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...