the smell of your hair, i know it's still there.

Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don't think, "Hey, I did sixteen miles today," any more than you think, "Hey, I took eight thousand breaths today." It's just what you do. Bill Bryson

Morning y'all,

It's a misty morning up top. The high yesterday reached 41 degrees. The low was 28 degrees. It was 31 degrees and cloudy at 7am observation. The mountain received a lot of sunshine yesterday, but temperatures up top were still pretty cold, so we didn't have much melt. There's still about an inch of snow up here. The ice on Alum is manageable without Microspikes, save for a few tricky sections. I would imagine that it will continue to get easier and easier as we have some warm weather forecasted for the next few weeks.

It's finally beginning to feel like the Great Smoky Mountains up here. Some light mist rolled in late last evening, settled in and now we are living the cloud. I was a little worried that we'd have California type weather all season after our early snowfall, but it appears that the Smokies' inimitable variety hasn't left LeConte. I am thrilled to rediscover the mountain today, as it is an entirely new place in this kind of atmosphere. There's an air of mystery with this kind of fog in winter weather, especially on a slow Monday afternoon. It really changes the character of the mountain, or at least your perception of it. Enjoy the mystery, folks.