Monday, April 11th

Today was the first day of our hike. This morning we drove down to the lodge to get a quick breakfast with our dads at the buffet. During breakfast, a young man breakfast we were getting ready to leave until a young man asked us if we could take him to the park where we were meeting Kathy to go up to Springer. We gladly gave him a ride and he introduced himself as "Muir", his trail name. It was about a one hour drive up to Springer Mountain. The trail actually starts at Springer Mountain but since the road meets the trail 0.9 miles from the beginning, we had to hike backwards on the trail to the top of Springer. Once we were at the top of Springer, our journey began. We hiked with Muir for a good amount of time and we would periodically take breaks as we got hot or a little tired from carrying our packs. After getting to know Muir more, we found out that he is a law enforcement officer in North Carolina, he is an ex-marine, he went to Appalachian State, and he plans on doing a 7 day trip and make it to Bly Gap. After a few miles we heard Muir screech. We turned around, and he was grabbing his knee in pain. He told us he has low cartilage in his knees and since he stepped on a root wrong it buckled. He threw on a brace and began to sort of limp behind us. After about 5 more miles we stopped for lunch. We stopped at Stover Creek and we checked out the shelter just to see what they look like. We continued after lunch for 3 more miles to the cemetery where there was a service road. Here, Muir said that the pain is too much that he can handle so he called the National Park Service for a taxi to come pick him up. Muir left and we went on to get to Hawk Mountain shelter which is our goal for the day. We decided that we always wanted to either camp right before the shelter or right after the shelter. When we were about 0.7 miles from the shelter we saw camping sites with water so we decided to hike down and camp right before the shelter. It started drizzling a tiny bit so we decided to set up the tent, make a fire, and make dinner. After dinner it was close to getting dark so we put up all the food, hung it in a tree, and then got ready for bed. We are now going to get our rest for tomorrow. The first day was a success: we head really good execution on our planning and nothing really went wrong besides Muir's collapse.