After nine days in the woods, Cornbread and I made it to lovely Hot Springs, NC - an iconic "Trail Town". The trail goes right down mainstreet and at any given time there are probably more hikers than townies. They have an amazing diner and the only grocery store for 20 miles is a Dollar General - the classic trail resupply store.
We spent three nights to recuperate and more importantly see my girls (minus Cristina who couldn't get out of military duty). It was great to see family again - and to see the dogs. Ate lots of good food and slept on real beds.
But all good things must end and we left after breakfast on Monday. It was a real struggle getting restarted. I was as homesick as I have been since being deployed. It wasn't the creature comforts of home - it was my loving family. I felt guilty as the pulled away - like I should be going home and being a father but I knew that I needed the trail to come completely home after 12 years.
So, we climbed out of the French Broad River valley back into the Apps and into the Cherokee National Forrest stretch. A remarkably unremarked section of the trail. Frankly, with the exception of Big Bald, I hadn't heard of any of it. But it follows several challenging and stunning ridges. One, named in honor of Howard McDonald, is an amazing 1.4 mile stretch of exposed granite ridge. Howard was a trail building master and this was his masterpiece. The trail zigzagged along the knife edge peak with shear cliffs on either side. The views were breathtaking to both the east and the west but one dared not look for too long while painstakingly negotiating Howard's handiwork of granite spiral stairways, narrow passages and hidden footholds. Each section was a stone brain teaser. Sometimes, you couldn't tell where the original mountain ended and Howard's genius began. It was like an exhausting, wonderful maze inside a 4,000 foot high playground.
And there are many other spectacular sections and the hiking was a little easier. We put in five long days but the miles were less painful and more solitary than the Smokies. It was a refreshing change. One morning, we even had our 7 am snack with a beautiful whitetail buck. After, we dropped our packs and were eating a snack he sauntered over the ridge and casually fed on tender briar shoots within 10 feet of us. These are not tame deer - they are wild animals. But I think he judged us so beat down that we were no threat to him or anything else for that matter.
I'll close on another wildlife story. Cornbread had been disappointed that he had missed two of my bald eagle sightings in Nantahala. So, this morning as we were dropping into Erwin, we skirted along the cliffs overlooking the Nollichucky river. We were still about 1,000' feet above the river and I was trying to find the railyard down below where they hanged the elephant a hundred years ago (another story - look it up). All of the sudden, Cornbread hollers, "bald eagle bleep bleep" (let's just say I thought Samual L Jackson was behind me). Startled , I turned around just in time to see a massive, majestic bald eagle, complete with a large fish in his talons headed straight for us! We must have been on his eating perch and he wasn't happy to see us - or smell us probably. But, before a fight broke out, he spun on a wingtip and gracefully (with just a touch of agitation) soared back across the river onto another bluff while we unsuccessfully fumbled for our phones. What a sight! All I could muster was a respectful, "Merica".