A few months back, one of my friends sent a message about meeting up for a weekend in a cabin up around Asheville. We had done it a couple of years ago, and it was fun, so why not do it again, but this time in the fall! (although it still feels summerish here) So we picked our cabin, and booked it, but less than a month out, we got a message that they would have to cancel our reservation, because when the hurricane came through, there had been water damage to it, which made sense because it was right on a river. We scrambled and picked a new cabin; this one was more north from Asheville.
I call Asheville our middle meeting ground, because it is four to five hours for my friends from Georgia to get there, but it takes me twelve hours. Obviously not in the middle, but all of them come from Georgia, and it is just me coming from New York, so it makes sense that the split is closer to them. Although maybe we could meet in Virginia sometime…
I had a plan though. The cabin was booked from Thursday to Sunday, and I took Thursday and Friday off, but if I drove all 12 hours on Thursday that would be like missing a day, so Wednesday after class, which lets out at 5, I hopped into my car and started heading south. My original goal was to make it a little over 8 hours to McAfee Knob, so I could wake up the next morning, and immediately start running.
It mostly worked out that way. I will be honest, whenever I am camping or sleeping in my car out in the woods, it is a little scary. Being out there alone in the pitch black of night is a little unsettling, and there are plenty of creepy Appalachian Trail stories, so as I became increasingly tired to an unsafe level, I decided to stop at a rest stop less than 30 minutes away from McAfee Knob and sleep there. I had made it 8 hours, so I had done well enough. Plus there were many other people sleeping in their cars too, so I did not feel scared. It was not too bad to sleep in the back of my car except for the bright lights of the rest area, but it was nice to have the bathroom in the morning right there.
Once I had eaten my peanut butter and honey sandwich the next morning, I headed out to the trail. The parking lot ended up seeming nice enough that I could have slept there, but no matter. I was happy with my decision. The trail starts out on the other side of the street, and when I was crossing, I saw a white blaze, which is what the Appalachian Trail is marked with, but when I got to the other side, I realized it was just a random tree marker, so I paused my watch and pulled up the map to find the actual entrance, and it was just a little further up the road, but I forgot to restart my watch, and it took me a little over a mile to realize that.
(Forgetting to start my watch is always infuriating. It is something so simple, and it is so unnecessary to stop it in the first place, especially on a mountain run when the pace is typically slow and variable, but I will probably never learn my lesson. Thankfully Coros has a really good mapping feature on their app that makes it easy to calculate the missing piece.)
The trail starts out at a nice incline, and it honestly never got too bad throughout to get to the top. The map made it look like there would be some serious incline towards the top, but it never did. The run to the top was so nice that I felt like I did not deserve the grand view that I received. It was stunning in the morning light about an hour after the sun had risen. It was shining down perfectly into the valley below giving it a goldish tint. The mountains off in the distance looked like waves rolling in from the ocean that had been paused just before they were about to break, and they dominated the horizon off in the distance.
I found out about McAfee Knob back in college, when I was really obsessed with hiking, and specifically the Appalachian Trail. I used to love to find cliffs to sit on and take pictures. That was my thing, and this had the perfect pronounced cliff sticking out. When I was up top, I set my phone up to take a video (just like old times), and I went and sat on the cliff, but funnily enough I did not like the picture, I actually liked the one of me running by the cliff better, which I guess is to be expected at this point. Nonetheless, hiking or running up the mountain, the view was well worth the trip.
I decided to keep going along the trail a little further, so I was going down the other side of the mountain, and this was the steep side. I had gone up the easy side the first time, so after I had run down about a half mile and turned around, I had a slightly more strenuous climb to get back to the peak before I headed back down to my car. No complaints though, because I was training to grab as much elevation as I could. The goal was to get to 10,000 for the week, and adding the extra part of the mountain on made it so that I got over 2,000 feet of gain for this run.
While I was heading toward the cabin, I realized that I still would have a lot of time before the 4 o’clock check in, so I pulled up AllTrails, and the first hike that popped up was called White Rock/Buffalo Mountain. It was a little over 5 miles, and it had 1,300 feet of climbing, which was about what I wanted so I set my course that way. It was a short rest from my run that morning, and I had not been eating too much, because a person can only eat so many peanut butter and honey sandwiches, granolas bars, and apple sauce in one day before they get bored. So my energy was low, but it is not everyday you get to run multiple mountains in one day, and to get mountains in two different states in one day, so I went for it.
It was hot! It was about 80 degrees when I was out there, and when I was not under the canopy, I could feel the heat radiating down upon my head making it immediately start to perspire despite my lack of water intake. It truly felt like the summer. The mountain was a small park, but it was well marked with plenty of signs. The trail was all single track, but it flipped back and forth between being right on a cliff side and being along a wider ridge. Thankfully I never had a close call with falling off the edge, but I thought about it a ton because the previous day, I had listened to a podcast about a hiker that had fallen off a cliff and had to wait days to be found and rescued, so I was overly worried.
I tried to push harder on this run, and for the most part I felt like I succeeded at this, although the pace does not show it. I also slowed down at the end. I had gotten the elevation that I needed, so I was ready to be back at the car, so I could finally finish my drive. So when I saw a sign that said Wimpy Shortcut, despite me being opposed to this idea normally, I decided I was okay with it due to it being my second run of the day, so I took it, and it was steep and when it leveled out it was covered in dense leaf fall. The leaves there were big, flat, and dry, which makes for a surprisingly slippery surface. It felt like I was skiing through leaves, and of course, while taking the short cut I got lost. I had the map on my phone, so once I realized that I was doing something wrong, I was able to navigate back to my car, but I really did not save any time with the short cut, so the lesson was learned. Never take a short cut.
After that I went and picked up Ethan from the Asheville airport, because he was trying out his new stand by perk from working for Delta, and then we headed to the cabin, and Matt met up with us shortly after we got there. We all ran out to the store to get food for dinner, and once that was done, we cooked, ate, and then I started to look for the trail for the next day. I pulled up google maps, and almost immediately a dotted line stuck out to me, which usually means a trail. It turns out that it was the North Carolina and Tennessee border, but it was also the Appalachian Trail, and it was only 12 minutes away from our cabin. Perfect!
So I went to bed later than usual because of hanging out, but I got up at a normal time, and despite the lack of sleep, I still felt refreshed, probably because I did not sleep in my car, and I headed to the trail after going through my morning routine. Again, the sun had risen at this point, so I missed sunrise, but at least the trail was well lit. The trail starts right by the interstate, and it starts to climb. It is steady and rolling at the start, but after a while it becomes a steep incline straight up to the top of the peak. At the top, the trees disappear, and it is partly bald, there is at least one side of the mountain where the view is perfectly clear. I did not get to enjoy the vista, because the clouds were sitting in the gap, but I think what I saw was just as beautiful as if I got to see the actual vista. The newly risen sun was illuminating the fog in a goldish glow, and it was casting that glow onto the area around me. So it felt like a magical fog had landed upon the mountain top signifying it importance and adding a feeling of grandeur. Then I responded to a work message, and all the magic was lost. Do not respond to work messages on trail runs.
After that the run turned back into rolling hills. While running up one of the hills, the branches and trees where so think that there were just pin pricks of light peaking through. When I caught the glint of light shining through the holes, it looked like a search party holding flashlight as the light shined through. It caught me off guard. I was so confused why there were people with flashlights when it was bright out, then my brain connected the dots.
I went out for four miles, and when I turned around, the cloud cover set in even more, and the whole lighting changed. It felt like the sun had just set and suddenly, the sky was a dark blue. It went from a gorgeous gold glow to dark and gloomy. It felt as if I had been transported into dusk instead of dawn, but it was cool.
The trail was nice enough coming back that I was able to get some more speed. I finished with an 8-minute mile for the last one, which felt like I was flying. When I finished, I went to scout out the trail head for the Appalachian Trail going in the opposite direction from where I had just run for the next day, and when I came back, there was a dog waiting for me by my car. He was kind of big, and honestly random dogs can be a little intimidating, but I love them nonetheless, so when he came up to me, I started to pet him, and on his collar, it had his name, Roscoe, and it said he lives at Sam’s Gap, and that he will go home, so just leave him, so after petting him for a while, I went back to the cabin with a smile on my face.
The next day, when I went back to Sam’s Gap, I started running right around sunrise again, and I got some decent views as I climbed up to High Rock. There was a small vista there to step out onto, but it was nothing like the previous two days. The trail climbed and descended a few times, and in my 8 miles, I was able to get the 2,000 feet of elevation gain that I wanted, and in back-to-back days over the course of 16 miles, I saw no one out on the trail. It was quiet and peaceful, but I always like to see at least one person.
There were a couple of times where wildlife scared me on these runs. The first time was on McAfee Knob, when I was running down the mountain, suddenly, I saw this blur flying right next to me, and then it smacked into the small tree along the trail and started scurrying. It was just a squirrel, but it came out of nowhere and landed so close to me that it got me good. The next animal that got me was a bird. On my second day running from Sam’s Gap, I was coming down a hill, and right when I was stepping down a small bird that was perfectly camouflaged into the fallen foliage popped up and flew away. That also made me jump badly, and in both instances, I yelled out as well. On the non-scary sign, I did enjoy a plethora of deer sightings!
My last run came early on Sunday morning. I finally got to running before sunrise, and I was running from the cabin, so I had enough time to summit the giant hill/mini mountain before the sun rose, but it was so cloudy that it did not matter, so no giant red ball sunrise was viewed on any of these climbs despite me trying, but the views were still great. There was a pretty cabin at the top as well, which personally, I think adds to the views, but again, nothing compared to the first day’s view.
While climbing the 600 feet in a little over a mile, the bottom of my right Achilles started to pull. It was not terrible, but at this point, I will do anything to avoid an injury, so instead of repeating the hill three or four times like I planned, I went back to my car, switched to my road shoes and set out on a road loop. I knew the loop from driving to the Appalachian Trail the previous two mornings and coming back a different way. I needed a little over nine miles to get to 60 for the week, and I thought the loop would be about 6 maybe a little more, so it would be perfect given my first climb and decent had gotten me 2.5 miles.
Switching to my road shoes for the first time in a couple of days felt amazing. It also felt fast. None of my trail runs were fast, so my legs were ready to get moving and grooving. I knew there was one massive hill, and it came about two miles in, and it was a mile straight up hill that climbed 400 feet. It was awesome. I wish I knew where to find one of those hills closer to home. Then I had to lose all 400 of those feet in the next mile, and I was flying down so fast, that I could literally feel the heat on my feet from the friction of my socks rubbing on the sole of my shoes so rapidly. There is not a lot of wiggle room in my shoes, but there was enough to cause some serious friction. So my slowest mile was my first, a 10:03, going up the gravel mountain by the cabin, and then miles later, I ran a 5:32 effortlessly down a massive hill. I do not think I could have run down it slower if I tried. Gravity was dragging me down, and I was so fast that the dog who decided to come chase me gave up almost immediately, but to be fair, the dog was short and a little overweight.
I tried to keep the pace up the rest of the run, but I quickly realized that I had misjudged the distance, and not only had I misjudged it, I was off by 50%. The loop ended up being 9 miles instead of 6, which was fine, but I started to bonk the last few miles and coasted in to finish. I still ended up with over 1,600 feet of gain on my mostly road run. I was so content and tired that I walked up the last hill to get back to the cabin, finishing off a great set of runs.
I came out here with a goal of getting 60 miles and 10,000 feet of elevation gain, and by Saturday morning I had crested above 10,000 feet and was closer to 11, and by the time the trip ended the next day, I had 63 miles and 12,500 feet of gain. The Appalachian trail treated me well. I only got super tripped up once, and the rest of the time, I was just cruising up and down the magnificent land that is lovingly known as God’s Country, and although I have experienced the beauty of North Carolina multiple times before, it never gets old.
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