Odometer: 116…
Marco gets up shortly after 6:00 after another lousy night of sleep. I sleep until after 7:00. It’s after 10:00 when we leave the hotel to drive out to Big Water to get some more information on a walk down Wiregrass Canyon from the Bureau of Land management. We then head 4.6 miles into Smoky Mountain Road once more and park our car near the sign of Wiregrass Canyon. From there we start our hike down the narrow and washed out canyon. The cliffs around us are changing as we walk along. The further down we get the wider the canyon and the more briers (thorny bushes) we have to pass. It would have helped if we had been wearing closed shoes and long pants. After much more than 2 hours of walking we finally see the lake. To have good view of it though we climbed up some rocky hills. Not wearing a watch we had no idea what time it was and how long we had been walking. What we knew though was that we didn’t want to walk back through all these thorny bushes. Therefore, we decided to climb the rim and walk on the flat instead of in the canyon. Not having to walk all the curves of the creek might be even faster as well. So, we are walking and walking seemingly endless. As the sun is near sunset and we are facing high cliffs where ever we turn the situation is becoming frightening especially also because we don’t have more than a few sips of water left. We speed up even more and start walking around the cliffs. What a big relieve when we see that we can make it to the street before dark. Once at the street Marco heads to the right where our car must be parked with 99.9 percent certainty and I head to the left with the spare key for that 0.1 percent. After probably about another miles walk Marco is coming up from behind me with the car and the well deserved water. The sun had just set and not even half an hour later it’s dark. As exhausted as we are, we drive straight to Bella Napoli for a quick dinner before even taking a shower.