Pinhoti hike in GA , also a bit of AT news from my NC section hike

Just wanted to offer that this fall I would be interested in hiking either woods part of the Ga Pinhoti Trail if I can get someone to go with to make it easier for shuttling, etc.

If we get along well and hike at the same pace, great - even if we decide before beginning that we aren't compatible, we could consider driving each others car to opposite ends of the section and then swap keys along the trail.

There are 29 miles of road walk from the 1st road in GA before getting on woods trail in the N.F. I don't really care whether I hike that or not, but I do want to hike the 70 miles of trail coming into Dalton.

I'm interested in hiking the other section east of Dalton and continuing on the BMK to the AT also if that's what works best instead. There is 50 miles on the Pinhoti to the BMK, then 70 more miles to connect with the AT somewhere above Springer Mountain.

I tend to get bored and tired after week but can go as far as 100 miles in that time. The A.T. hike 2 weeks ago with the guy from Macon was a success but he took the camera and I still don't have any of his pictures. He didn't take near as many as I would have if I had taken mine instead. We hiked from Fontana at the southern entrance to the Smokies, back to Dick's Creek Gap which is the first trailhead in Ga across from NC. We hiked south because it was easier to get shuttled up to Fontana from our car at Dick's Creek. I knew I would like going opposite the "flow" because I could chat with a lot more people that way. I kept a count of all the people we passed and counted 44 going north on the busiest day - the average was about 20 people per day going north. From the ones we talked with, I'd say 2\3 were hoping to make it at least a long thru-hike, if not go the whole way this year by doing a flip-flop to get to Maine before October. The most interesting group we met was a group of 14 that were hiking, I think you call it "slack-packing" , where a guy named Warren Doyle was SAGing there camping gear every day to a campgroup. The people told me he did this every other year or so and did it for the whole length of the AT and did not even charge anything! I guess they just tipped for gas and such.

Edwin