For the past few weeks I had been entertaining notions about getting out and hiking again but things just seemed to keep cropping up and getting in the way. Then October 28 arrived. On that date I received an e-mail from Tom Dupree, a person I met while on the trail in North Carolina. He told me that he was going down to the Tennessee/Georgia area to do some hiking on the Benton McKay Trail. While technically not the Appalachian Trail it si close enough that I decided to include it here.
The southern portions of the Appalachian Trail are heavily used. To take some pressure off it the Benton McKay was created as an alternate route from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Davenport Gap in the Smokies. The Appalachian trail leaves springer and heads east north east befor curving back to the west while the Benton McKay leaves Springer and goes Northwest before making a curve and heading in a Northerly direction.
It promised to be an interesting hike and I took him up on his offer. There were to be some challenges. The Benton McKay, being relatively new, is not as well documented as other trails I hiked, our main maps were geological survey topographical maps, and a good portion of our planned route went through the Big Frog Wilderness where there were no trail blazings with numerous intersections with other unblazed trails. We hoped to be able to hike about 40 miles of this trail.
I was to drive to Lexington, where Tom lives and works, leave my care there, and take Toms car down to the Ocoee River, near Ducktown, TN and meet a third member of the party, CharlesDeWitt from Nashville, TN.
Well, flexibility is a good thing. I left for Lexington at 10:30 this morning and upon arriving discovered that Lexington only built garages for midget cars. My van would not fit in the parking garages in the area. We decided to leave his car and head for Tennessee in my van. The drive was great. The weather perfect. We stopped for a late lunch at Cracker Barrel down around Corbin. It was the first time I was dissapointed about what I had at Cracker Barrel. Since I was getting out of my rut I decided to get completely out and ordered their fish. It wasn't bad but Cracker Barrel has many better things on their menu. After eating we were hung up in a massive traffic snarl in Knoxville. After all was said and done we didn't actually meet up with Charles till well after dark. No hiking today.
We set up camp in a forest service campground and figured out how far we could go. We shortened the distance. Each of the 3 of us, it turned out, had to be back at our respective homes on Monday night and we had lost the opportunity to hike any on today. We decided on Dyer Gap a distance of about 24 miles. The next chore was to find a place to stash a car at Dyer Gap. We knew that the trail crossed a forest service road there. The questions was finding the particular forest service road and staying on it till we found what we thought was Dyer Gap. There were no road signs or destinations signs saying you are here.
We finally found the place, we hoped, and left Charles car there and drove back to the Campground. On the way back we stopped for a snack at a Mexican Restaraunt in Copper Bottom, GA. We got there at 9:57pm and the place closed at 10:00. The waitress did not appear to be happy to see us. A half hour and 10 of the hottest chicken wings I ever had later we were back on the road to our campsite . Ready for an early start in the morning.
Posted by at November 4, 2005 01:19 PM