Thursday, May 21, 2020 5:45 pm 14.7 mi
AT 180.8 Russell Field Shelter → AT 195.5 Siler’s Bald Shelter
Weather: Wet off and on
Trail Conditions: Rocky bits, rooty bits, muddy slippy slidy bits
My Condition: Physically feeling good. Mentally, nervous for a big day tomorrow to Peck’s Corner
Ended up being the only person at the shelter last night which was awesome! There’s 5 other people here tonight just doing a section of the Smokies. Went up Rocky Top today, sang the song, and not long after saw a black bear retreating into the distance. Shortly after, heard some mean grunting, looked to my left, and saw two pretty sizable wild boars/pigs! Good ol’ Rocky Top, Rocky Top Tennessee! Saw a turkey and two rolly polly chipmunks that somersaulted their way down onto the trail. Great day for animal viewing, despite the on and off rain. It would rain JUST hard enough for me to stop and put on my rain gear, only to stop once I had it on. Ate two packs of ramen, plus half a greenbelly bar, for dinner. To top off the day, as I was going to the bathroom and to brush my teeth, I saw a deer grazing. I was already pretty close, but I slowly, quietly crept forward. At one point she spooked, looped back around, and started grazing again. I was able to capture it all on video too! Feel like Snow White or Pocohontas. Or maybe hiker stink makes you completely invisible to animals. Either way, so cool! Went outside in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and for how remote you feel here in the backcountry of the Smokies, it felt like I was surrounded by distant lights! It was an oddly beautiful sight seeing so many distant lights twinkling.
Post Trail Analysis
The shelters are big enough that I opted to sleep inside, and I still had plenty of social distance with the relatively small crowd (HUGE crowd compared to last night – it’s all a matter of perspective). I’m glad the boar spooked and ran off, rather than spooked and charged. This was probably my most dangerous animal encounter on trail! I got probably 10 feet away from this deer, which is pretty incredible. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was its regular spot and it had been habituated to getting fed by humans. Unfortunately for many species, humans can be horrible teachers of bad habits. Picture this – a bear stumbles upon a campsite, smells the food that has been recently cooked, sniffs around, catches a whiff of a food bag that is in someone’s tent, and tries to scratch his way through to the food. This happens all too often, and it creates “problem bears” that roam the same circuit of shelters and campsites each and every night, getting too comfortable being around humans to startle and too persistent to drive off. These bears require relocation, or end up getting put down. The Smokies took the step of putting fences across the opening of each of the shelters. Unfortunately, this created a reverse zoo situation where guests would feed food through the links to curious bears on the outside, reinforcing the undesired behavior. These fences were removed in all but one shelter. At this point of the trail, I took bear bagging quite seriously – Opsak inside of my foodbag with all food, garbage, and scented items in it, and the foodbag either stashed in the locker, up on the pole or wire, or properly hung from a tree. I eased off on this later after I forgot to pack the bear line taking the bag down one morning. The black bears weren’t a problem, especially this year with traffic patterns being far different than what they are used to. I would NOT recommend this same willy nilly attitude in a typical year, but even more so in grizzly country or in places where regulations requiring bear canisters exist. The regulations aren’t really for you, they are to protect bears FROM you!
Warning: My singing could probably be considered dangerous.
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