Day 30

Miles: 20.1
Total Miles: 368.8

We woke up early at the hostel and decided to slack pack 20 miles, another option given by the hostel. They drive you 20 miles up the trail and drop you off, you hike back with a smaller and lighter pack without your cooking, shelter, sleeping bag, etc., and then the next day they drop you off at the same place and you hike on from there. Arrow and I decided to get the slack done as quickly as we could so that we'd have more time to stay at the hostel. The hiking was exceptionally quick and we could run a decent amount of it. The only problem of the day was a lack of streams through the area we were hiking. Because we were slack packing we'd only brought a single water bottle with us and no guidebooks. Had we brought our companion books along we'd've known that there was a stream not far off the trail about halfway down the 10 miles stretch with no visible water. We did fine even without the water though, just taking a large break when we got to the stream.

The greatest thing about the slack packing was that we were able to hike back down into the town valley rather than up out of it. We passed plenty of other hikers with extremely exhausted looks on their faces on the way down. When we were about 1.5 miles away from Uncle Johnny's Arrow and I ran into Dave who had hiked into and back out of Erwin while we were out. He told us about the great food that we'd missed out on at the hostel and about the church service they were brought to. He's about a day behind us now because of this option though so we were pretty happy with our decisions. We got back down to the hostel and after spending all day talking about how badly we wanted Pizza Hut were relived to find out that the shuttle was running to that area of the town. We each got our own pie and ate half and packed half out.