Today we woke up early around 7:45 despite a rough nights sleep. We managed to pack our stuff and eat breakfast pretty quickly to get an early start on our 12.3 mile hike. It was much easier to get ready without having to take the time to takedown and pack our huge 30 pound tent. So far I had carried the mammoth tent, which was probably why Ford stayed a solid 15 feet ahead of me throughout our first days. The story of mammoth tent is that we simply didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on tents that weight less than a pound, and mammoth was the tent in our house. It can easily sleep a family of 5 or 6 and the whole trip slept only me and Ford. At this point I definitely see the tent becoming irksome later on. Today Ford offered to carry the tent instead of the food and I gladly accepted his trade. We set out from Blackwell Creek at 9:00 am for Woods Hole, 12.3 miles away. After about 1/2 of a mile into our day we passed a wide creek that we then used our map determine was actually Blackwell Creek, meaning that we had even farther to go on an already long day ahead. We hiked up and down big Gooch Mountain and then down into Justus Creek. Around this time I had started to notice a trend in the elevation of the trail we were hiking. For miles and miles we scaled mountains, then trudged straight down the other side into their valleys or "gaps". This happened over and over again for miles and by day 3 was physically and mentally exhausting. Today we did it for 4 hours before stopping at Big Cedar Mountain for lunch, and then another four hours to Jarrard Gap. We choose to camp here, 2 miles short of our goal because other hikers told us that in order to camp at Woods Hole, we needed to have bear resistant canisters. We were already so tired by mile 10 that we were quietly relieved we couldn't camp there because it meant we didn't have to walk any farther. I made dinner with our last dinner for the first 4 day food supply and had my best nights sleep so far.
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