Backpacking in North Carolina

So, once again you all haven't heard from me in awhile. These past two weeks have been finals and a blizzard. Last week was spring break, so I took the opportunity to head down to North Carolina with some friends to do some backpacking in the Smokey Mountains. It definately turned into an adventure. I guess we should have gone on our premonitions from day one (Sunday night) when the campground we were supposed to stay at for the night was closed. Day two (Monday) involved starting out on the wrong trail for three miles, and then once we found the right trail head at around 4pm...we then had a problem actually finding the real trail. Finally at almost 6 we started hiking and ended up making it about 2 1/2 miles before it started to get dark. It also involved a lot of stopping to reorient ourselves and look for the trail. Day 3 involved Adam going to look for his gun (which he has somehow lost in all our trail craziness the day before. If you are wondering why he had a gun it is because we were in bear country) and then us heading out at about 3 in the afternoon. We ended up crossing the river, following the trail as best as we could, about 8 times. We finally got to a trail crossing and were able to determine exactly where we were in the dense forest and realized that we had about 7 miles to go to get back to the car. We were able to hike about 1 more mile that night. Day 4 involved us heading out at 9 am. We then hiked about a mile and crossed the river about 12 times. Each time it got progressively deeper (starting at about ankle depth and ending at about thight depth). It also started to pour down rain. We finally made it to the end of the trail at about 12:30. (There was a road at this point), but we still had to turn on to the trail to take us back to our car and up the mountain. We had about 4 miles left. By now it had been raining for about 3 hours and we were all soaked. We started up the trail and about 3/4 of a mile up the trail dissapeared...it was nowhere to be found. We had two choices...to go back the way we came (which took us about two days) or to go back to the trail head and figure out where the road went and hope it took us back to our cars. We chose the latter. At the trail head we determined the cars were about 12 miles down the road. Two of the guys we were with, Adam and Preston, changed into dry clothes, grabbed food and water, a map, and cell phones and started running toward the car. In the mean time I set up a tent and the rest of us changed into dry clothes and hung out for four hours until the guys drove up to rescue us. No one died...no one got hypothermia and the moral to this story is....always call the forest service ahead of time to determine if trails are still good (apparently ours weren't...Preston and Adam were informed of this by the forest ranger who rescued them about 6 miles down the road). It was a good adventure though.