Puma Ghostwalker

Fortunately the Hike Inn had power after the tornados hit, Nancy Hoch said, if she didn’t have power she wouldn’t have been able to accommodate me there.
Her husband Jeff was out of town. Sadly, I would have loved to talk with him about his extraordinary first people collection of arrowheads and spear tip points and other Native artifacts. They had no internet there and all I could do was upload my photos and videos to my laptop from my camera. The processing of a video to my laptop takes a while; I just splice the segments together in chronological order, that’s it. No editing. I shoot; I talk and try to keep it interesting, and speak correctly about all the facts and science in my head.
I have no script to follow. I just shoot from the hip, sort of speaking.

It was sunny and warm, enabling me to dry out all my gear. After resupplying in Robbinsville I was given a ride back to the Fontana Dam Marina. My next resupply point was over 100 miles away, past the Smokey Mountains to Hot Springs North Carolina, where I mailed my laptop to the Bluff Mountain Outfitter. This will be my longest leg of my journey so far. If I get jammed-up, there are points along the way I can stop, like Gatlinburg Tennessee.
The Fontana Lodge had a restaurant, so at the dam I called for a pickup to have one last good meal, while I still smelled nice, then off to the Smokey Mountains.
I hiked to Birch Spring Gap, the only tent site with no shelter in the Smokey’s.
In the great Smokey mountain National Park you can‘t setup a tent anywhere you want to, and I knew I would have to start sleeping in the crowded shelters soon, so I stopped at Birch Spring to be alone after my resupply. The Appalachian Trail in the Smokey Mountains is very heavily visited, so to reduce the impact on the natural surroundings, it’s pretty mandatory, that you stay in the shelters.
Birch Spring was a beautiful camp site, the best water I ever had came from the Smokey’s, and this spot was no exception. I carried the SteriPEN….Adventure to purify my water, I highly recommend it. But to tell you the truth, when the water from a spring came right out of the side of a mountain, I just drank it. Up from the blue blaze trail they had a hitching post for horses; the Smokey’s is the only place where people with horses share the Appalachian Trail. Many hikers have mixed feelings about sharing the trail with them. I do not. I love horses so much; they have such a beautiful power. I love to touch them and hold them in my arms and really feel them.

That night I heard my first bear in the middle of the night going down the hill very close to my tent, it was big and noisy, obviously not very worried about being heard.
My plan was to hike to Spence Field Shelter for the night, I was excited to camp up on a grassy bald and take in some grand views. I fell short of my goals many times during my hike, but I wasn’t going to let that get me down, I just want to go with the flow of the cosmos, wherever it lead me was fine too.
It took me longer than I expected to hike through the Smokey’s, the shelter weren’t spaced right for my speed. I found much later, when I could hike much faster, that I didn’t like to go faster than 16 miles a day. The reason was, when I went faster than that I noticed, I would’nt take many photos, shoot many videos, I just wasn’t observing nature like I wanted to.