Pprovost - Appalachian Trail Journal - 2015

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We made it! Springer Mountain Summit

November 18, 2015

November 18, 2015 Wednesday
Day 159
Miles about 2189
Miles left: zero!!!!!!!
Days left:0





We had a fun and diverse group in the Hawk Mountain Shelter, 2 other thrus:Frostbite and CoinToss, a father and son ages 50 and 75, Frostbite's Mom and a very green section hiker guy.

As predicted, the rains came in the night with wind and a vengeance. We had a shuttle to catch and a summit to tag so we were up and hiking as soon as it was early enough to see. There was so much mist in the air that when I went out to get the food off the Bear hang cables, I couldn't see the shelter with my headlamp 15 yards away.

We tagged the Springer Mountain Southern Terminus of the AT at about 10:45 with CoinToss and Frostbite in the pouring rain. We are done!! We walked down the mile trail to the trail head parking lot and within minutes our Hiker Hostel shuttle guy, Josh, was there for us before we even needed to change into warm clothes. It was a long drive down gravel roads even at Josh's breakneck speed (he drives this road at least once a day). We had an interesting conversation where we remedied the issue of problem hikers on the AT forever.

Now that we are done, I can tell this pre-hike story. A week or so before we left, we attended a lovely fundraising dinner at our dear friends, Eric and Carol's, synagogue in Vancouver where they had all sorts of fun entertainment including magicians and a palm/tarot card reader. Betsy and I went in to the psychic's room and had our palms read and then she read our tarot cards. A bunch cards were laid out in front of us then she started turning over cards one at a time and explaining their meaning. She did a few cards and then a card came up that had one bold word written on it, "Failure". She saw this and it clearly bothered her and she quickly tried to discount this and palmed the card away and continued on. I, however, was stuck on the meaning of this card and it's relevance to our impeding trip. Although I wasn't obsessing about it, this card was in the back of my mind throughout the trip. There were so many ways our hike could be totally derailed that were entirely out of our control namely illness and injury in us or even in our family that would take us away. I put this out of my mind as best as I could and we motored on, vowing not to mention this ill omen until we had tagged Springer Mountain. Even in the last few miles I was focused on not doing a stupid wipeout before we had finished.

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