Day 14

FS road 69 to near Wesser Bald Shelter - 14 mi - 129 mi total
By morning the rain had completely stopped. Opening our eyes, the first thing we saw were big raindrops sti sitting on the outside of our rainfly. We opened the tent and fly doors to look outside and got a showering of ice down the backs of our necks. Sure, It wasn't raining, but our thermometer read near 20 degrees and everything wet had frozen overnight. Took us a few hours to get out of camp because we wanted to wait for our stuff to thaw out (pants, jackets, shoes). We were on the trail by noon and around 1 we were up at the stone obervation tower on Wayah Bald. Awesome view of Clingman's Dome and more of the Smokys in the distance. We're getting really close! Couple of miles later at Burningtown Gap we met a trail maintainer who told us we just missed free hamburgers at the gap. As we were leaving he said "Oh yeah, there's someone coming up behind you". We just sort of looked at him and he continued matter-of-factly "There's radar up there, that's what I'm going up to fix". Alrighty then. We didn't really know what to make of that and walked on. Took a cool blue-blaze trail up to the top of Rocky Bald. Good views and a neat hidden campsite. Heading north again, we crossed Tellico Gap, saw some teenagers getting out of their monster truck and head up the trail just ahead of us. We paused to give some space between us. At the top, we were surprised to find a group of college kids from U. of Florida on spring break who said they were freezing to death (the sun was setting and it was probably around 45*), but no sign of the teenagers- weird. Or not. Stopped at a nice spot on the ridge right before the Wesser Shelter. Quiet night under the stars again, just the two of us.