5/1/00
Day 40
Chestnut Knob Shelter (4,410 feet elevation)
449.3 miles

My fears about shelters being full of Northbounders have not yet come to pass.  There were only two at Jenny Knob Shelter the night after I last wrote, and there are only 3 here tonight with room for at least 3 more.  This place is a bit different in that it is built of stone, is enclosed and has a door, and is perched near a magnificent view.  It looks out over a crater-shaped valley known as Burke's Garden, which was the Vanderbilt's first choice for their Biltmore Estate.  The downside of being up high is that this shelter has no water source, so you have to plan ahead and haul water up with you.  Most shelters are placed down in gulleys where the springs and creeks are flowing.  Being up high in a clearing, this shelter is also exposed to the wind.  There are steel cables to hold the wooden roof rafters down on the stone walls.  The wind has been roaring on and off and the sky that was blue and clear all day is at sunset filled with ominous clouds.

For all my kvetching about "mileage nazis", I did my first 20 mile day yesterday.  As it turns out, I couldn't have picked a better section of the trail to put in a long day.  Mostly the trail was smooth walking and very few stones, and the terrain had rolling ups and downs, but nothing too serious.  The shelters in this section seem to be at inconvenient intervals.  I planned the long day and camped out by Little Wolf Creek mostly to put myself in position to reach Chestnut Knob today.  I got a late start this morning because the outside of my tent was covered with frost and the inside was dripping with condensation.  I hung around waiting for the sun to get high enough to strike my tent and dry it out before I packed up.

Yesterday I saw my second snake.  This was no slender green fellow, but a big black sucker about 3 feet long.  When I noticed it just a step or two on the trail in front of me I managed not to say "Eek!" like a little girl, but my "Whoa!" lacked a bit of the manliness I would have hoped for.  The snake ignored me as I walked around it.