- Miles 377.1-392.3 (15.2 mi.)
- Total ascent: 3858’; descent 4646’
I make no bones about it: Today was hard.
Our day began around 7 a.m. with a bottle of missing hand sanitizer. We connected it, after calming down and washing our hands with soap and water, with the missing trowel: We hadn’t been doing site checks after doing number-twos.
Commencing with the day’s hike, we soldiered up the last of Roan Mountain. Roan, known to be a zoo, had just a few hikers — all section hikers — summiting it that day. The summit was bald, with little but unimproved trails and high grass within a couple miles’ radius of the peak.
Afterward, we were compensated with some of the AT’s most iconic landscapes: the Overmountain shelter, a barn converted to house hikers that had been declared structurally unsound and its floor removed in September 2019; the longest stretch of grassy balds in the Appalachian Mountains, together comprising the Roan Highlands; and a violet-bordered meadow representing the final mile of North Carolina.
At a shelter after Overmountain, we stopped at for a late-afternoon snack. There, we met a retired woman from New Hampshire who was section-hiking the remaining miles to Virginia, who graciously gave us some antimicrobial hand wipes. At least the hand-sanitizer fiasco was solved.
Still to hike that afternoon were Little Hump and Hump Mountains, named for their respective order and size. We sumitted Hump Mountain just before the sun touched the mountaintops to the west; while it was a spectacular time to be the highest thing in the sky, we didn’t linger. It was already almost 7, and we weren’t done with North Carolina yet.
A few miles later, through an unassuming meadow, we walked our final step in the state. We will remember North Carolina best for ensuring every shelter within its borders had a privy, and perhaps worst for its unrelenting wind.
We felt, stopping just after the field at Doll Flats, as if we’d earned our ticket out. Not a mile of the day’s hike was beneath tree cover. The terrain was rocky and rutted, with nowhere other than the ground or the occasional shelter to sit. Gusts approaching 50 miles per hour whipped us up and down the ridge.
We’d had, fortunately and unlike our last pre-resupply days, extra food and coffee to power us. We’d also had helpful and friendly, if brief, company, which counted for more than we thought it would earlier in our hike.
Beyond us lie 74 miles of Tennessee and then more than 500 miles in Virginia. With snow forecast to start around 9 a.m. tomorrow, we plan to do the first of the remainder early. Just three miles ahead is Mountain Harbor hostel, where we have a reservation and which supposedly serves a five-course breakfast. Nothing could get us moving more quickly in the morning, whatever the weather, than that.
