- Miles 321.1-330.8 (9.7 mi.)
- Total ascent 2881′; descent 3064′
At Sam’s Gap, Rachel hid the bear cans. She hid them so we’ll, in fact, that I just missed our health insurer’s 8 a.m. ET call center open.
I wanted to call early, while I still had battery and the wait was likely to be at its shortest. I sorted out the payment issue with a representative, reminding myself that this overworked, underpaid phone jockey was almost certainly more frustrated with her employer than I was.
I felt frazzled afterward, my imagination coming up with all manner of scenarios related to hiking without health insurance. Rachel helped me finish packing, which I’m not particularly good at in the best of conditions.
We walked the trail back to the Trail, which was so steep as to make us reach for an energy drink powder before 9 a.m. We climbed almost all of the day’s elevation in our first few hours of hiking.
Our reward was Big Bald, with 360-degree mountain views and enough pines to make the mountain green before its neighbors. Atop it we met a grandfather and his son and grandkids, who were, hilariously, begging their grandfather to stop playing Pokemon Go and to put down his phone.
Rachel and I took no photos, on account of our dead phones, but stood and talked for some time with the family. Around us stood sedges and tall grasses, mixed with chives another hiker picked in order to spice up dinner.
We crossed back into North Carolina sometime after Big Bald but before lunch, which we ate at Big Bald Shelter. There, we met Will and Shannon, work friends who were hiking from Allen Gap to Erwin, a stretch of 55 miles.
Shannon was on her first backpacking trip. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, she proclaimed, including childbirth. But she reanimated at lunch, where we talked about some old gravesites along the trail. Will graciously allowed us to charge a phone on his battery pack. We chose Rachel’s, which had our maps and which we filled to 25%.
Incredibly, the shelter where we ate lunch was less than a third of the total mileage from our destination. We left it around 1 p.m., making almost 3 miles per hour downhill. We crossed multiple streams but were otherwise on good terrain, so we carried the bare minimum water to save weight.
We performed the final “D” in “PUD” — pointless ups and downs — and reached a large, flat site with a bonfire-sized fire pit around 3 p.m.
In camp, I wrote an extended analogy about for-profit health insurance, which I haven’t decided whether or not to post.
Rachel set up the tent and rolled out our bags.
As I finished wasting battery on my rant, the first two members — Drafty and Icarus — of a group of eight rolled into camp. We talked about the route to Erwin, facial hair, trail lore, and our names’ origins before the rest of the tramily rolled in.
We finished grits and tuna, brushed out teeth, and hid our bear cans inside a rotten but still-standing tree’s trunk.
The drizzle began, in spurts and then steadily, as we walked the tenth of a mile back to our tent. We hear it’s likely to rain until 6 a.m.
That, in fact, suits us. We can shake a tent, but we don’t care to get wet over breakfast or, worse, a cathole. Let’s hope the weatherman is right.
