Blue Mountain Shelter to Sassafrass Gap

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A cold windy night! Dropped down to 25 degrees and somewhere in the night there was a brief rain. As a Ranger student we called this area the TVD (Tennessee Valley Divide), and is famous for the wind and cold. It has lost none of it's reputation as far as we are concerned. The shelter was empty when we crawled out of the tent around7:30AM. We did some moving of gear and soon had all our stuff under the roof overhang of the shelter out of the wind, in the sun. We had a hot breakfast of oatmeal with a cup of Joe looking down into the valley seeing the tree greening washing up the mountain sides like water on the sea shore. Views like this sell for millions and all we had to get ours was walk a bit.
Packed up and up the trail by 9AM. Up a short hill and then dropped almost 1,100' into Unicoi on GA 75 about 10 miles from Helen GA. CC had to do some equipment adjustment and I saw a sign for calling 911 so decided to try the cell phone. Had a halfway reasonable signal so made a few calls to let folks know we were doing fine. I love to hear the surprise in their voices when they hear from us. After the break it was up Rocky Mtn a 900' climb that went on forever. Depending which side of the mountain we are on it was a cold, shaded, windy walk or a calm sunny stroll. Water is now everywhere after the heavy rain the other night, not much need to go looking for it way off the mountain.
We saw a few Southbound section hikers but our Pod (I have named our traveling group this because we act like whales moving in a extended family group in one direction. We help each other out when needed and keep track of each other as we move along.) seems to be loosing touch with us as we saw none of them today. We did see two women who seemed to be out trying to do body weight management. We asked them where they had come from and where they planed to stop. Dicks Creek Gap was their start point and Testnatee Gap was the end point. We knew this was somewhere south of us but a bit unsure of the distance as we have been through a bunch of gaps in the past few days. This was 3:30PM and we were nearing our camp for the night. After they were gone down the trail I had to check my map and was floored. These ladies had set a route of 30.5 miles that had taken us 2+ days to cover being in reasonable shape. The lightest lady weighed more than CC pack and all and they were only 10 miles into the 30 with only five hours of daylight left. We figured they might make Unicoi Gap before dark and could get a ride from there, but no matter how you sliced it these ladies were in real trouble.
We also met a fellow going South setting in food caches for his return back North. Now why would you walk South with double the weight to hide food that you were going to eat as you came back North is confusing to me. Non the less that is what he was doing. He told us about a hostel, "Cloud 9" in Hiawassee,GA that was cool and had cool people running it and if we had time it was worth the stop. I told him that is where our next resupply box was headed. We aksed him to relay a message back to "Minimum Man" and he had no problem with that. Then I asked of he could also give a message to Phexen. He looked quite puzzled and said the following:
"I can handle one thing only, I have smoked too much grass and bounced off too many trees, so one thing is all I can handle." At least he knows where he is in the world
We went over a number of mountains today, Tray Mtn and Round Top to name a few 4,700' up and down total. 12.2 miles covered in a total of nine hours. We set up camp in Sassafrass Gap becouse it was near water, 150 yards so the book said. The book was correct in the horizontal distance, it said nothing of the 120' vertical drop to get it. Had a nice supper and retired to the tent, cool but no wind.

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