2-Night Solo (+2 Dog) Backpacking Trip
This was my first-ever solo backpacking trip. It's a loop trail near Franklin, North Carolina that I had backpacked a couple of times before; once with Carla and Brian in July 2017.
15 miles of this 25 mile loop is on the Appalachian trail, and there are connector trails at the beginning and at the end that lead to the Standing Indian Shelter.
I downloaded my GPS directions from this site, plugged them into my GPS, and used them heavily on the trail. Of course, I had a map that was $15 at the store at the Standing Indian Campground.
We hit the trail on Friday around 6:00PM, and the weather was great up until Saturday at 2:00pm when the sky fell out. Fortunately we had just stopped at a shelter for a late lunch so we missed the worst of it, but then we picked up and made it another ~7 miles to the next shelter. While not actually sleeping in the shelter, I'm glad we went there because there was good conversation with fellow hikers plus a bonus campfire, which the dogs and I all appreciated.
That was great until the sky fell out again all night long. In fact, Mabel decided to disobey my come-here command in favor of staying in the shelter a couple hundred feet away. I had to drag her down to the tent, but once inside we all snuggled up and slept. Yes, I let the dogs in my tent in inclement weather.
On Sunday morning we had a pleasant, but wet hike back to the car. This trip was great. Thank you Carla and Brian for convincing me to do it. I plan to do more of these backpacking trips in the near future.
