Day 12 - Benton MacKaye Trail

Zero day at Green Cove Motel!  A zero day means you don't do any hiking and I didn't expect we would have any days like that on this trail.  After the nightmare that was yesterday's hike we definitely needed a day off and we slept late.  We fell asleep at about 9:30 last night and stayed in bed until 10 this morning.  We wandered down to the store and poked around for a bit before the owner, Tubby, offered us some of her leftovers from dinner the night before.  We had a huge breakfast of cube steak with country gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, and Mac and cheese.  Tubby comes from a family of eight, so she always makes enough to feed an army she said.  We sat with her for about an hour talking about just about everything before we left her alone for a while.

Breakfast of champions on a cool table Tubby made from YooHoo caps. 

I made a few phone calls, the first to Rick and Brenda Harris - BMTA board members and maintenance directors.  I asked about trail conditions coming up and Brenda assured me that our next section had been worked on very recently. She was aware of the condition of the trail we hiked yesterday and told me they were working on getting it cleared.  Since we were in a wilderness area, they cannot use anything like chainsaws or weed whackers.  The ranger district here is focusing on maintaining horse trails this year so the BMTA is kind of on their own.  I then called the Tapoco Lodge and confirmed we would be there this weekend so we definitely would have a place to stay.  

Bloody and battered hiker legs from the tough day yesterday. 

We ate huge dinners and then lounged around the rest of the night.  Even though there are no laundry facilities here, we were able to wash our clothes in the sink with a bar of soap and get them mostly dry for tomorrow.  Laundry on this trail is few and far between!

Drying laundry hiker style- chasing the sun around the parking lot! 

For anyone looking for a quiet, clean, relaxing place to get away I highly recommend Green Cove Motel.  This place is out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.  There is no TV or phone in the hotel rooms.  No phone service works here.  The windows and doors open up back onto the Tellico River and men are outside fishing all day long.  I was telling NoKey this is how it must have been doing a long distance hike 30 years ago - walking nearly deserted roads to get to town, get a stack of quarters, and use the pay phone to call places.  Tomorrow we go back into the woods with a guarantee of better trails and nice weather. It was been a perfect day off!

Green Cove Motel- middle of nowhere and heaven on earth!

Day 11 - Benton MacKaye Trail

We started earlier today, about 8:30, and began our first climb of the day to Cantrell Top.  The sun came  out for the morning and we had some easy ups and downs until we reached Hipps Gap, a dry (shocker, I know!) campsite.  From here we had to start climbing but our day looked easy on the map and profile because once we were up, we were on top of the ridge.  We couldn't have been more wrong.

This is a North Carolina State line marker from the early 1800s

After some crazy steep climbing and an attempt to get water that didn't pan out, we reached Moss Gap, noted for the hairpin turn in the trail and a tree marked with a giant X indicating there is water a mere half mile off the trail.  We decided to head up and get water at one of the few campsites if we needed it.  This is where our day turned to utter shit.  For the next four miles we bushwhacked through immense blowdown.  The trees were thankfully blazed and there was a faint path of where people had gone through a week ago, but otherwise we were completely on our own.  For four miles, which took us three hours in the pouring rain, we climbed through branches, grass up to our necks, and thorns shredded our legs.  Any evidence of campsites and unmarked side trails was completely obscured.  It looked as if a tornado had hit the mountain.

There is a trail in here... Follow the blazes and make your own path! 

When we finally hit Rocky Top, we had about half a clear mile before coming to another hairpin turn at Sledrunner Gap - the halfway point of the BMT.  Now, we were coming downhill in the same shit we climbed on the other side.  This side was even worse because it followed and crossed a stream multiple times.  Rhododendron were down everywhere and even harder to climb through. Again, all campsites and mile markers were completely wiped out due to the utter disregard for trail maintenance.  At 4 pm we had to make a decision.  We were at a trail junction where the BMT went up and trail 180 looked to be going down.  The map indicated in about 6.5 miles we could be at the same location 5 BMT miles would take us to.  We had been hiking for 7 straight hours without eating or stopping and we decided the road might be longer, but at least it was clear.

Which way to go now...? 

This decision changed our entire day.  Trail 180 was an old roadbed that appeared to have a lot of recent foot and horse traffic.  We got down the 1.5 miles in less than 40 minutes. We came out at a campsite and ate a quick dinner before walking FS 126, a gravel road that went up and between two mountains before coming downhill to Tellico River Road.  It was about 6:50 when we finally made it to the road and we knew that the Green Cove Motel was 1.4 miles from the trail.  We walked about a quarter mile before coming to the Sourwood Campsite and some people told us the motel wasn't far.  They even drove us down.  When we got to the store, the woman working there, Tubby, was only there just to stock the place.  She said we were incredibly lucky to catch her as she had just got back from a trip to Knoxville and was shutting up for the night. We grabbed snacks and sodas and checked in for two nights as we were utterly exhausted.