Featuring rolling, mist-covered peaks and breathtaking views, the Great Smoky Mountains straddle the border between North Carolina and Tennessee and include 71 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

On  the 1^st of March, with FreshGrounds’ breakfast in my belly and a notable pep in my step, Sim, Lil’ Engine and I crossed Fontana Dam and began our ascent into these iconic mountains.

Indeed, they were smoky – often fog-laden with a blue phosphorous haze – possessing an indelible magical quality. Home to gnarled trees and countless slate-bed streams, hiking up into and through them carried a feeling of hallowedness.

On the second day in the Smokies, a whipping rain swept in, and a shrouding cloud had descended across the land. After summitting Clingman’s Dome, the highest point on the AT, reaching up to 6,643 feet, I was alone and made a slow descent off its back.

The forest thickened – populated by firs and pines, that seemed born of time immemorial – and the path narrowed. Afternoon was giving way to evening, and shelter was a priority whose immediacy increased with each passing second.

Consulting my guide, FarOut, I found a shelter that was 1.2 miles off-trail – an uncharacteristically long detour. I followed a trail, which was rapidly shape-shifting into an near-horizontal waterfall and continued onward.

On, and on, and on, and on I went. Reservations percolated through my mind as to whether I had missed a turn off, but further I pushed until popping out into a clearing.

The fog had grown mythical, and the sense that I had entered another world was pervasive. Ethereal, fantastical, fairy-like.

Stepping into the shelter, I found my dude, Lil’ Engine. The shelter had space – I think there were two others in there, one a thru-hiker and the other out for the weekend – so I quickly made up my camp.

Lil’ Engine and I spent the evening laughing, further entrenching the depth of friendship we were so quickly building. We cooked – I’m sure I had ramen, with a packet of tuna and a portion of powdered mashed potato mixed through – and drank peppermint tea along with S’mores Pop-Tarts.

It was cold – bitingly so, the kind that makes your fingertips hum. Laughing some more, we eventually got ourselves tucked up and drifted off to sleep.

Waking the next morning, I felt an overwhelming desire to stay in my sleeping bag. Thunder was clapping, lightning was flashing, and the rain was torrenting all around. Rolling over, then sitting up, I turned to Lil’ Engine and said,

“I think I want to take an on trail zero day”.

Normatively, zero days – days in which no miles are hiked – are taken in town, where one can wallow in the sweetness of warm hostels, hot showers, and the cornucopia of sensory delights that is an American gas station.

But a zero day on trail? To my inexperienced mind, the idea seemed outrageous. Leaving the Smokies for the day was not an option, as the only road out had been closed because of the weather.

I had brought extra food into the Smokies with me, so calorically there was no issue, and we had been making a pretty hot pace up until then. So why not? I asked myself and Lil’ Engine.

“For sure my dude!”, Lil’ Engine clipped, characteristically relaxed, in her delightfully exuberant Quebecer accent. The other thru-hiker in the shelter was a chap named Atticus. We had met him two nights before, but did not know him all that well. A Virginian and a sound technician, he possessed excellent backcountry skills, and quickly committed too to a zero in the shelter.

Unique to the shelters of the Smokies are the enormous fireplaces built into the stalwart stone-wrought walls. Again, the day was cold, but the wood was wet, meaning a fire was not on the cards.

Or so we thought. With Atticus around, we ought not have been so hasty in jumping to disparaging conclusion.

Diligently, methodically, he began fashioning feather sticks. Taking wet wood, and shaving the ends into thin, still-attached filaments, he carved this seemingly unusable fuel into a tinderbox which readily lit.

With a fire roaring and a continual supply of hot food, we spent the day gorging and warming and trading tales of experiences past. It was a beautiful day, and the first which truly opened my eyes to what thru-hiking is all about.

It’s not the miles you crush, nor the steps you take, but the gaps between them. The open spaces that invite you to envelop yourself in them, provided you are open enough yourself to do so.

“We hike so we do not have to” – a phrase I came to adore on the trail. Many zeroes followed in the weeks and months after, but nothing quite touches the magic of the first.