After two and a half weeks of hiking — almost 300 miles of my current hike and, counting last summer’s hike, 2/3 of the entire Appalachian Trail — I can’t tell whether I’m still just getting started or whether this trail is dragging on forever. Picking up exactly a year after last year’s section has provided a strong feeling of continuity. Starting in Harpers Ferry again, especially, brought back memories of hiking through Maryland with my dad and sisters at the beginning of that hike. Seeing the white blazes and shelters along the trail again is still a bit surreal; I simultaneously have a hard time believing I am really hiking again and feel like I never left. As I mentioned in my last report, though, my body took a couple days to remember the whole concept. I believe it was some miles from Harpers Ferry when I first kicked a rock with my Croc-clad toes and stumbled/hopped forward waiting for the pain to subside before my body fully recalled the activity, “Ohhhh, hiking!”
I think I’ve regained my trail legs now, and have kicked numerous unsuspecting boulders, roots, and branches with my fearless toes. For the last week I even exceeded my goal of 15 miles/day by a fair margin. I covered the 134 miles between Waynesboro and Daleville (where I now am) in seven days, without ever getting off the trail to resupply. Of the five full days of hiking in that span, the shortest was 17.8 miles, the longest was 25.7 (or, if you count the 0.4 miles of side trail to a shelter where I lunched, 26.1 — very close to my first marathon day!), with an average of 21.6 miles/day. One reason for such long days (by my standards… I’ve only met one southbound thru hiker since I’ve started, and he was doing 30+ mile days through Shenandoah National Park and is now several days ahead of me) is that I feel I might as well take advantage of the relatively flat terrain in Virginia before I get to the more mountainous regions in the south (the ATC’s “terrain by region” page is a good resource for comparing the trail difficulty in various regions).
Another reason is that for five days last week (including my stay in Waynesboro) the weather was cloudy, foggy, and sometimes rainy with very few appearances of the sun, which does not encourage taking long breaks as much as, say, sunny rock outcroppings do. Based on no meteorological expertise whatsoever, I think it was the remnant of one of Hurricane Isaac’s arms passing by. I’ve slept in three shelters so far, and the rest of the time my tarp and bivy are doing a fine job of keeping me sheltered. The sun finally came out in earnest on Thursday afternoon and with the exception of one thunderstorm (which found me already at a shelter eating lunch), the weather has been very pleasant since then!
A third reason is that with my Kindle screen damaged, I have less incentive to take long reading breaks along the way.
My decision to not resupply for so long was more of a blunder than a plan. I had packed what I thought was five days of food out of Waynesboro, planning on resupplying at a campground store which was three and a half days north of Daleville. But at some point a day or two after leaving I was perusing my guide and noticed that the campground was a full five miles off the trail (I hadn’t noticed that before). There is another camp store 30 miles more south along the trail and only 1.2 miles off the trail. I decided I was going fast enough that I could stretch my food until then. When I got to the road for the second camp store, on Friday, I realized that if I did another long day on Saturday I could stretch my food long enough to get to town for lunch on Sunday, which I did! So by arriving here two days earlier than I expected, and making my food last about two days longer than I expected, I didn’t have to resupply and didn’t go hungry. I even finished with about a meal’s worth of lentils left. From the very same pound of lentils I left Colorado with.
I saw my third bear on Thursday. I was nearing a place my guide calls “Big Rocky Row,” where I was hoping to find a nice place to camp for the night, when I saw something black beside the trail a little ways ahead. I wasn’t sure what it was until I got a closer and could tell it was the backside of a bear who, I think, was scratching its head on a tree next to the trail (or maybe it was licking something off of it?). It was obviously oblivious to my presence, so I whistled and rapped my trekking pole on a tree. It slowly turned its head and gave me an annoyed look for a moment. Then it seemed to suddenly remember that it was supposed to hide from humans, gave a start, ran up along the trail for a few paces, then disappeared to the left.
Not long later I found a nice spot to set up camp near an overlook over the James River. It was sunny and there was a breeze so I was able to hang out my sleeping bag, bivy, and tarp and get them all dry from the previous damp nights. I spent forever hanging my food bag that night, redoing it at least twice. Looking down on the river I could see the James River Foot Bridge (to which my guidebook adds: “longest foot-use-only bridge on AT”) which I would cross the next morning. Not only is it a foot-use-only bridge, but it is dedicated to a deceased AT thru hiker named Bill Thomas Foot.
In the morning my food bag was still hanging, unmolested! Walking to my bear bag is always an apprehensive few moments in the morning, and always a relief and sense of triumph over my witty ursine brethren when I spot it still hanging there. I think it would be safer from bears if I kept it with me when I slept, but since I don’t have a tent that would likely be an invitation to all manner of rodents and procyonids to join me under my tarp. Before I leave town I am going to buy a carabiner and try the PCT method of hanging my bag.
Anyway, before I got to the bridge Friday morning, I came to a road crossing where an Amherst County Sheriff was sitting in his parked SUV near the trail.
He called across the street to me, "Have you seen any other hikers today?"
"I haven’t seen anybody else today."
"You haven’t seen three ladies?"
That reminded me that I had passed three women hiking in the other direction on Thursday afternoon, about ten miles before I found my campsite. I walked over to where he was parked, "I saw three ladies yesterday. Two older ladies and a younger?"
"That’s them. Apparently they’re missing. Where did you see them?"
I remembered passing them while I was huffing up the hill before Punchbowl Shelter, the last shelter before I saw the bear. They were cheerful when I met them, with one of them calling out “Good day for a hike!” as she moved to the side of the trail so I could pass.
I set down my pack to pull out my trail guide and was able to tell the sheriff where I had seen them, and approximately when. He repeated what I told him to his radio. Apparently they had been dropped off by one of the women’s husbands on Thursday, were supposed to hike to the shelter south of the road, then return. When I saw them they were already north of the road and headed even more northward. Another sheriff drove up in an SUV, who had apparently been waiting at a road crossing south of where we were and we repeated what we knew to him. He said they only had food and water for a day and no sleeping gear. That would make for an uncomfortable night, and I hoped nothing worse. I wished I hadn’t hurried past them so quickly. If I had given a small-talk pause before passing them, they may have asked me how far to the shelter, and I could have pointed out their error right then.
For their part, the sheriffs didn’t seem too concerned and said there were lots of people out looking for them. They were more curious about how my hike was going.
“16 days? That’s something. That’s something to tell your kids about some day.”
“Do you have a gun or anything? You need to be careful. There are freaks out there,” the other added. “We had a guy killed on the trail last year.” (Indeed at several of the shelters in the area there are posters featuring photographs of a hiker whose body was found near the trail last August, asking anybody who may have met him to contact the FBI).
“I’m careful, and almost everybody on the trail is very friendly and watches out for each other,” I told them, trying to reassure myself.
“Oh, people hiking the trail, yeah. But it’s the freak not hiking that you have to watch out for.”
Then they talked about snakes for a bit and wished me good luck. I know their concerns are exaggerated — the only time they ever hear about the trail is when they are responding to crimes or lost/injured hikers — but it was a little disconcerting all the same. That night I ended up in a lonely shelter all to myself and didn’t sleep very well, being interrupted alternately by dreams of pizza and hamburgers in town and of deranged killers stalking the trail.
Before I reached that lonely shelter, though, I had a very nice lunch under the sun in a clearing near a spring. Someone made a fire ring there and dragged several logs around it to act as benches. While I was sitting on one of the logs eating my chicken flavored Knorr rice side and sipping my liter of “Gatorade” made from Wal-Mart brand sports drink powder and spring water (one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had), something at the other end of the log caught my attention. I stared for a moment, not sure what it was, and suddenly realized I was looking at a snake (about three or four feet long) sticking out from under the log adjacent to mine. It’s head was on one side, facing me, with its tail on the other side. It looked to me like a rattle snake. To confirm I walked around the logs to the other side (with trekking pole in hand), and sure enough there was the infamous rattle.
I returned to my lunch, but kept an eye on the snake to make sure it didn’t come closer. It kept an eye on me too — although I think it was mostly hoping a mouse or chipmunk would wander by soon. After I finished lunch and packed up I walked back around to get a closer look. As I approached, it coiled itself up, like they do, with its head protected by the thickest part of its body but still keeping a clear view of me. That was neat to watch, but I hadn’t really meant to cause it such an interruption in its hunting, so I left it a lone and continued my hike.
Saturday night I shared a shelter with a nice father and son duo who are systematically section-hiking the trail northbound for a week every year, and had just started their 8th section in Daleville that morning. I still did not sleep well, but this time it was purely due to anticipation of town food with no more worries of an AT serial killer. It took me so long to fall asleep that I slept in past 7am, but I still got to town (11 miles) before noon. The trail comes out at a road with a Pizza Hut immediately to the left and a Howard Johnson motel directly across the street. I checked into the motel and then had a pizza and large salad for lunch. It was almost as good as I had been dreamed!
So for the third Sunday in a row I lodged in a town. I am loving this motel to motel hiking. I can’t afford to do this the entire way, but $50 does buy a nice bit of paradise: hot shower, sink, WiFi, electricity for charging all my devices, nearby laundry, privacy, bed, continental breakfast. Sometime next weekend I’ll get to a hostel on the trail which offers most of those amenities for only $10 (and there are more hostels further south). I might get another update out from there.
Postscript: I found an article online about the three missing hikers. They were found in good condition a little over an hour after my conversation with the sheriffs, which I am glad to find out. Why it took 40 searchers and a police helicopter (which I saw fly low over the ridge as I was crossing the Foot bridge) all night and morning to find them, I’m not sure. I never saw any searchers go by my camp that night. There was not more than about 20 miles of trail where they could possibly have been, and a couple of searchers jogging in different directions could have covered that in a few short hours (of course I had the advantage of knowing where they were and what direction they were moving, whereas I think the searchers assumed they were headed south when they got lost… but I’m still at a loss to explain the failure to find them sooner).
Happy trails to all, whatever the nature of your trails may be.
Diode