The cabin was warm and breakfast was served in the office starting at 9 am so we didn’t get an early start. Sleeping in a bed and having a hot meal cooked for us was totally worth the delay. We also stopped in on the hiker box at Mountain Crossings, a place for hikers to donate un-needed gear to other hikers. Kacy found a sit pad (small light-weight piece of foam pad) that she was pretty excited about, making the stop worthwhile.
During our planning session waiting on Lux and Kate yesterday we’d realized that making Kacy’s flight on Sunday was going to be a challenge. We’d need to do three 13 mile days to get her off the trail at Dick’s Gap on Saturday to catch a ride to Atlanta but we could make Unicoi Gap on Thursday after two ~10 mile days and get of their instead. We decided to move her flight up to Friday, get off the trail Thursday at Unicoi and spend the night in Helen, GA. That plan required us to get to Low Gap today, more than 11 miles up, a long day especially for starting late but off we went.
Not too far up the trail we ran into Dr. Evil. He’s from Maine and he’s hiking with his 1 yr old cat, Ricco. The cat runs along the trail with him, though tends to wander around chasing bugs. However, when he tucks the cat into his jacket they make blistering time up the trail.
The trail turned rocky and rough again. We’d been leap-frogging Neel for a couple days now, he makes amazing time on the flats but his knees have a hard time with downhills which slows him down. He kindly posed for a shot demonstrating some of the rocky trails we had to traverse.
We’d checked out the elevation map after lunch to get an idea of what we had left to tackle. What looked on the map to be two climbs and one big descent turned out to be 4 or 5 more climbs, nothing we couldn’t manage but once we were in the mindset of being almost into camp, each time we weren’t there yet was hard on morale.
We finally made it to camp around 5 pm with enough time to set up camp and make dinner before losing the light. We were both completely wiped out by the time we reached camp but since it was Kacy’s last night in camp we made an effort to hang out by the fire and socialize. One of the guys was lamenting about having left his sit pad behind in the hiker box, he used it as a kneeling pad in and out of the tent and was hurting not to have it. Since this was Kacy’s last night on the trail she returned the sit pad to its original owner and it’ll continue along the AT with him. We splurged and ate double dinner, having the free mountain house meals and the extra instant potatoes pillaged from the hiker box.
Caveman somehow had enough internet to stream Spider-Man homecoming on his phone as we relaxed by the fire. It’s really not roughing it with all this tech, but it’s still a good time.
We’ve got one more 10 mile day together, Kacy seemed to hold up alright with the new insoles and regular doses of Vitamin I so hopefully tomorrow will go smoothly.
Day 6 Mileage: 11.5 mi [Neels Gap -> Low Gap]
Total Mileage: 51.1 mi