What could be more fun than hiking the Appalachian Trail? Doing so in a hurricane. We hiked into Great Smoky Mountain National Park on the eve on Hurricane Matthew pummelling the east coast. It's long arms of wind and rain swept all the way to the Appalachian Mountains. We had a little bit of shelter from the storm, thanks to your tax dollars.
GSMNP is America's most visited National Park-- reporting 9.5 million visitors annually. Nine million of those visitors never leave what the National Park Service calls "the front country" and the lay person calls "the road." (Imagine driving a carload of children to a huge playground and never leaving the parking lot. I know a few six-year-olds that would call that crazy, but that's how most Americans treat our park system.)
Even the "few" half million visitors annually that make it into the "back country" at GSMNP create quite an impact, so the park service insists that everyone concentrate camping to 3-sided shelters-- these were blessed protection from inches of rain and strong winds.
The Federal Government, in their wisdom, has also redirected funding from trail maintenance (which is atrocious on the AT in the park) to ensuring the few privies (outhouses) at said shelters are handicap "usable." The result is a pit toilet in a wooden box large enough for a wheelchair, complete with stainless steel lift bars and handles. You would never get a wheelchair down the miles of trails to these privies, but perhaps even more short-sighted is they didn't even outfit the stalls with ramps.
I only got to analyse a few privies,because of a long-standing Tennessee law forbidding outhouses. This law was apparently made ages ago to encourage people to convert to indoor plumbing, it's current practice results in thousands of people forced to camp and shelter in the same areas with zero waste management plan.
If the government didn't give us enough to think about, camping with packs of strangers certainly did. When it was raining, we were the only people in the shelter to hang our food bag from a tree (a method used to keep bears from eating you in your sleep while trying to get to your peanut butter). We concluded that most Americans would rather risk attack to themselves and their neighbors by large wild animals than get their backpacks wet.
The highest mountain in Tennessee is located in GSMNP: Clingman's Dome (6655'). This is also the highest mountain on the Appalachian Trail. It is adorned with an ugly concrete tower, and no other commemoration of the walker's lofty accomplishment besides recognizing, by all the crowds, that one could drive here. At least we know in our hearts that it's all downhill from here. Too bad walking downhill while pregnant is pretty difficult.
Within 2 weeks of accomplishing our goal, I stand by my original claim that hiking the AT while pregnant is not worse or harder than hiking last year, but it is slower. I also really miss Aleve, which I popped multiple times per day to ease sore joints and feet, but cannot safely ingest right now. However, the trail is a great escape from random people touching my stomach, a particularly irksome practice of our culture that has, thankfully, not transferred to the hiking community. It could be because I smell so bad, but, so long as we hang our food, I can travel through the woods unmolested.
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