My first stop enroute was Dahlonega, GA, where Kevin (the guy who responded to my craigslist ad) gave me a set of panniers and a headlight for my upcoming bicycle trip. He was working on cars with a buddy...

...at his beautiful forest-hill house...

...with his three-legged dog, the most mellow canine it has been my pleasure to meet.

Then I finished my drive to Robbinsville, NC, which is is the southern Appalachians. From here I picked up a dirt road into Big Fat Gap, deep within the Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock Wilderness of Nantahala National Forest.

A network of trails winds in and above two watersheds that were once logged by the Babcock Land and Timber Company and are now regrowing.

Fortunately, one section of the forest was spared when another resource-raping outfit damned the Little Tennessee River, submerging Babcock's railroad route.

This untouched part was named for Joyce Kilmer, a guy who wrote a poem about a tree.

it was a wonderful birthday for me. three days of solitude in rivery treesy mountainy springtime goodness.

this is the slickrocdk river. i found a few old rails along its banks, nearly eaten by undergrowth, from the babcock days.

there was nobody out there! i had all this wonder to myself. no charge. it felt like sailing to a remote panamanian paradise anchorage.

at the end of my first day's hike, i relaxed and snoozed by wildcat falls...

...with richard henry dana, jr., my hiking partner.

that evening i camped along the left bank, my food hung high out of reach of the bears i never saw. neither did i see the wild pigs.

i was visited, however, by these friendly critters, the charismatic megafauna of the insect universe...

...and two rabbits...

...a nocturnal rodent, a turkey-looking creature, several small birds, a few soaring birds of prey, and many curious but harmless flies. *

and now please aquaint yourself with the signage of the land. these are from the NC side.

behold the land of the hungry trees. these orange ones along the Tennessee border did not match local decour and thus were not allies of the local flora, who worked slowly but consistently to eraditcate them.

and these lined the trails on the TN side. got a bear in the chamber and nine in the reserve.

i thought this looked cartoonishly happy. what do you think?

after a long day's slog to windward (climbing out of the valley and up and up along the ridgeline), the good ship simon and his hiking stick came upon this anchorage and dropped sail for the night.

where i fired up the galley...

...and poured through the charts.

the day of my birthday was the best of it. i woke up to my yummy breakfast of hutzelbrod, and a much-welcomed and long-waited-for poo...

...and then settled back into my tent for a violent thunderstorm, which i savored every minute of.

i love thunderstorms (we lack them in my homeland of southern california), and i have never ridden one out in a tent before. there was just a tolerable amount of primeval fear there, enough to be stimulating but not enough to be debilitating, and i busied my mind with setting up whatever receptacles i could to catch the water dripping off the tent.

the rain lasted JUST long enough to fill me to capacity, which saved me the trouble of hiking down a thousand feet to the nearest water source and back up. thor's birthday gift to me.

and then the day's hike, maybe four or five hours, was the most beautiful of the trip...

as i slowly gained a few thousand feet of elevation along this wooded ridgeline...

...bringing me at long last to a rocky peak called hangover...

...where i could finally see everywhere i had been (for the first two days were under the contant cover of trees) and take in the splendour of this borderland between tennessee and north carolina.

(it was fun the night before, sleeping in NC but peeing in TN.)

this is the narrow woody path running out to the lookout

and not far from this peak was a beautiful place to set up camp.

after which i headed back out to my viewpeak to watch for hours as the weather piled in from the northwest.

it never rained, though, and my delightful book (two years before the mast) entertained me at greath length up there.

after a tasty hot birthday dinner of cheesy pasta and 1.5 mint newman-o's, and then some dark chocolate...

...i noticed the clouds had cleared out and i hiked back to my favorite perch to suck up a hearty dose of moonless starry night.

it was warm and breezy up there at night.

blissful slumber, and then i awoke to dreamlike mist whizzing through the trees of the little saddle i was camped in.

three days of solitude was exactly what i needed after two months on a computer in urban existence.

it was an ideal time to reflect on the past three (dynamic!) years of my life and phase my mind into my next decade.

if this is poison ivy, i'm hosed! it was everywhere!
(editor's note: it must not have been)

these remind me of my childhood on the east coast. we don't get them in southern california.

now take a deep breath, shut your eyes, make a wish, and blow.