Appalachian Trail (day 8) - Nantahala Outdoor Centre to Cable Gap Shelter / mile 159

"I don't even know who Rod Stewart is" Rod Stewart

I woke up just before seven and started to pack up, everyone else in the room made a move as well. I've grabbed my stuff and went to the kitchen area to sort out the resupply. I've got six plus days worth of food in Dollar General for 35$ yesterday but I didn't have time to repackage it. Fifteen minutes later it was all done and I was ready to go.

Next step was an eight miles long and four thousand feet high climb up from the valley NOC was located in. It took several hours of steady climb to reach Cheoah Bald mountain. The night must have been really cold and windy as all the trees were covered in ice, it looked like a winter wonderland up here. Sun was hitting the frozen branches, melting them enough to cause a small icicles fall to the ground when the wind blew on them. It looked really cool and I wondered if there's special name for this phenomenon.

My other knee started to hurt now after the other got better and I had to take a paracetamol to keep it in check and hope that I won't damage it much further. I slowed down the pace to make sure of that, especially downhill.

Throughout the day I was going back and forth with couple of other hikers, one of them being young guy from Georgia with trail name Rod Stewart. It was given to him by a couple from Essex, England also hiking the trail. Apparently he looked (or sounded) like him but I really couldn't tell. Rod Stuart was carrying a small guitar and sleeping in a hammock but last night it was so cold that he has opted to sleep in a shelter. His grandma was Yugoslavian and emigrated to US in 70s, before Yugoslavia collapsed. We talked about the Balcan conflict and genocide on Serbs, also about current European and American politics but I didn't want to go too much into detail about it for obvious reasons. Rod Stewart seemed like a nice guy and he ended up staying in the same campsite as me.

We arrived there at about 6pm. The place was quite busy, campsite was going downhill next to a small stream. I've set up my tent quite a distance from others on a most level bit of ground I could find. There was no tree branches to hang the food from but people did not report any bear activity in the area so I decided to keep the food in my backpack overnight. The sound of the stream was very calming and after the dinner consisting of ramen, spam, nutritional yeast and instant mash potatoes I went to bed.