Mount Mitchell

We hiked Mount Mitchell this week-end. We didn't get a full up/down hike, but put in 6 miles (3 up, 3 down). I packed a little too much for the trip (twice as much water as I needed), but better safe than sorry :) It was some good exercise and part of our preparation for Kilimanjaro. There was a bit of rain and thunder for our trip too, but cooled things down so wasn't all bad.

There is construction on the Blue Ridge Parkway that can really bite you if you want to go to Mount Mitchell. Right where the park office is, the road is closed only allowing you to reach it from one direction. Unfortunately for us, we tried to get to it from the other side, and finding out way too late that we couldn't get there. It added about 1.5 hours to our journey having to drive around the mountain to eventually find a path into it.

The GPS we were using wasn't very helpful after we told it to Detour. It kept trying to find other ways to put us on the Blue Ridge Parkway on the wrong side (no option to disable a section of road available to it). We knew we were in trouble when it had us start going down this gravel road (toward "Craggy Gardens"). After that, we hit up a gas station for some advice along with talking to the wife on sporadic cell reception while she looked on google maps. Eventually we got close enough to the other side, that the GPS started figuring things out (but by then we could follow the signs).

Here are some pics from the excursion
http://picasaweb.google.com/CrumpPhotos/MountMitchell

And here is a geocache we hit up while there
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=efd970f9-4783-481d-995b-7f4f8ea6c1e4

A funny thing about this one, with all my recent experience on Geocaching, I've always found a box or canister. This one was a 'virtual cache' which I didn't know about at the time. We didn't find anything, and the coordinates were right in the middle of a construction area (and where the grave of Elisha Mitchell was). We figured something destroyed it and gave up. When I got back I was going to log the situation, but read this one was wanting you to find a plaque and prove you found it by making note of a word on it. Luckily when I explained this to my sister, she remembered the words on it verbatim and recited it to me. Way to go Bek!