Hiking in the Rain

I went hiking in the rain. I thought this would be good practice since it rains so much in the Appalachian Mountain Chain. Some folks claim it rains 11 out of every 10 days. That is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it does rain often. In fact, the higher elevations in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park are classified as rain forest. It wasn’t raining hard, really just a drizzle, but it reminded me of a few hikes I’ve done in the rain.

What I thought was a pretty bad rain happened about the 4th night out of our first section hike. We were down in Georgia camped for the night primed to go over Blood Mountain in the morning. It started to rain so we scrambled for the tent. As the thunderstorm got progressively worse, more and more water was collecting in the floor of the tent. I was frantic to keep my sleeping bag dry. Too bad we don’t have a picture of me inside the tent in full rain gear holding my sleeping bag in my lap and using my sleeping pad as an island amidst the sea swirling around me. Got a new tent the next day. Gotta love those guys at Walasi-Yi Center at Neel’s Gap.

Drying out wet boots

If that was the worst rain I had ever seen, I was mistaken. A worse rain than that happened later in that same trip as we were hiking down to Fontana Dam on the south side of the Smokies. It started raining the night before and by midmorning I thought it was raining about as hard as it could. But I was wrong. It really didn’t pick up speed until the middle of the afternoon. We had planned to camp at a campsite just north of Walker Gap, but when we got there it was under water forcing us to go on to Fontana. The storm seemed to be in its full blown fury as we walked up and over the ridge. The wind blew my poncho all about allowing rain to hit my legs, run down into my gaiters, through my socks, and on into my boots. Every step I took for 5 miles water would squish up between my toes and roll over my foot.

Camped at Roaring Fork Shelter

The worst rain I have been in was Hurricane Francis. We were doing our second section hike and heading over Max Patch racing for the next shelter before the storm hit. The rain was fierce, but the wind was incredible. We knew the storm would be upon us before we got to our next re-supply town, so we took an extra days food in case we had to lay over. When we got to Roaring Fork Shelter we just moved in and set up house keeping. We stayed 2 nights, until Gene’s barometer indicated the storm had passed.

You know, maybe my little walk in this little drizzle wasn’t much practice at all.