Erwin, TN to Hampton, TN 5/6/18 – 5/13/18

This past week we did our biggest day yet…we hiked 19.1 miles!! It’s so exciting seeing our mileage go up. An average day for us is around 14-15 miles.

That same day we hiked through the Roan Highlands and climbed Roan Mountain and had a beautiful view! A lot of the high mountains we climbed were in fog due to such high elevation so we were happy to have such nice views! We stayed at the Roan High Knob Shelter at the top of Roan Mountain. It’s the shelter with the highest elevation on the entire trail so it was pretty cold there. Hopefully it’s the last time we need our cold weather gear out here since its mostly summertime now.

Pictures from the Roan Highlands

Where we stayed at the Roan High Knob Shelter

We met a bunch of middle school kids out here that were doing trail magic for the thru hikers and asking them questions. They all wanted to give us their snacks they brought and were so sweet and generous.

We hit the 400 mile mark this week!

We got to see the Jones Falls and Laurel Falls.

We saw our first snakes this week too. After seeing something like this all the tree roots in the trail look like snakes. So far no poisonous ones and I’m quite ok with that!

HAPPY 5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO US!!! This weekend we are staying in town and taking a few days off to celebrate!

We got to stay at Braemer Castle hostel which is one of the coolest hostels I’ve seen so far! They even have a kitchen and so we went to the grocery store and got lots of food to cook up while we are here. So fun to cook in a kitchen again! We made eggs, sausage gravy and biscuits for breakfast. We have had haystacks and burgers and a big box of ice cream that we aren’t having a hard time eating up! We are enjoying this civilization so much and I’m afraid it might be a little hard leaving to go back out on the trail! We are having really warm weather here…I think today was 87 degrees. We plan to leave here tomorrow morning but hope to enjoy a little time at the lake nearby before we hike out.