The Green Knob Mountain Adventure

13 April 2015 ~ 0 Comments

By admin

Health

Happy Monday! I am coming off a vacation high, you know where you had the best weekend ever but feel as if you need one more day to rest and recover? Yup, that’s me.

I guess today will be filled to the brim with coffee… lots and lots of coffee.

In case you missed it, we decided to celebrate my birthday by driving 5 hours fro Charleston, SC to Burnsville, NC to tackle the highest mountain in the Appalachians, Mount Mitchell.

A little side story… Our trip almost didn’t happen.

We rented an SUV because:

A. My car is stick shift and sucks to drive in the mountains (Plus Dan can’t drive it and doesn’t trust my driving for long distances. Men.).

B. Dan’s itty bitty “Pico” is so tiny and cluttered it’s terrible to drive to load up with all the necessities. I don’t think the cops would appreciate me riding in the husband’s lap while he drove so we could pack our luggage.

So an SUV just made sense. Anyways, as we were making our way out of town, we stopped for a quick meeting. While I was getting out, Zoe’s excitement took over and before I could grab her, she leaped from the SUV and pounded the ground. My heart broke as I just knew she broke something. I froze and yes, screamed. She clearly knocked the air out of her, and just laid there (she also screamed). Dan ran around the car to see what had happened as I scooped down to get to her.

That dog is like a cat, I swear. She got up and walked away like it was nothing. So close, and I was shaking for an hour. She didn’t try that again.

Anyone else’s dog always seem to be lucky?

zoe-lucky

That dog, I swear. I didn’t let her out of my sight the rest of the weekend.

We rented this cabin in the Pisgah National Park which was absolutely perfect.

Clean, full of everything we needed and no pet fee. Zoe got to tag along (it’s amazing how much she loves the mountains).

Sorry, we snapped pics after we packed up to leave.

Of course the best part was the swing. We may have had a few glasses of wine the first night and had LOTS of fun on this baby!

If you ever need a place to stay in the mountains we highly recommend Serendipity. So nice to come back to after a day in the woods and pop a bottle of bubbly (or two).

Which brings me back to…

We knew that scaling Mt Mitchell was a one day trip and with 2 full days, we opted for a day of “light trails” to warm our legs up…

This post is spotlighting that day, which, by the way was not at all light. But amazing. I’ll recap Mitchell tomorrow.

Black Mountain Campground

We were blessed that the cabin was a 10 minute stroll to Black Mountain Campground in the Pisgah National Forest. Which meant, we parked our car in our drive way on Thursday and we unparked it when we left on Sunday. Amazing.

Friday, we walked to the campground to check out the trailheads…

First on the list, to see a waterfall! We made our way towards Setrock Waterfalls.

It wasn’t the biggest fall we’ve seen, but it was beautiful and a great way to kick off the morning.

It was easy, the trail was big, and though we had agreed that today would be a light day, we craved something a tad bit more demanding.

Of course all waterfalls are gorgeous but it was only a 1/2 mile hike and that just wasn’t going to cut it.

After looking at a map, I saw a 3 mile hike up to “Green Knob” where it was said to have a lookout tower to enjoy 360-degree views of the area.

I showed the map to Dan, we agreed that 3 miles up, 3 miles down would be perfect and we set off.

Green Knob

About 15 minutes in, I was questioning everything.

Holy shit guys (sorry for the profanity but this is a lot better than the words I was saying during the hike), I was just sure I was going to die on that hike. It was the hardest hike of my life. And no, I’m not just saying that.

There were moments where I wanted to cry, look up at Dan and pull a scene from an old war movie:

“I’m holding you back, just leave me here! Leave me here, gosh darn it!”

But I only said that in my head (the r-rated version of course) and kept climbing up.

Every once in a while Dan would look back and tell me not to look up, the climb seemed never ending.

My tight calves were on fire, and I hated myself for not being more proactive at stretching them. And I was annoyed, it looked far too easy for Dan. <— Luckily, when I asked him about an hour in, he said he was in pain too. Sweet.

The trail was crazy hard, but wow, was it amazing. From time to time we would stop on the edge of the mountain and look out over the valley.

The mountains seemed never ending, and the clouds, I can’t describe them. They were stunning and seemed so close, as if they were kissing the mountain tops. It was this view that kept me climbing, I wanted to see how much better it could get!

About 90 minutes in, Dan could tell I was struggling (I was so whiny). He stopped, took off his Camelback, pulled out some Pomegranate Stinger Chews and practically forced me to eat. After a few minutes, I got a little pep in my step and we continued on until alas, we did it… we summitted.

-Click Image To Enlarge Pano-

It was a feeling neither of us had ever experienced.

Sure, we’ve hiked before, but this was something different. It was if all of the pain I had just experiences for the past 2 hours disappeared, and I was overcome with energy, pride, thankfulness and hunger.

We stopped, took some pictures, ate some snacks (pretzels, cliff bars, and apricots) and headed back down.

Funny story about the picture above… we actually started to make our way down and realized we didn’t take our traditional selfie picture, so we turned around, climbed back up and took it. Lol, it’s tradition!

All together, our “little trail walk” ended up 11.5 miles.

Of course the whole way, I was thinking, “How the heck are we going to do this again tomorrow but with 2 more miles to climb?” but then my prayers were answered when we stopped at the campground to talk with the workers.

When they learned what we had done, they had faces of surprise and congratulated us on accomplishing the hard trail. They said Mt Mitchell would be a piece of cake for us, as it was easier than what we just did.

Praise Jesus was all I could think…

Tomorrow I’ll share our Mt Mitchell Adventure (spoil alert, it was more than just Mt Mitchell)!

The Gear We Rely On For Hikes

Before I head out for today, I thought it might be helpful for some of you, if I quickly shared what we rely on for our day hikes? All of these are items we purchased and all are things we rely on for our trail runs and hikes.

Shoes: