The Appalachian Trail spends most of its 2,197.9 miles being a path in the woods. Around mile 31, it ducks through a stone breezeway at Neel Gap, in a building where you can buy new boots and, according to the store, a heated frozen burger.
People have walked in there carrying a hardback "War and Peace" and, in one case, 125 Viagra pills. Some have walked in crying. Long before any of them, the place was a tea room, on land from a family in the leather business, and that becomes funnier once you see the tree out front.
One roof, about five feet long
The Georgia Appalachian Trail Club says the stone arch here "is the only place along the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail where the treadway passes through a man-made structure." The store's version is "the only covered portion of the trail's 2100 plus miles." Blue Ridge Outdoors sized up the glory in 2014 as "a five-foot long, roofed breezeway." That's the only length we found, so call it a magazine's number.
The claim has at least one heckler. A travel writer at TakeMyTrip overheard a visitor "playing devil's advocate," who suggested that the trail also passes below bridges and highway overpasses, "which are also manmade structures." Fair enough. We couldn't find anybody who has settled this by checking the whole trail, so the word "only" belongs to the club and the store. The same writer noted that the one sign marking the spot was a white rectangle on the wall, and that the bathrooms were off to the side "for those hikers who've been holding it in for the past 2,000 miles or so."
The mileage in the claim moves around too: 2,174 in that travel piece, 2,175 when the store's operator said it on Georgia Public Broadcasting, 2,178 in the Atlanta paper in 2010. Nobody was lying. The trail keeps changing length.
A tea room and some very useful trees
Until the 1920s this notch in the Blue Ridge was called Frogtown Gap, and the mountains around it cut Union and Towns counties off from the rest of the state. The turnpikes in the area charged tolls, which north Georgia farmers didn't care to pay on the way to market. So the state's first highway engineer, Warren Rabun Neel, surveyed a road over the top. On July 4, 1925, a dedication at the gap drew between 3,000 and 4,000 people, according to the local papers of the day, "said to be the largest number that had ever gathered on any mountain in the area." The governor made a speech.
The land around the gap already had an owner with a professional interest in bark. Near the turn of the century, the Pfister-Vogel Leather Company of Milwaukee had bought about 65,000 acres around what is now Vogel State Park, because tanning leather took tannic acid and tannic acid came from trees. The company also ran five sawmills. Then a synthetic version came along during World War I, which the building's National Register file says saved "some of their Georgia forest land from destruction."
At the gap, the Pfister-Vogel Land Company put up a wooden building for use as a tea room and lodging. And on May 1, 1927, August H. Vogel and Fred Vogel Jr. gave the state 16 acres, two of them right here. More gifts followed, and they became the park. One of the people the file credits with inspiring the donation is Bonnell Stone, who was a company forester, a state representative from Union County and, by the same file's account, instrumental in getting the highway built. That's a man with a full calendar.
The boys from Company 431
In June 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived: Company 431, also known as Camp Enotah, made up of unmarried young men between 18 and 25, by Georgia DNR's description. They built the cabins and the dam at Vogel State Park and a shelter on top of Blood Mountain, but the National Register file says most of their development work went into Neel Gap.
They built the main inn from stone that came out of the highway construction. They wrapped the old wooden tea room in stone so the two would match, and a covered walkway joins them, with the trail running between. As far as the file tells it, then, the famous roof is the link between a new dining hall and an old tea room.
The inside was paneled in chestnut, which sounds like a luxury and may have been closer to salvage. Blight hit north Georgia's chestnuts starting in 1925, many had to be cut, and the file says that's "probably" why the paneling is there. The store gives the construction dates as 1934 to 1937, and the National Register says 1934 to 1938. The Appalachian Trail itself was fully connected in 1937, but this wasn't mile 31 yet. The southern end was on Mount Oglethorpe until 1958, when development pushed it north to Springer.
Popular and broke
Known early on as Vogel Lodge, it was a restaurant, dance hall and inn. It was "immediately popular," according to the file, and the state parks director wanted more bedrooms a year after it was finished. It usually opened only from spring through November. Bonnell Akins of Blairsville, who leased it from 1952 to 1963, told the file's author that "although it was popular, it was never financially successful." Georgia DNR says the inn closed in 1965.
What followed was a slump. For a few years in the mid and late 1960s, according to a writer who worked at the store, an artist turned it into a live-in pottery studio. By the 1970s it was neglected and headed for demolition until local residents lobbied to save it. When the National Register form was prepared in 1978, a park ranger was living in the old tea room and running a craft and hiker's supply shop, and the old room numbers were still on the doors. The form had to argue for an exception, since the building wasn't yet 50 years old, calling it "an outstanding example of the workmanship of the Civilian Conservation Corps." (Georgia DNR and some others date the listing to 1977. The form we read was signed in 1979, and that's the year the Atlanta paper uses, so we're going with it.)
In 1983, Jeff and Dorothy Hansen turned it into the gear store and hikers' stop it is today.
The man with the framed resignation letter
The person most responsible for the stories was a corporate retail executive. Winton Porter rose through Galyan's in Atlanta and handed in his resignation on December 6, 2000. Blue Ridge Outdoors says the letter stated, "My dream begins now." He put up his entire 401(k) as collateral, according to Backpacker, and his wife, Margie, co-signed the contract from a hospital bed, where she was recovering from having their second daughter. "We gave birth twice in one week," Porter said. A framed copy of the letter later hung by the case of frozen burritos.
He took over the lease in 2001 and went from a 120,000-square-foot superstore to a 3,500-square-foot shop that, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said, "looks like a phone booth." He described the new job this way: "I'm a back-ologist, a shoe-ologist, a psychologist, a sociologist and a plumber." The plumber part wasn't a joke. On the day the paper visited, two of his veteran hikers were gluing PVC pipe to fix the line from the well.
The shakedown
The store's signature service was an item-by-item inspection of everything in your pack, which could take from one to four hours. "Spend that much time with a customer and you'd get reprimanded or fired at most stores," Porter told Backpacker. "For us, it builds tremendous loyalty."
By Neel Gap, northbound hikers have had about 30 miles to regret their packing, and the pile tells on them. The Atlanta paper's list of discards included a machete, a coffee grinder, a hardback "War and Peace," and a snorkel and mask, all boxed up and mailed home. Backpacker's list was stranger. A hiker known as Minnesota Smith packed nine rolls of toilet paper. The Viagra belonged to a 62-year-old. Somebody else pulled out a snorkel mask and flippers. There is, as far as we can tell, no snorkeling on the Appalachian Trail.
Our favorite customer is the one known as Ranger Rick, who staggered in under an 89-pound pack. "It took two of us to carry the damn thing," Porter said. "He had three pounds of coffee and three pounds of creamer and sugar in there. We got him down to 34 pounds. He made it all the way to Katahdin."
Backpacker put the typical session at about 12.5 pounds saved. Porter told the Atlanta paper that UPS hauled off about 9,000 pounds of unneeded gear a year, and Backpacker, using four tons, adds that he was pretty certain UPS used his route to haze new drivers. Another 1,000 pounds of food went into the hostel's hiker box.
People have not learned. A store employee with the trail name Moose Juice, writing for The Trek in 2023, reported helping a hiker send home "12 pounds of knives, a machete, and a hatchet." Our Neel Gap guide says what we know about the service now, which comes down to asking when you call.
Tears as big as half dollars
Those first 30 miles are hard. Backpacker called them arguably the toughest stretch on the trail, steep and rugged, cold and wet in the early spring when most thru-hikers start. They also come right after a person has announced the plan to everyone they know.
"They've told all their friends they're going to walk the AT," Porter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "They've walked 30 miles, and now they're entertaining the word 'quit.' They walk in crying tears as big as half dollars."
His answer was to introduce the staff. "I tell them, 'Here are the people who are going to help you. Their names are Lumpy, Flying Pork Chop, Dartman and Cornbread,'" he said.
One raw March morning in 2008, a 66-year-old named Christine Serafin limped in with a swollen right knee and a 31-pound pack, before food and water. She was a former timekeeper at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and her trail name was Indy Girl. She stayed an extra day, bought a lighter jacket and left with a 21-pound base load. "That's a good diet program," she said. At Backpacker's last report she had made it through most of Virginia, then flip-flopped to Maine to escape the summer heat.
How many people don't go on is another matter. You'll see it said that a quarter of all thru-hikers quit here. We found that repeated on blogs and forums with no study behind it, and Backpacker's 2008 figure was one in six, also with no source. Meanwhile, Blue Ridge Outdoors reported something like 200 photos of former customers on top of Katahdin taped to the walls in 2014.
The tree
The tree out front is hung with old boots. Backpacker, in a 2015 photo caption, calls it "the tree where hikers throw their hiking boots after buying new ones from the outfitter there." Atlas Obscura says southbound hikers throw them up there to celebrate the end of a long walk, while "less-seasoned hikers joke that the boots in the trees are from those who have already given up by the time they reach this location." Nobody seems to have kept records. We're rooting for the new-boots version.
Inside was a more organized effort. In 2008 hundreds of worn boots hung from the chestnut posts and beams, the start of what Porter called his Museum of Old Soles. "I'm shooting for 2,175 boots, one for every mile of the AT," he said. By the 2026 count he'd need about two dozen more.
Add it up and you have worn-out leather hanging from chestnut that was probably cut because of blight, in a building on land from a leather family. We can't find anyone who planned that.
The frog, and the people who named it
The name is older than anything else here. The ethnographer James Mooney, who published "Myths of the Cherokee" in 1900, gives the Cherokee name as Walasi'yi, "Frog place." He says it first belonged to a mountain to the northeast of Frogtown Creek, "(Rock mountain?)," from a tradition that a hunter had once seen there "a frog as large as a house." The trail club says the creek rises just north of the gap, and Mooney says a Cherokee settlement along it carried the same name. That question mark is Mooney's, and we like him for it.
Elsewhere he says the walasi frog was marshal and leader of the council in Cherokee animal stories, which may be what the National Register file means when it cites an unnamed historian calling Walasi the chief of the animal council. Mooney also lists a second Frog place, in the Great Smokies, with stories of its own, so be careful with anything you read that merges the two.
Mooney's notes also list Fort Scudder, on Frogtown Creek, among the stockades built to collect the Cherokee ahead of the Removal. The name stayed on these mountains after the people who gave it were forced out of Georgia.
One man, no S
W.R. Neel got his name on the gap around 1924, and a plaque with the correct spelling went up in 1925. In 1950 the federal Board of Geographic Names ruled on it anyway and chose "Neels Gap," despite recommendations from state and federal officials, that plaque and a letter from Neel himself. Imagine writing to the government about how to spell your own name and losing.
It stayed wrong until a Georgia Appalachian Trail Club member named Jordan Shenefield wrote a newsletter article called "Is It Plural or Possessive? Actually, Neither!" and pushed for a correction. The board fixed it on April 12, 2024. Plenty of people still write it the old way, and so do some of our own pages.
The next owners came in as customers
In 2009 Georganna Morton and Logan Seamon sold what they owned and started north. They got the shakedown, slept in the hostel and moved along. After Katahdin, Morton ran into Porter at a trade show and told him they were looking for somewhere to land. He offered them both jobs. "I said 'I'll have to think about it,'" she told Blue Ridge Outdoors. "To which Winton replied, 'No, you'll be there on Friday.' It was Tuesday."
They took over at the end of 2013. The store's website says it serves more than 2,000 hikers a year and evaluates more than 500 packs. Porter once told Georgia Public Broadcasting that over 350,000 hikers had gone through the breezeway since the store opened, a number we can't check and don't want to.
Northbound thru-hikers still have 2,154.3 miles to go when they leave, by the store's count, and they do leave lighter. There's a limit, though. Dartman told the Atlanta paper about a hiker who cut the handle off his toothbrush to save weight. "Have you ever tried to brush your teeth with a toothbrush with no handle?" he asked.
