Night Six – Trey Mountain Shelter

Let’s start with getting to Trey Mountain. There had been a bit of snow the previous day but nothing like I saw today. I didn’t get as early of a start as I had hoped because it is really hard to drag your butt out of the warm cacoon of your hammock to put on frozen clothes and shoes. The clothes are bad enough but stomping and slamming your sore foot into the ground until you can manage to get it into a frozen stiff shoe is a whole other experience.

I hit the trail around 8:45am and snow was just starting to fall lightly. All in all I was making pretty good time and had hit Blue Mountain Shelter, about six miles away, at a little after noon. By the time I got there the snow was heavy and there was probably about four inches. Even in the snow I didn’t want to stop at just six miles so I decided I was going to push on to Trey Mountain Shelter eight miles away. Trey Mountain on its own wouldn’t have been too rough, but it is the constant up and down that has been characteristic of the Georgia portion on top of the snow that made things so hard. So it was a thirteen mile day with a 700 up, then 1100 down, then 1000 up, then 800 down, then 1300 up again. I stumbled my way into Trey Mountain Shelter just after sunset utterly exhausted.

At first I was a bit confused because there was a bunch of gear in the shelter, sleeping bags, a hatchet, flashlight, etc. It looks like a couple of hikers decided to bail and left all their stuff behind. Given that it was still windy and since I had picked up a nice sleeping mat in Neel’s Gap I decided to stay in the shelter vs setting up my hammock however I quickly found out it was nowhere near as warm as my hammock set up. With temps being right around 20 degrees and my realization that I either needed to set up the hammock in the dark or find a warmer shelter solution I decided to use the abandoned sleeping bags and stuff my mat and quilt into one. It actually turned out to be a super toasty way to go and I was plenty warm despite the cold temps.

Although it saved me some hassle of setting up my hammock on that particular night, in general I’m a pretty big LNT advocate. Unfortunately there was no way I was going to be able to pack out much of the extra gear so I did the best I could to tidy up and put it in a neat pile that didn’t take up half the shelter like when I found it. Hopefully the owners of that gear will come back to retrieve it when the weather is better.

Pictured is sunrise at Trey Mountain Shelter. Despite the weather the previous night it was a beautiful sunrise to wake up to.