Appalachian Trail - Day 020 - Hot Springs to Allen Gap

Day: 020

Date: Sunday, 14 May 2023

Start:  Hot Springs (AT Mile 275.0)

Finish:  Just past Allen Gap (AT Mile 290.3)

Daily Kilometres:  27.0

GPX Track:  Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos

Total Kilometres:  491.5

Weather:  Warm, humid and sunny in the morning.  Overcast and humid with a downpour and thunder in the late afternoon.

Accommodation:  Tent

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Egg & sausage sandwiches

  Lunch:  Italian sub/ham salad sub

  Dinner:  Rehydrated meals

Aches:  Dave - left ankle giving him some grief; Julie - nothing to report.

Highlight:  The views from the rocky bluffs as we climbed away from Hot Springs and the French Broad River up to Lover’s Leap were spectacular.

Lowlight:  Dave had a miserable start to the day.  His left ankle was playing up, even before we got out of Hot Springs. and then the trail, after a short distance following the French Broad River, climbed very steeply to Lover’s Leap and beyond.  It was quite humid and, although only 9:00am, we were quickly bathed in sweat.  Dave’s pack, with four days of food (with an increased ration per day because he doesn’t think he is eating enough) seemed exceptionally heavy, and the first hours out of town are always tough mentally anyway.  All through those first couple of hours he was thinking about the joys of hiking from B&B to B&B carrying just clothes and a packed lunch, as they had done last year in the UK, and then began mentally going through his pack to decide what he could do without, and then wondering whether it really was sensible doing these big step ups and step downs with an artificial hip and 20kg on his back.  Options were considered and plans were made.

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We slept in until 7:00am and packed most of our gear before walking up to the Hillbilly Market, a sort of grocery/deli, which we were told opened at 8:00am and was the only place to get an early breakfast in Hot Springs on a Sunday.  It was open and we bought some hot egg & sausage sandwiches for breakfast and a couple of subs to take with us for lunch.

Then it was back to our cabin where we ate our breakfast, finished packing and began hiking around 9:00am.  It was a beautiful morning, but humid.

The first few hours provided the best and worst for the day.  Great views and very hard trail (see above).  It was very slow going, which was not good.  We had been warned that, because of aggressive bear behaviour on the trail ahead, there was no camping allowed until we hiked at least 15 miles which was OK because that was our target distance for the first day out of town anyway, with a relatively late start.  However, we soon came across a number of signs warning we had to hike at least 19 miles before we were allowed to camp.  Those extra four miles would equate to two hours, making it a long day.

We had no wish to camp where there were bears, and had heard some scary stories about bears ransacking hiker food supplies, knocking down trees to get suspended bags and taking bear barrels containing food, even though they are supposed to be impregnable to bears.  We had also read in our friend Stef’s blog (she and Mike are a couple of weeks ahead of us on the trail) of two thru-hikers they knew were abandoning their AT thru-hike after a scary night with bears sniffing around their tent.  However, we decided that the first notice we had received about camping being prohibited up to Allen Gap, 15 miles away, was the one which we would follow.

Back on the trail, after that enervating first ascent, we were once again hiking through avenues of mountain laurel pink and white blossoms which, along with easier grades, made Dave a bit happier.

From there we climbed to the shoulder of Rich Mountain (3,660’) where we stopped for lunch and Julie took a side trip up to the fire tower to have a look while Dave relaxed.

The afternoon mostly involved following another long broad ridge with a series of knolls which the trail always chose to climb rather than go around.  It was a rollercoaster and sweaty work in the humid afternoon.  We had just stopped for our last break around 5:00pm when it began to rain and soon became quite heavy.  We finished our break huddled under our raincoats and then began hiking again along the sodden trali, thinking about all that gear we had spent time drying out in our Hot Springs cabin and how it was going to be wet again.

We reached Allen Gap soon after 6:00pm, by which time the rain had stopped and then climbed a litte further until we found a nice place to camp beside the trail in a grove of rhododendrons.