Day 5

It's nice being in a hotel bed. 

I slept decently again last night. Something ran through near the camp around 10:30 -- couldn't tell if it was a bear or a deer but either way, I went to sleep shortly afterwards. 

Besides turning over a few times in the night, I slept until 6:40 am. Once I heard people moving at 7, I started to tear down and get ready to start moving again. 

By 7:45 we had everything packed up and we began hiking. We wanted to go 3 miles to the next gap over and grab some water and eat breakfast. After arriving there around 9, we cameled up and put away our breakfast. 

We wanted to move quickly since we had to do a pretty grueling 9.3 miles with only a couple hours to spare.

The big climb of the day was Kelly knob, a mountain where we gained slightly less than 900 feet in 1 mile. After going up and over 3 big mountains yesterday, I was really feeling it going up. 

Throughout the rest of the day, we primarily went downhill, which was probably more than 1700 feet down over 4 miles. 

When you're going uphill, your muscles hurt, and when you're going down, you joints and ligaments hurt. Thankfully, evening after all the hiking we've done recently, we feel as though we're in pretty good shape. And we'll need it going into NC tomorrow. 

We got to dicks creep gap, mile marker 69.4 at 12:10, 20 minutes before our shutting was going to pick us up. 

After Dale "Bandit" Johnson picked us up at 12:30 and drove us into hiawassee, we've gorged ourselves on some burgers, sandwiches, and fries. Now, I think we'll order a meat lovers pizza. We also got a 4 day resupply which will last us up until the NOC. From there, it's only 2 days back into the smokies -- looking forward to it all. 

It's been nice being in town and taking a bit of a break. Like I said, none of us are injured, but taking it easy after hiking 80 miles in 6 days is a welcomed relief. 

We'll certainly relax for the rest of the night, and generally plan out where we want to roughly target for camping over the next few days. 

Daily recap:
- hiked 9.3 miles
- from mile marker 60.1 to 69.4
- from steel trap gap to dicks creek gap ( Nero into hiawassee) 
- high temp was 65 and blue sky
- low temp (morning) 35
- low temp (tonight) who cares I'm inside
- ascent: 2,316 feet
- descent: 3,124 feet. 

*Not sure if the elevation change is right, the map service couldn't locate me properly since I was in hiawassee and off trail. Judging from my body though, that feels about right*

Looking forward to crossing off the first of many states from our list. 

Thanks for following,
Tyler M.

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