The next day was our first big hiking day! We had planned to hike a full 12 miles, which, being the stunners that we are, we did. There was nothing that made it stand out except that at the very end my feet were killing me, and everything at the end was green and beautiful. OH and we hiked up this insanely steep mountain...I think it was Sassafras. We ended up spending the night at another shelter with Austin, and new kid named Scott, we also met a lady named Wonder Woman, who was complaining about her thyroids and how she was sick for two days after eating some wild ferns, and a very silent fellow named Don. Don was from somewhere in NC and was moving very slow, due to heavy backpacks and such.
We started out moving pretty slow the next day. Our goal was to make it to the shelter at the bottom of Blood Mountain. From previous conversations with my brother, I had come to see Blood Mountain as a terrible, never ending up hill hike. I was dreading the hike. We spent the night in another shelter, which was .4 miles off the trail, which isn't very far, unless you have been hiking all day. There we met Scott again, who was taking it very slow compared to the 19 miles he hiked on the first day. But all that hiking had given him some pretty torn up ankles, which, according to him, didn't hurt but he thought it best to take it slow anyway.
There was also a couple at the shelter who came in after us. The guy portion of the couple was named Captain. SWEEEEEET name! Anyway, Dan was super fascinated with his stove set up and the fact that he ate pudding.
We sleep, we wake, we pack up, we get water, we hike. Scott decided to hike with us, because with the pace I was going, I was making it a nice sllloooooooww hike for everyone. We began to ascend Blood Mountain. Let me tell you, I got to the top of that thing and wanted to kill Jonathan. I was scared for nothing. It was a breeze to climb up. There was a large stone shelter up at the top that had a fire place. It looked like a two room house. It was also very windy up there, so I'm glad we decided not to make it up there for the night. There wasn't much to see because it was so cloudy, but we decided to take pictures anyway. We didn't stay long up there, Dan and I were planning on hiking 14 miles, which meant that we needed to get on the rode. So we hiked down the mountain. I decided that this must have been the side that Jonathan climbed up, because it was a bear to climb down. Lots of boulders and steep climbing. But all our efforts were rewarded in the end when we finally got to Neel's Gap, where there was an outfitters. But I'll tell you all about that later.
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