Big Bald to Unaka Mountain

Barbed Wire Fence Crossing

On Top of Big Bald. This was definitely the highlight of the section. We dodged another thunderstorm bullet on this one. You can see the clouds building in the background (not a safe place to be at 5500 feet).


The 360 degree view was incredible. Bald Mountain Shelter (which lies at 5,100 feet in a saddle back between Big Bald and Little Bald) is a great shelter. We got there about 5 minutes before hail storm hit. Its always nice watching a storm from a nice dry shelter.
We eventually made our way down to Erwin Tennessee and stayed at our first hostel - Uncle Johnny's. This also marked our first hot shower. We resupplied and had a pizza buffet in town before retiring to our private room and watching E.T. - it was so nice.

There was some controlled burning being done on the way up to beauty spot.

The next day we took a short hike up to Beauty Spot - a great bald. We decided not to camp out on the bald because it was pretty cold and windy so we headed a couple hundred yards into the woods and found a nice campsite with a spring nearby. We also had some nice trail magic - someone had put a bunch of soda in the spring. Here is a picture of the sunset from beauty spot.

Its always nice to have a fire on a cold night.

From here we headed up to Unaka Mountain. On the way up there were lots of grassy areas littered with Huckleberry Bushes (maybe).

Near the top these grassy areas gave way to an amazing red spruce forest. We couldn't really see the trail and we had to rely on the white blazes to find our way through this great forest.