Day 136

After getting sporadic amounts of sleep due to the very loud snoring I got up at 5 am and started hiking. It was very much still night and even though it was a full moon there was too much cloud cover for it to do more than show the outline of the trail. Which was a good thing cause about a half hour before first light my headlamp ran out of batteries. I was up on a very narrow knifes edge ridge with 1000 ft drops on each side with no light except a little moon glow through the clouds. I think that was the most dangerous thing I've done on this trip. It was still very pretty and I had wanted to do a full moon hike during the trip but I am going to try it again sunday when there are no clouds and I have a headlamp. The main reason I kept hiking is so I could make it to gatlingburg where I had a box waiting with my rain jacket. I made it to newfound gap which was where I could get a hitch to town by 9:50 but had no luck getting a hitch. There were literally hundreds of people up there and not a single one gave me a ride. The post office closed at 11 so I just told them to mail my jacket back and hiked on. I was done with the smokies. I just didn't want to deal with all the people. Still it was a fairly nice overcast day and I had a great 360° view from clingmans dome along with a constant stream of tourists. I hiked the nice graded paved half mile 300 ft. approach path the tourists had to hike to get to the visitors center thinking it might have hot food. It didn't. I did get some replacement batteries there so it wasn't a total waste of my time. It was also amusing breezeing past the tourists on the way back up without really trying while they were panting and stopping due to how hard it was for them to be walking and not driving. Yes I'm still a but mad a not getting a ride down to town from people like this. I eventually get to a shelter feeling like a badass southbounder having dusted everyone I saw and did 24+ over the tallest mountain on the trail. Then Trashcan walks in. He had just done 38. Ego = crushed. Just goes to show that there is always someone out there bigger, badder, faster than you.