Cold Mountain - whew!

On Saturday morning Tiff, Liz, Jeremiah, Marshall, Olive, and me all left for Cold Mountain. I did some research on the the trail, but I was getting a lot of inconsistencies online about the distance, the difficulty and the access to water. I printed a few different maps and ended up defaulting to this one.

To start, I got lost driving there. Then I pulled a u-turn up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and ended up sliding off the road in the Discovery and almost hitting a tree. Everyone got out and I slowly tried to drive out and sunk deeper and started leaning way over to the passenger side. I ended up hooking my tow strap to a 4x4 Dodge Dakota and set the guy up directly perpendicular to me. I got a steady pull straight to the side and backed right out while I watch my front passenger quarter panel glide past an oak tree. Then we lost Olive.

Upon finally reaching the trail head, I tied Olive to the side of the truck and we started unloading our packs. I turned around to grab Olive and she was gone. We all split up for about 10-15 minutes when I spotted her. We was way up on the trail above us and she wasn't sure how to get back down to us when we were calling her.

We gathered everything up, left a trip plan in the windshield of the Rover and headed up. I could go on-and-on with details about the hike up, but it is best to say that it was hard. The hardest hike any of us has ever done. We passed a few couples just hiking and they were all surprised to see that we were going to backpack to the summit.

After hours and hours and hours of just brutal hiking we found a good campsite just shy of the top of Cold Mountain. We set up camp and proceeded to the top of the mountain trying to beat out the weather and the sunset. The summit was amazing and worth the effort. We stayed only a short time though. We could see a storm approaching from the west once we reached the top.

Back at camp we made some instant mashed potatoes and cooked hot dogs with cedar. We listened to some WNCW radio and warmed-up with some R&R and Raspberry Stoli. We had a great night and some pretty heavy rain at times.

IN the morning we packed-up, cleaned-up and headed back down to the trail head. It was pretty misty and there were some sprinkles but not too bad. We loaded back into the truck and headed straight for Burgermeisters in Asheville for enormous hamburgers and fried pickles and pitchers of PBR. What a reward! Here is a view of Cold Mountain from Mt. Pisgah.