We woke early and hiked out. After .1 miles we came to Mountaineer Falls Shelter. This shelter was built by AT thru hikers, ON their thru hike as part of a hard core project (more on hard core later). Legend has it that the shelter was completed in 2 days. We hiked and hiked and hiked. After about 10 miles we came to Moreland Gap Shelter. It was here that we ran into Will and Way again, as well as the section hikers we would leap frog with for the next few days. We ate some lunch packed our things and hiked out again, determined to sleep in a bunk, get a shower, and do laundry all for a $5 donation to Kincora tonight. At around 6:30 we hiked out onto Dennis Cove Rd. Kincora is .2 miles to our left. At the trailhead there was a dirt parking lot on our left that a couple guys in a truck just pulled into. I could tell they were up to no good right away. A couple seconds later they started doing donuts and driving in and out of the huge mud puddles all over the little lot. Classic Tennessee. They sprayed us with mud once than stopped and apologized. We didn't care cause we were already really dirty from hiking. We thought the mudding looked like a lot of fun.
After that event we walked down to Kincora. Kincora is a very old hiker hostel that has supported thru hikers for quite some time. It is run by Bob Peoples. He is a legend on the trail. He constantly runs trail maintenance projects on the trail and is the coordinator for Hard Core. Hard Core is an annual project that happens the 2 days after Trail Days Festival in Damascus. He invites 50 people out to perform maintenance on a large section of trail. He usually does really massive projects during those 2 days. After talking to him for some time I found out that he is planning this years project to be the extremely rocky section coming down from Hump Mountain (See post: Hump Mountain and Mountain Harbour B&B). Here we ran into Jersey Girl and Yukon Cornelius again and had a wonderful reunion. After having some ramen for dinner I read a little bit and went to bed in the bunkhouse.
Bob Peoples.
Trail work being done during Hard Core.
Trail work being done during Hard Core.
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