Clingman's Dome is first on the menu this morning. Despite a cold night, the skies are clear, making today all the better. Clingman's Dome is the Highest point on the AT, but it is rather uneventful hike. Not nearly as steep as mountains elsewhere, even Roan seemed to be a tougher hike. The summit is also wooded which is nice because that is obviously how its supposed to be, but you have to climb a man made obstacle to get any views. Other than the balds, this is true of most mountains in the southern portion of the trail. So Clingman's is a nice hike but other than the stat on paper it is rather unrewarding.
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| Spaghetti and Motor on the Clingman's Spiral |
The rewarding part of today's hike is the 7 mile down climb into Newfound Gap as the weather becomes increasingly beautiful. I have been on the edge about going into Gatlinburg. I have enough food to get me to my next mail drop, but the trail is about experiences and towns are certainly an experience. Gatlinburg is a shiny, neon example of that theory. Gatlinburg is refereed to as the Atlantic City of the trail, a far cry from the expectation I had formulated by listening to that Johnny Cash song.
When we reached Newfound Gap, trail angels Godspeed and Mountain Mama hailed us over to the parking lot where they spoiled us with soda, fresh fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and ham and cheese sandwiches. The sun was out, we shared stories and thank yous, and watched the conventional tourists mill about the parking lot (I say conventional because we are tourists of a sort, we just walked here). Godspeed and Mountain Mama offered us all a ride into town. Happy Feller, Spaghetti, Motor, Blink, Haiku, Wrong Leg, Dorothy, Live, and I pile into their appropriately sized pickup.
Gatlinburg is a wonderful, distusting, entertaining, and otherwise useless tourist trap and the only real grocery store is a mile and a half out of town, luckily there is a bus system. Six of us get a room at the Holiday Inn, which if any of you are wondering smelled pretty bad after we left. We meet up with Handsome Dan and Happy Feller at Five Guys for dinner. Desert at Wendy's. We wandered through the tourists for a while but were all tapped out at about 7. Can't get too crazy, the trail angels were nice enough to offer me a ride out of this hell hole at 9 in the morning.
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