5.0 and I got a late start out of Standing Bear. We decided to eat one more frozen pizza for lunch before we left. Other hikers that were zeroing told us we should stay but we picked up a few resupply items and headed back out on trail. The weather was sunny and cool.

The climb out of Standing Bear was a brutal. We had been warned, but truly I prefer not to know. We’re going to climb whatever we come up against, why waste time worrying about it. All miles are definitely not created equally.

It was Mother’s Day, and my thoughts returned to my mother. She would have been interested in hearing all about the hike. She would have been most interested in hearing about all the people on the trail. I wish I had the opportunity to share it with her. She loved people, she made helping and giving to other people her life’s work. Even during her darkest hours, when she finally agreed to accept the comfort care of Hospice, she would go in her kitchen and make bread and other treats for the Hospice nurses who came to provide her end of life care. I miss the smell of that fresh bread. She made our family’s fresh bread for the week every Tuesday. I can still remember exactly how the kitchen smelled every Tuesday afternoon when I got home from school as a boy. It’s something I’ll never forget. I talked to her a lot that day, I felt her presence strongly, we walked together in the woods that day.

I reached the shelter pretty early. I set up my tent to hopefully help it dry out. But the southern Appalachians are a temperate rainforest, and as the clouds began to gather, there was no hope of anything drying out.