His hike through Tennessee and North Carolina has long been a mystery to us. I have not seen anyone say they met him in these states. However, he still could have hiked through them and perhaps stayed alone in shelters on the AT and had very little interaction with people. He would have been there during off seasons for hiking (Mid to Late Oct to Late Nov). Many of the hiking hostels in NC close in the late fall/winter season. At one point I plotted out the distance between AT shelters in NC and TN and figured out that the dates between when we know he was in Virgina and when he shows up again in Georgia give him enough time to have hiked from one AT shelter to the next one each day in NC & TN. The AT shelters in TN and NC are mostly close to each other (6 to 12 miles in most sections) and he said he hiked an average of 10 miles a day. It's only when he got to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park that he would have needed to get a back country hiking permit. IIRC, there is also a time limit for that permit- hikers have to finish the GSMNP portion of the AT within a certain number of days. I think he could have skipped it. If you talk to LE again, please ask them if they have ever checked the permits for GSMNP (He would have been there in Oct or Nov 2017). I'm very curious if he could have used his real name or if he used an alias to get a permit too.
As to your question on the panhandle of Florida, yes we have photos of him walking along the HWY near Crestview, FL in Jan 2018. A Trail Angel stopped to give him some water and snacks. It's the photo where he is holding up the "Thru Hike" sticker and there is another one from that same stop where he has a Ziploc bag of items in his hand. After that some campers encountered him at the Sand Pond Campground in Pine Log State Forest, near Ebro, FL in Feb 2018. Nothing concrete on this, but I have always had the impression he got his "Mostly Harmless" trail name while in the Sand Pond Campground. The story told on the CCSO podcast was that he was camping in Florida and some other campers/hikers invited him to join them around their camp fire "as long as he didn't bite" to which he replied "I'm mostly harmless". The others thought he was giving his trail name so they gave their trail names. That is how he got the trail name Mostly Harmless. He was called Denim before that for all of the AT and the majority of hikers who met him knew him as Denim.
I've never seen that about him hitching a ride with girls in AL although it's possible he did that when he reached the end of the Pinhoti or when he didn't want to hike it anymore. We have a photo of him taken Dec 29, 2017 near the start of the Pinhoti Trail. So he definitely began hiking it. It's the photo that has the white truck in the background. There's a main road that crosses the trail a few miles in and that's where some Trail Angels met him and took that picture before he continued on the trail. He had his tent by that time- he purchased it in GA. So he could have hiked the entire Pinhoti camping in his tent without running into very many people. But I think he would have needed a way to get from AL to the FL Trail so that may be when he got the ride.
Thank you so much for getting sections of his coding language from LE. I haven't been able to keep up with all the threads here lately but Denim is a case I think about a lot.
