On May 11th we woke up with 10 of our fellow thru-hiking companions and walked three miles in the dark to watch the sun rise at Clingman’s Dome – the highest point on the Appalachian Trail. It was beautiful; with dissipating clouds from the previous days’ rain storm the intense orange looked like that scene from The Lion King. After watching the sun rise, Lindsay and I left Clingman’s Dome and approximately 1/4 of a mile down the trail Lindsay slipped on a wet root and fell. When she fell, her tailbone landed perfectly on a pyramid shaped rock with all of her weight, including her pack. Ouch!

Lindsay watching the sunrise at Clingman’s Dome

We are fortunate enough to have some amazing friends in North Carolina and we plan on spending a week or two with them while she heals up. We are hoping that the two to three week standard healing time might be reduced to a week or two because of her age, good health and strong bones developed from powerlifting, so we can get started hiking sooner. When we start up again we will have Hunter with so we cannot pick up where we left off in the Smokey Mountain National Park (dog’s aren’t allowed). Our plan now is to skip the last 40 miles of the Smokies, start hiking northbound and after we finish at Katahdin in October we will jump in the car and head south to do out last 2 days on the trail to complete our 2,185 mile hike. Hey, we’ve never done anything the easy way in the past, so why start now!

Lindsay getting checked out by the Park Rangers waiting for the ambulance.

We will continue to update the blog with some more posts in the next week while we are recovering and hope to hit the trail by the 25th of May, still keeping us on schedule to hit Katahdin before it closes!

Lindsay bundled up, smiling through the face of pain after dislocating her tailbone.