Gooch Mountain Shelter 2177.4 to Springer Mountain 2194.3 (16 miles, 2194.3 total miles)
I’d had a much better night of sleep when I’d taken a tip from Painkles and Shade Tree to reboil my Nalgene water in the middle of the night when I woke up cold. It made a huge difference, as did cinching my sleeping bag liner around my head and face to keep in the warmth.
I was now using hand warmers at night and in the morning as well, and felt I was getting a better handle on cold weather camping. It was still a relief to know I’d only spend one more night on this trip camping in freezing temperatures. It made letting my hike go a little easier.
I’d wanted to sleep till 7AM, not having slept through the night fully since Bruce Leaf’s, but a few of the others had wanted to get to the cookout Sticky Fingers was hosting on Springer that day around 2 or 3:00 in the afternoon. That seemed early to me, as we still had almost 16 miles to hike before then. I set my alarm for 6AM anyway, not wanting to be left behind, but still silenced it till 7:15. I was finally waking up warm in my quilt, so it was much more difficult to get moving.
I knew Lentil, Looseleaf, and Happy would also be leaving later, since they’d night hiked the day before. I had enough food till the end of the hike, and we were having a cookout the next day, too, so I started to think it wasn’t worth rushing through my last full day on trail. If it happened it happened, I figured.
I was therefore surprised that Milky Moo and Painkles only left just before me, around 8:45AM. I guessed they hadn’t felt like rushing either. I departed right before Lentil and Looseleaf, having only drank half my coffee and not eaten anything for breakfast yet because I’d wanted to warm up first. I took off like a rocket, possibly feeling remnants of the day before from putting on the speed getting me going.
The first mile or so was plenty easy, cruising around rhododendron trees and over beautiful flowing water sources. Right before Justus Creek, I ran into a couple older SOBOs named Not Polo and OB who I hadn’t met before. They let me pass, but then I pulled over to delayer and have breakfast near a fallen tree, letting them go by again.
While I was eating a couple bars and finishing my cold coffee, Lentil and Looseleaf arrived and stopped as well, also needing to shed a few layers. While we were sitting and talking, Hero rushed by, on a slight run and ready to be done hiking, getting picked up by someone later today after Springer. The rest of us agreed we weren’t in a rush, though I continued on before them to keep hiking. I told them I was a little burnt out from hiking with Flamingo for the last couple days, who’d fortunately left before me today, and wanted to spend some time by myself.
It was a surreal feeling being on my last full day on trail, and I had the strangest feeling I could almost sense that the trail itself was going to run out, and there’d be no more AT to hike. After my break, and even after consuming coffee and calories, I felt my pace slowing. I wasn’t surprised, as I’d been pushing myself to hike faster the last two days to avoid night hiking.
I went up and over a couple climbs, stopping when I saw I had cell service. It had been very spotty lately, and I sat in a sunny spot for a while, answering a few messages and enjoying the connection to the outside world. Lentil, Looseleaf, and Manchego stopped for a bit while I was there to say hi before they continued on. I passed by Lentil and Looseleaf when I was hiking again a bit further, and Lentil hurried forward to catch up with me, wanting to chat.
We had a very good conversation about a variety of topics, and found we were similar in a lot of our world views. I find I enjoy speaking with people who have both similar and dissimilar viewpoints to my own, but there is a comfort in the former. An ease to being on the same plane of existence with another, not needing to explain yourself more than necessary to understand each other.
Together we passed a quiet gravel road at Cooper Gap, making our way up a few little ups and downs when Looseleaf joined us again. The day was lovely and sunny, a perfect send off from the trail. On the ascent to Hawk Mountain Shelter we stopped briefly for water, before climbing once more. Sweating in my fleece, I followed Lentil up the incline, making our way down a short blue blaze to the shelter.
I perched myself in a sunny spot, took out my PB&J and extracted the logbook from a white plastic tube attached to the shelter wall, characteristic of the southern shelters. While Lentil and Looseleaf cooked their lunch, I bundled back up and read the emotional end of trail posts from many of my recent SOBO and flip flopper friends. I wrote my own heartfelt paragraph in the book, finding it so hard to believe it was almost over. My excitement was mounting, as I became evermore eager to achieve this greatest of goals.
After a long lunch break, in which we were joined by Pause, Manchego, and Beer Girl, we headed back out to finish our climb and cruise on a few nice miles of flat and downhill. That only took about an hour, and was enough time for me to listen to half a podcast and retreat into my head for a little while. I’d thought I wouldn’t want to listen to anything on my last day on trail, but I’d felt the urge and went with it, not wanting to hold myself to some arbitrary desire.
We passed a sign for the Benton MacKaye trail, which intersects with the AT multiple times and is named after the person who’d dreamt up the Appalachian Trail. Right after that I saw a sign for Long Creek Falls, just .1 off trail. I’d read about it in the guide earlier during the day, as I regularly liked to take a look at anything noteworthy that was coming up. I asked Lentil and Looseleaf if we were going to check it out, and it turned out they weren’t aware of that one. I definitely wanted to go, so we headed down our second to last blue blaze of the trip.
It was a very short jaunt, where we were greeted with the sight of a lovely waterfall reminiscent of Laurel Creek Falls in Tennessee. I spotted a small rainbow in the corner of the waterfall, illuminated by the sun shining directly toward the water.
OB and Not Polo arrived a few minutes later, and there were only a few day hikers around as well, so it felt very relaxed. Lentil showed me how to take a long exposure shot with my phone, though I ended up wishing I’d known how to do that the whole hike. Better late than never seemed appropriate here.
We continued on, toward the base of Springer Mountain, a 4.1 mile climb of 1,350 feet was now all that separated us from truly becoming thru hikers. I put away my headphones, drawn into conversation with the other two. Lentil told me about how she had a history of being an excellent piano player, and that she’d almost gone to Juilliard instead of studying to become a physicist.
I reflected on how amazing it was that the trail drew people from all walks of life and backgrounds, and how it could take hundreds of miles of hiking with someone to find out these fascinating pieces of personal history.
We hiked through enormous rhododendron trees, crossed over bridges spanning clear streams, and all the while talked about how we couldn’t believe how close we were. I ate a bag of Sour Patch Kids, remembering how I’d eaten a similar bag on the hike down Katahdin. The northern terminus of the trail had been on my mind quite a bit lately as well, as I began to fully wrap my mind around what it had meant for the NOBOs to end there.
We stopped at Stover Creek Shelter a third of the way up the climb, where Looseleaf wanted to make a run for the privy. OB and Not Polo came in after us to set up for the night nearby. I read the log book and signed quickly, the pen dying in my hand as I wrote. We left around 3:45 to continue climbing this final mountain, the signs telling us regularly how close we were.
We passed beautiful ice formations on the side of the trail, and a well known parking lot that sits a mile before the summit. When we were within .3 to the shelter, we saw a familiar looking woman carrying a heavy cooler up from the parking lot. She accepted Looseleaf’s offer to carry it, full of ice and sodas for the cookout. Her name was Rocky and we’d seen her briefly in the gravel lot at Burningtown Gap. She’d also brought liquor, food, and dry firewood, which was extremely kind of her.
As I realized the cooler was full of beer and there was liquor around, I understood this to be a different type of summit than Katahdin in another way. Lentil, Looseleaf, and I had merely been planning on hiking Springer Mountain Shelter for the evening and summiting in the morning, .2 further up to the end of the trail. For me, I didn’t want to have to pick an end date between Springer vs Amicalola, and also wasn’t emotionally prepared to reach the terminus today.
However, when we got to the shelter and dropped the cooler, no one was in sight. Our question answered as to whether or not the others had summited, Lentil received a call from Happy telling us to come to the top. I didn’t want to be the only one who stayed back, so I followed the other two through a golden hour forest. We passed Shade Tree coming back from the top, and a couple others as well.
I walked through the woods with trepidation, suddenly afraid of what I was about to see. Would it look the same as all the pictures? Would it feel the same as I imagined it? When I arrived, the rest of our group was on the large slab of exposed stone with a few others and a NOBO from this year named Cowbell, who’d hiked with them earlier on in the trail and had driven out for the end.
I stepped close to the summit, then backed off, unable to approach it. The problem was that it hadn’t been at all what I’d pictured. I’d imagined myself arriving alone, dramatically shedding a few emotional tears as I knelt at the base of the metal placard affixed to the mountain, spent but fulfilled. I hadn’t imagined a group of 10 or 12 people up top, some of them a little tipsy, all celebrating our victory.
Maybe it was because my dreams of finishing with a group had previously been dashed so many times before, or because I was falling into the same trap of my own expectations, or I simply wasn’t ready, but I sat to the side and watched while Lentil and Looseleaf took summit photos and a couple group photos ensued. I was thrilled for everyone, but had entered into some sort of state of emotional overwhelm in that moment, and needed a more low key experience to truly feel comfortable summiting this last mountain.
When it was just Lentil, Looseleaf, Flamingo, and myself, I slowly walked up to the summit, feeling a sense of disbelief and numbness. This was natural, I knew, from several firsthand accounts of other hikers who’d completed thru hikes. I’d shed tears thinking about this moment many times before, hell, I’d even cried multiple times now because of the cold, but here, somehow I couldn’t muster the glistening beads of emotion that were supposed to be noting how special this occasion was.
The truth was it was too fresh, too unreal, too big for me in that moment to even understand what it was that had just happened to me. Or, rather, what I’d just made happen. The summit looked like it had always looked in the pictures, with the addition of a beautiful homemade sign that Sherpa had made for Sticky Fingers and the rest of us.
I went through the motions of taking photos, waiting for it to sink in, feeling as if I was playing some part in the finale of a play. It felt great to be here, but maybe knowing I still had a night of sleeping in the cold and 9 more miles to hike the next day also lent itself a bit to the feeling of unreality. My brain felt rather foggy, and I headed back to the shelter with the other three around sunset.
Next to the shelter, Sticky Fingers had set up a Coleman gas stove, and the picnic table was covered in soda, beer, burger buns, and large bags of chips. I told Flamingo I felt really strange, and that everything was too fresh to process. He asked if I wanted a hug, and I accepted, after a moment of hesitation.
I’d thought perhaps Flamingo was misunderstood, always seeming a little on the fringes of the group, appearing to be trying harder than necessary to get people to like him and want to be around him. I’d given him a chance, thinking maybe he was just awkward and insecure, both things I certainly have been more times than I can count.
Yet when he hugged me, it became vastly apparent that something had been off about him the whole time. With a muttered and nonchalant “Sorry,” he released me and I told him, in an automatic sort of fashion, that it was okay. Refusing to look at him, I walked back toward the campsites that led away from the shelter, dropping my pack when I found a large clearing big enough for my tent and Lentil and Looseleaf’s.
I set up my tent quickly without the rain fly, as dusk approached, intending to finish setting up after I ate. I left everything else and returned to the cookout, accepting a burger from Sticky Fingers and trying to act as if nothing had happened. Everyone was laughing and joking uproariously, in wonderful moods, as they should be, celebrating such a momentous event.
Sticky Fingers had brought hot chocolate as well, and though I wasn’t going to drink, hadn’t been drinking much at all for a while in fact, I added a bit of Baileys and Kahlúa to mine. More to calm my nerves and warm me up than in any sort of celebration. After I collected water, I sat with Happy, Milky Moo, and Cowbell at the fire.
Happy had 27 miles to hike near Daleville in a couple days on her way home back to Massachusetts, having had to skip up when she thought her foot was broken. I admired her filling in that section, though was glad I’d been lucky enough to have no missing pieces to finish after the Approach Trail tomorrow.
I went back to my tent early, not in much of a mood to socialize. Lentil was feeling similar, and I boiled my Nalgene water for bed while they made dinner in their tent, needing more than black bean burgers to sustain them. After all the food was put away in bear boxes and the three of us lay in our respective tents, my tears finally came.
They weren’t tears for the end of my thru hike, though. Rather they were tears about what had happened when I’d hugged Flamingo earlier. Without going into too much detail, he’d touched me in a way that was violating, neither asking for, nor receiving, consent from me to do so.
It was an awful way to end my thru hike, and I went back and forth in my mind over and over about what to do and how to handle it. The idea of doing nothing made me sick to my stomach, but the thought of being around him for my real last day on trail made me feel even worse.
I couldn’t stand thinking about being in the group photos we were going to take tomorrow with him, and thought about purposefully oversleeping to avoid them. It was unfathomable to me that I’d hiked 2,200 miles for this to happen at the end. For me to turn my emotions inward and suffer because someone else had decided to do a thing like that.
Several times I wanted to tell Lentil what had happened, what he’d done that made me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t even think about the end of my hike. Yet I was afraid, embarrassed, and angry. Hadn’t I known people who’d had much worse things happen to them? Did that really matter in this situation? I fell asleep unresolved, undecided, dreading the morning, suspended in uncertainty.