, is new and exciting, and we’ll have a roof — a cabin, the first we’ve booked on this trip — and a real meal in Erwin soon enough.
