Here you are, out in the woods, with a giant backpack on. People like you are immediately your friend. Almost everybody that passes by, at least says hello, if not more. You see many kinds of people and different groupings. To me, the most interesting is a girl and guy couple. The girl is almost always perky and happy to be alive, while the guy usually mumbles a lot, but doesn't say much. My thought of that was that, some outdoorsy girl just dragged her boyfriend out to do her favorite sport, while he suffers, thinking that he would rather be back home playing video games. I could be wrong, but it was truly the girl that did the talking in every case. With solo guys, you could either get a "This is the greatest day of my life!" to the sullen downward glance of the person that came here to be alone. I still remember passing this one tall, thin, ghostly-looking guy with a bandana over his face that turned and looked at us wordlessly as we passed by....I kept checking to make sure he continued on his way for quite a while.
The single women on the trail were by far the most interesting. They had the nerve to do something I didn't...heading out into the woods all alone for days at a time.
However, there was one person that really stood out in our minds. That was the Angry Hiker. Not long after we left the Sarver Shelter and our bear friend, we began what was to be the most difficult ascent of the trip. It was the climb to the Audie Murphy monument, something that was hard enough except that we had somehow managed to bring our Florida weather with us. It was 95 degrees that day, and all of us were dripping sweat and wondering how much farther we had to go before the trail leveled out. During this part of the journey, we were passed by a young guy with a baseball hat and joe cool sunglasses and headphones (which we did see a lot of on solo hikers). He was really humping it and stopped for a minute, but I could tell early on, that Paul's friendly conversation was not for him. He took off, up the mountain and soon we could hear him cussing about the trail, who's idea it was, who painted those white blazes, and basically using every cuss word known to a sailor. Paul took this one-sided conversation as an opening to tell the guy about his previous travels in the hiking world and the guy finally yelled down, "Dude! You keep talking to me and I'm too out of breath to help you! I gotta quit smoking!".
My feeling was that he had an appointment to keep somewhere. Either a bet that he could make the ascent in a certain time period, or some awesome food was waiting for him at the convenience store on the other side of the mountain.
A little while later, a really friendly tall guy with two dogs and a bottle of water passed by us. The trail runner guys were amazing. They ran in places where I was almost crawling. We finally caught up to them both, the tall guy laying back resting, his dogs panting, and the angry hiker puffing away on his cigarette. We got a wave and a friendly hello from the tall guy while the angry hiker quickly put away his smokes, got his pack and high tailed it for the top of the mountain. My best guess was that he didn't want to hear any more of Paul's stories.
Paul just took it all in stride, while I spent the rest of the trip wondering what we did to offend that guy. We did have a lot of fun trying to recreate the effect of a guy cussing the whole time he was hiking. I'd have to say that I never met anybody like that again.
There is one other person we met on the trail that might have less than fond memories of us, me in particular. We met him at the top of the mountain by the Audie Murphy monument, and then two other times. We have decided that 3 time meetings is the magic number where you have now become old friends...except that the last time we met him, he referred to us as the 3am guys.....
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