pwhumphreys's profile

For those who haven’t seen our various posts on social media, unfortunately due to Hurricane Helene we were forced off the trail after only 100 miles on the AT.

We are very fortunate to have waited out the storm in the company, comfort and generous hospitality of the good folks at Mountain Harbour Hostel in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, who’s property has been irreversibly damaged by the floodwaters.

We got back on trail late on Friday (27th September) to find it too had been decimated by the storm. We had to wade violent streams where bridges had collapsed, climb through labyrinths of fallen trees and scramble over landslides. We camped high on the treeless tops to avoid the ‘widowmakers’, where we were then exposed to a night of gale force winds battering our tents.

The following morning, the high winds continued and we braced our way through 12 miles in poor visibility before we reached Carvers Gap, a high mountain pass linking Tennessee and North Carolina. We were lucky to be picked up there by some locals. They were driving round the mountain in the hope of finding cell signal to let their families know they were ok, as their homes had been completely cut off, with all power lines, roads and services connecting them to civilisation destroyed.

They drove us as far as they could down the mountain where we continued on foot down the road back to town. After a few miles and climbing through and round various fallen trees and power lines, we were able to hitch a lift to the nearest major town of Elizabethton. On the way we saw the extent of the devastation of the storm. Homes levelled, cars, roads, bridges, power lines destroyed, and people shovelling the silt out of their homes from the floodwaters.

In Elizabethton we learned that the next 2 towns on our route, Erwin and Hot Springs had been destroyed, and the southernmost 800 miles of AT had been closed due to the damage.

With this in mind we decided to find a hotel and regroup to work out what we were going to do instead. The first hotel we found had no water, as the city had shut off the supply due to contamination from the floodwaters. We then managed to find an alternative in the nearby city of Bristol.

Due to the level of damage along the Appalachian trail, even further North of our intended section, we decided to look elsewhere and settled on the Ouachita trail in Arkansas, which we should be able to complete in full.

This is obviously absolutely gutting. We spent a year preparing for this journey together, and Pete has been wanting to do this specific route for most of his life, so to have our plans derailed in a way we never for one second anticipated really knocked the wind from our sails.

Thanks so much to all who have donated so far. Whilst we are so pleased to have smashed through our original target and so proud to be making a difference to two amazing charities that mean a lot to us, we are also distraught that we won’t be able to compete what we set out to do it all for in the first place.

With that in mind, following a week or so’s hiatus as we travelled across five states to make it to our new start point, we are now four days into our hike of our new challenge - the c. 230 mile Ouachita trail heading from Arkansas into Oklahoma.