{"id":65,"date":"2009-04-05T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T21:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/?p=65"},"modified":"2010-05-17T07:29:31","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T11:29:31","slug":"fontana-dam-to-russell-field-shelter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/05\/fontana-dam-to-russell-field-shelter\/","title":{"rendered":"Fontana Dam to Russell Field Shelter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, 4\/3<\/p>\n<p>AT Miles = 13.8 \/ 177.5<br \/>Other Miles = 0 \/ 13.4<br \/>Total Miles = 13.8 \/ 190.9<\/p>\n<p>When I went to bed last night I had pretty much decided to take a zero at Fontana Dam, but apparently sometime while I was sleepibg I decided not to. I woke up about 3:30 this morning and couldn&#39;t get back to sleep because my mind was full of all the things I still had to do before I would be ready to head out. So, I got up and washed out my bandanas (I have three, one for washing my body, one for washing my dishes, and one I keep in my pocket all day for wiping away sweat, dirt, etc.), I moved the socks I had washed last night, but were still wet, so that they were sitting on the heater so they would dry fast. I finished up those ands a bunch iof oither little chores, then at 6:00am I headed up to the main lodge and used the public computer to upload my photos so you all could enjoy them.  When the restaurant opened at 7:30, I had a great breakfast, then headed back to my room and finished up my bounce box, grabbed my pack and trekking poles, took one last look around the room to ma<br \/>ke sure I hadn&#39;t left anything, then headed up to check out and to get a shuttle bacxk to the trail.<\/p>\n<p>It was heavily overcast and very windy, but it wasn&#39;t raining and I actually got a few photos of the dam as I walked across. Once across the dam I walked into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That was exciting.<\/p>\n<p>The trail climbed steeply and it quickly got colder and wetter and cloudier. It seemd to take forever to get anywhere. Finally I arrived at the shelter and it was one of the old fashioned ones with the chain-link fence across the front and a gate that could be latched at night when everybody is in for the night.<\/p>\n<p>It was wickedly cold with the wind blowing. I had my doubts that the water for dinner would ever boil on my wimpy little alcohol stove, but eventually it did. I managed to stay awake for a decent interval after supper, standing around in the shelter talking with other hikers, then crawled into my nice warm sleeping bag around 8:00 as the sun went down.<\/p>\n<p>Allen Freeman<br \/><a href=\"mailto:allen@allenf.com\">allen@allenf.com<\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.allenf.com\">www.allenf.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, 4\/3 AT Miles = 13.8 \/ 177.5Other Miles = 0 \/ 13.4Total Miles = 13.8 \/ 190.9 When I went to bed last night I had pretty much decided to take a zero at Fontana Dam, but apparently sometime while I was sleepibg I decided not to. I woke up about 3:30 this morning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at_thru_hike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":480,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/allenf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}