Day 36 - Friday, April 26, 1974 - Sam's Gap to No Business Knob Leanto

11.9 miles - 288.7 cumulative miles

Got up this morning at a fairly reasonable hour, before sunrise, but didn't leave until 11:00.  We sat around cooking a pound of bacon all morning.  It was good, but it sure was a late start.  Made the 12 miles we did pretty rough.  Hiked up Big Bald 2 1/2 miles from the camp site.  Fantastic views and a rough climb.  We could see everything we've hiked over for most of the past week.  We had lunch on an old picnic table down a ways from Big Bald.  Old weathered tables there in the middle of nowhere next to the trail among a bunch of dead trees.

Frying bacon - and another mysterious hand signal

Trout Lillies

Spring Beauties

 

From there we went down and up to Little Bald, which wasn't even bald and then down most of the rest of the way to Spivey Gap.  The remaining 4 miles from the gap to the shelter were beautiful.  Two and a half miles were very gentle descending with a mile before it of mostly level hiking.  There were 3 people at the shelter when we got there.  One was a guy (a thru-hiker) we met this morning at out campsite while we were cooking bacon.  The other two guys were doing the trail a week at a time on their vacations (section hikers).  While we were cooking our supper our friends from Connecticut (Matt and Ted) showed up.  Seems they had met the owner of the resort near Big Bald on the bald and were invited to spend the night there.  Had a big dinner and a $22 room all on the house.  And we had thought they would be long gone ahead of us.

Abandoned log cabin along the trail

View from around Little Bald Mountain

Leo came in around 9:00.  Almost thought he wasn't going to show up.  Matt and Ted saw him on Big Bald at 3:00.  He was taking lots of pictures.  I took quite a few myself.

I was pretty tired by the end of the day, but here I am, writing this at 2AM.  Can't seem to get to sleep.  Have moved my sleeping bag outside.  The bunk was no good.  We've got 6 miles to do plus 3 1/2 to the post office in Erwin in the morning before 11:30.  Hope we can make it!