Venture Crew 403 continued working to complete the entire AT in Georgia. Our plan was simple but with an interesting twist. 
We would hike in Friday night (yes…in the dark) for a mile or so to Ramrock Mountain, hike about 8 miles to spend Saturday night on top of Sassafras Mountain and then hike out 3 miles to Hightower Gap (FS69/FS42) on Sunday morning. It would be an easy 12 mile sojourn with only a few climbs and, with the crew’s first night hike, expectations were high.
We arrived at Woody Gap just as it got dark…a steady downpour was already there to meet us. (There is excellent parking at Woody Gap, with areas on both sides of GA60, along with picnic tables and a reasonable restroom for any last minute issues before hitting the trail.) With headlamps perched and ablaze atop our heads, we took off through the rain. The good news is the rain quickly slacked off…the bad news a fog so thick and stifling it was difficult to see more than the person in front of you replaced it. 
In and of itself, fog is not a big deal…Bob and I had certainly seen our fair share of fog in the Smokies. However, it was also the dark of night and the unfamiliarity of this section of the trail…which is to say, we were not quite sure where we were at any given time. The default in a situation like this is to hike some length of time and then proclaim wherever you are the location you planned on being. To bolster my position that we were indeed on Ramrock Mountain, we had been hiking uphill for about an hour and the ground beneath us was slap full of rocks. The other reason we stopped was that we couldn’t be sure we were still on the AT: the trail had petered out among the rocks and the white blazes on the trees were impossible to see with the fog.
So we made camp, setting up our tents wherever we could find a spot with minimal rocks. The onslaught of rain chased us all into our tents to hunker down for the night…it was 10PM. At roughly midnight, we were jarred awake by the trampling of feet on slick rocks and stabbing flashlight beams. From the voices and the quantity and quality of curses issued, it seemed like four hikers were making their way through the rainy night and our campsite. I remember thinking how rude of them to trespass…but then promptly fell back asleep.
The rain was replaced with a steady drizzle when morning light came. I crawled from my tent and stretched the rocks out of my spine. I looked around at the stirring tents and realized that in our blindness last night, we had set up right in the middle of the trail. All of a sudden I felt pretty bad for thinking our midnight “trespassers” rude. On the bright side, we hadn’t wandered off the AT after all! We packed up soggy tents and gear. Jerome (one of our adults) and all of his gear were soaked…including his Alaskan Husky. Neither he nor his dog apparently slept the entire night being occupied in trying to stay afloat inside his tent. The temperature was cold…the thermometer clipped to by pack read 40 degrees. So when faced with hiking 10 miles in soggy boots and wet clothes and then sleeping in a wet sleeping bag, he decided wisely to return to his car and take a trip to a Blairsville Laundromat to dry everything out…he would meet us on Sunday at Hightower Gap.
The rest of us shouldered our packs and slogged on. The rain had started up again. It appears if we weren’t on Ramrock Mountain, we were close enough. We picked our way over slick rocks downhill to Jacks Gap and then steeply up and over a no-name peak. The rest of the morning was spent hiking over an undulating landscape that brought us to the new (at that time) shelter at Gooch Gap.
The shelter had been completed the month before and had been designed and built by the family of hiker Kurt von Seggern…I remembered reading about it in the newspaper. We stopped there for a quick snack and then crossed FS42, a creek and continued on, passing a deep stand of moss-covered hemlocks, most showing the effects of woolly adelgid infestation. The rain had atrophied to a heavy drizzle again…hard enough to be annoying but not so hard as to submerge the trail.
The rain had finally stopped by the time we had lunch at a small clearing after crossing Blackwell Creek. We had three mountains to summit to reach Sassafras: Phyllis Spur (3,081 ft), Justus Mountain (3,224 ft) and then finally Sassafras Mountain (3,336 ft) all in two and a half miles. We were stumbling down to Cooper Gap from Justus Mountain, tired and sweaty despite the cool temperature, when we had to step off the trail to allow some Army Rangers by. They were based at Camp Frank D. Merrill located just outside of nearby Dahlonega. At our best we were trudging along the trail with packs weighing around 40 pounds. These guys were running up the mountain with what looked like full packs (90 pounds?) carrying big ole rifles. Each and everyone of them said “excuse me, sir” as they passed me. Youzer!
The last haul up to Sassafras was uneventful, just steep and interminable. We collapsed to the wet ground…it felt so good to stop. The sun was finally peeking through the clouds but it was too late in the day, nothing was going to dry out as a result. After dinner, we sat and talked for a bit but things were too wet to even attempt a campfire and everyone was too tired to try. By 9PM everyone was in their tent.
It kind of got light outside without any further physical evidence that the sun had risen. It was 7AM and cold and damp…but at least it was not raining. We had a quick breakfast and then took off down the trail. It may have been the anticipation of trails-end or maybe just my wet underwear, but the three miles to Hightower Gap just would not end. There was no steep climb but merely a couple hundred feet elevation gain over the two miles before a reasonably steep, short drop into Hightower Gap. The sun had finally made an appearance and we could even see patches of blue in the sky. Mary, one of the adults, used her brand new cell phone to call her husband, Fred, who was waiting for us at Hightower to let him know we were on our way and at least within cell distance of the gap. A short time later, the now traditional cheer was raised as the cars were spotted and a decidedly drier Jerome and Fred waved us in from their cars.
Another section under our belt…one more to go.
flatfooting 