The Roaming Romantics

We woke up at Icewater Spring Shelter to a half foot of snow,freezing temps, and high winds. The forecast called for more snow and temps down to -17 with the windchill for the night.  We decided to hike back to the gap and get back to town. There was a group of 7...

With the road back to Newfound Gap still iced over and closed, we were forced to spend another day in Gatlinburg. To make things worse, the tv in the room stopped working! Eventually we went out into town and I found a mini horse! We heard from the NOC, that the park...

The road to Newfound Gap finally opened a little after 9am, so Seeker, Sunshine and I walked up to the NOC to hitch a ride back to the trail.  (Yeager and Princess Vidalia hung around the hotel a while longer and planned to meet us later. We had awesome luck finding a...

We started our St Patrick’s  day with frozen socks and shoes. I normally keep them in the sleeping bag, but today would bring us out of the Smokies and I had a dry pair in the pack so I left them out. The shoes were another story.  They were too frozen to get my whole...

It rained fairly hard over night and continued into the morning.  We stayed at the Hostel until it stopped around 11 am. We ate, packed and hit the trail with the Standing Bear, looking on. On the trail we had a good climb to start the day, going uphill for about 5...

Decided to push for a big day, hiking 26 miles from Groundhog creek shelter to Hot Springs. Got an early start, waking up before dawn, hiking the first hour in the dark. We worked our way up to Max Patch, climbing back up to 4600ft. As we got higher the wind picked up...

After our first 26 mile day we stayed in Ashville for a zero. In the morning we went to REI to replace my shoes. They were a little beat up on the outside, but the biggest issue for me was on the soles. One of them got a wrinkle on it that would not go away. Given...

We got a late start on the trail today stepping off from Hot Springs around 1:30pm. The trail went right through town with AT markers on the sidewalk . At the edge of town, the trail crossed over the French Broad river then ran down along side of it for a while. Then...

Slept in after the rain storm, getting up around 9am and hit the trail an hour or so later. After a couple miles we stopped to get water at a spring fed steam about 300 yards down hill from the trail. In the afternoon, the trail crossed a road, with a small “store”...

Woke up to about 22 degrees and a 30mph wind that drove us into single digits. The cold wind caught us off guard a bit. Not in a dangerous way though, more of a “I don’t want to get out of the sleeping bag” kind of way. For breakfast, I tried out a new concept, a...