3 Day weekend PT 5

I don't know what it was that woke me up this morning but I was slow to get out of the hammock. It had rained all night, yet I was completely dry. A true testament to the importance of preparation. When I finally got up and moving I was amazed at how foggy it was. visibility was about 30 feet, which was pretty spooky. My shoes, as expected were completely soaked, which brings me to my first bit of advice. Buy wool socks. As soon as I started hiking I forgot my feet were wet. I couldn't say the same thing had I been wearing cotton. I hiked for about a mile before I came to the spot I had wanted to stop for breakfast. Slaughter Creek sat at the base of some roughly cut stairs at the junction of another trail. Looking back at my GPS data, I may have gone the wrong way at this point, but the trails intersect again shortly.

It was not long until I was at the top of Blood Mountain. With an Elevation of 4,458 feet, it is the highest point in Georgia along the AT, and I don't think I could have chosen a worse day to be sitting atop it. The top of the mountain is pretty bouldery. I don't think that is a word, but I'm at a loss for how to describe it. Its like standing on top of a stack of boulders that have been flattened over a millennia. With the addition of rain and fog, it made for some treacherous traveling. There were points where you needed to have a third point of contact with the rock to avoid slipping to who knows where. Seriously, I couldn't see, so I don't know what would have happened. Photos do not do the sketchiness of it justice, so you will just have to take my word for it.

The view from atop Blood Mountain

The trip down the side of the mountain was steep, muddy, and extraordinarily slippery. I figured I had to be getting close when I started passing groups of day hikers, all of them questioning how far it was to the top. I told my wife to pick me up at 10 and she ended up being 30 minutes early, which I think is a first for her. I rolled into the parking lot at Neels Gap at 9:58, soaked, covered in filth, and beyond exhausted. In the parking lot were trees filled with hundreds of pairs of hiking boots and shoes. After hiking 32 miles in 3 days, I had zero desire to chuck mine up along side them. On the ride home I was already thinking about my next trip and what it had in store for me.