SNP Hike Day 1: No water, no gas, no problem!

Saturday, 6th of September, 2003.

Rockfish Gap to Calf Mountain Shelter, 6 miles.

So today is the big day: I’m going to take my first weeklong backpacking trip in twenty years, and I’m doing it entirely on my own, not part of a scout trip or a group of hikers with people whom I know and who are more experienced. And I am doing it my way: bringing the things I want and not the things I don’t. I do not have a lightweight tent (the 35 year old hiking tent I inherited from my mother a few years ago is bulky and quite heavy), so one of my concessions to weight is to travel without a tent and rely on sleeping in the shelters (three sided huts) on the trail each night all the way through the park. I have packed my lightweight so I am not right on the wood flooring. But beyond those concessions to my backpack’s weight, I’m bringing the stuff I want. Two litres of water, food for a week (mostly Instant India dishes from Trader Joe’s that I have never tried, but which look promising: just drop the foil bag in hot water for a few minutes and serve, but I’ve got hummus and pita bread for the first few days under the theory it should keep in the fall temperatures for a few days), and three full sets of clothes. And my camera, though I am limiting myself to just the body and two lenses instead of the full camera bag. The full pack is probably about 20 kilograms (45 pounds), but I’m out there to get some exercise among other things and I will be eating my way through the weight through the week. The plan is to start from Rockfish Gap at the south end of the park and hike all the way north to Gravel Springs Hut by Friday night, then Saturday morning my friend Meredith will join me there and we will hike north out of the park to Possum’s Rest and down to Tom Floyd Shelter just outside the park, turn around and come back on Sunday, and drive home from there. 8 days and about 120 miles or so. Meredith has never backpacked before, but seems pretty excited about the trip, even though she could not join me for the whole week like she thought she might be interested in trying.

It is the week right after Labour Day, so the “official end” of summer has come, which means the park will be more quiet, but that the summer time services like camp stores and such will still be open. I plan not to use them: I want to demonstrate to myself that I can hike this kind of distance as a sort of dry run for hiking through the Hundred Mile Wilderness some time up near the north end of the Appalachian Trail in Maine. But they are there just in case.

My friend Melissa is going to take care of my two cats, Zorro and Carmel. She also rather generously offered to come out to Rockfish Gap with me in the morning and drive my car back and borrow it from me for the week. Her own car seems to live in the shop getting repaired and the station wagon gives her a lot of storage space for her habit of going to thrift stores, picking through the clothes to find stuff that is in good condition, and selling it on E-Bay. It is not a living income, but gives her a little extra money on the side. Anyway, Melissa seems very happy with this deal and it works out quite well for me. She is a little surprised to realize just how far away Charlottesville is from D.C. once we get going, but doesn't back out.

When we get to Charlottesville, Melissa is ready to eat the steering wheel, so we stop for gas and doughnuts at a Krispy Kreme on the edge of the town that is baking the first doughnuts of the day. There is something quite special about watching your doughnut be cooked and picking it out as it goes by and eating it still warm from the cooking. Something I had not experienced before. Oh boy, is it a good thing Krispy Kreme is not moving into my home town! I could eat this every morning and wear size 60 jeans in a year... Fortunately this particular piece of culinary stimulation is coming to me just as I am about to do some really heavy duty exercise. Maybe I’ll skip lunch today.

Melissa drops me off at Rockfish Gap just outside the park and heads off back towards the city, and I hike in to the edge of the Park. I’m at the extreme southern end of the region which the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club maintains.




Uh oh. Just as I get to that first white blaze on the trail at the edge of the park, I realize that the two bottles of water are still sitting on the back seat floor of the car and thus somewhere between here and Charlottesville right now. And Melissa is not carrying a mobile ‘phone with her. It’s a good thing that my destination for the night, Calf Mountain Shelter, is not that far up the trail, as I turn back and go to the nearest gas station to get bottled water. This is going to be a nuisance: my water filter is one of those nifty pumps designed to screw onto a Nalgene bottle. Now instead I am going to be holding the bottle with one hand and balancing the filter over it and pumping with the other. This should be interesting... In any case, I get the water, turn around, go back into the park, and find the permit station (hikers in the park are required to get a backcountry permit to hike through the park complete with their estimates of where they will be camping each night. They can use the shelters only if they are hiking for three nights or more and cannot stay at any one location more than one night in a row. Of course these requires the gift of prophesy to know how far you will hike each day.). I’m looking carefully at my guide to the trail through the park and realize that I have miscalculated and will be getting to Gravel Springs Hut on Saturday night, not Friday night. Yes, I can do vector calculus but screw up that there are seven, not eight, days in a week. Well, I will look at the guidebook tonight and work out how to kick a day ahead somewhere. I seem to recall there was one easy day of hiking that might instead turn into a hard day. In the meantime, I estimate the shelters for each night, fill out the permit, and head on.




The Appalachian Trail here is not actually in the park much of the time: the park from Rockfish Gap north some distance is merely Skyline Drive and a hundred yards or so on either side. However, many of the sections where the park does widen out are wilderness areas. About 20 percent of the entire park is wilderness, which means it is only accessible by foot, land management is minimal, and they do not use power tools unless there is a very compelling reason. Like Hurricane Isabel which will strike here twelve days later, but I don't know this at the time. Most of the wilderness areas in Shenandoah are down here in the southern most part of the park. Strictly speaking, my destination for the night, Calf Mountain Shelter, is not in the park. But along the park rules about permit requirements are relaxed, they do have a peculiar feature common to the rest of the park: bear poles. More about them later.



The views, when I come to them, are quite stunning. The weather is very pleasant and the air seems pretty clear. In a couple of places along the trail during my few hours getting to the shelter, I find meadows with thistles and butterflies fluttering around in great numbers. I am wondering about the wisdom of bringing my camera: to get it, I have to take the pack off and dig through things, but if I wear it around my neck where I can get at it when I want it, it swings around a lot. No winning for losing. But there are some views I cannot resist.

I get into the shelter for the night in the afternoon and find I have a fair bit of company. Two fellows just hiked in locally from just outside the park up a fire access road and are hiking back out the next day, but I also have three other companions whom it turns out I will be seeing a good deal more of in the next few days. One is a fairly large fellow of Chris Farley proportions who is a short order chef at a restaurant he owns in New Orleans whom takes a month off every year or so to do some major backpacking. He’s spent two weeks going through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and now is going north through Shenandoah. The other two are semi-retired guys who go out for a week or so together like this each year. One looks like a slightly rotund and very cheery John Ashcroft. Can you imagine John Ashcroft with a big happy grin in his face? That’s this guy, at least appearance wise. His trail name is “Almost There”. He is a retired Judge Advocate General from the U.S. Navy, though he is on holiday and not talking about any of that. His hiking partner, “Poor Richard” is a short fiction writer for one of the outdoorsman magazines, the title of which is escaping my memory. We do introductions and sort out our space. And Poor Richard introduces me to bear poles.

This is a pole about fifteen feet high with arms coming off it, with a metal rod and a groove up at the top which you use to loft your food bags and anything else interesting to bears up to the top of the pole for the night, under the theory that bears will not be able to get at it. Actually it seems to be more a way to provide the raccoons with an interesting challenge. Apparently this is a unique design to this park: other places on the Appalachian Trail use bear boxes located on the ground where you can get into easily, but the local bears don't have the manual dexterity to get into them, or caged in shelters like they have in the Great Smoky Mountains. Mind you, bears might be big, but the real nuisance of the trail are mice: if you have any kind of bag in the shelter with you, you are well advised to leave it partway open under the theory that if a mouse gets in, it can get back out without having to eat its way through the cloth. But they can gnaw through backpack straps overnight quite easily in search of salt from your sweat on the pack. Lovely. Rats are apparently also known to nick off with pieces of small clothing if they are salty, like socks. Mice are going to be major nightime players in this hike, as you will hear in this journal.

I am carrying a camp stove with me for cooking. It is a bit of an antique. I think it dates back to the late 60s or early 70s and uses a can of propane gas that fits onto the burner which pierces the metal can and then has metal bands around it to hold it in place until the can is empty. I have used it a few times since finding it in my grandmother’s basement and found out it was an old stove of my mother’s. 25 years of complete neglect and disuse and it lit up right away the first time I used it. I don’t know how long the gas canister is going to last, but I put a new can on last year and have one left. And quite promptly, as I start to heat water for my spinach dish for the night, it goes out. The little worried voice in the back of my head does the approximation of how many uses I got out of this can of gas and realizes that the last can with me is not going to make it through the entire trip... and they stopped making this kind of canister in the U.S. some time ago. Or at the very least, I’ve not been able to find places selling new canisters for it. When it runs out of fuel, it will be time for a new stove... and that could be as soon as Thursday! Uh oh again. But in the meantime, I replace the canister and scare everyone when it lets out quite a hiss of gas as I get it on (maybe I’ll run out on Tuesday?) and manhandle the bars that hold the canister in place. I won’t be sorry to retire this stove, truth be told, as it is such a big production to get the canisters changed. But it is done and I heat up my water, by which time it is getting dark. I get my spinach dish, heat it up, open the pouch, and pour it out onto the plate. Poor Richard comments on its resemblence to a cow paddy. Oh dear. These guys are heading north on the same path and pace as me: I’m going to have a lot of sophomoric humour in the next few days.

After dinner, I get everything together into bags and put the entire backpack up on the rod into the air on the bear pole. This is pretty challenging: the pack slides off the rod a couple of times as I am trying to get it up there and snagged on the arms, but eventually I succeed. I settle down into my sleeping bag for the night, satisfied that the hike is off to a more interesting start. It gets a little more interesting when the chef guy complains about the problems of the homeless people hanging around on the street scaring customers away and one of the guys who has come in from Charlottesville turns out to have been someone who lived on the streets for many years. But after some heated debate, they seem to find ways to keep the conversation amiable and turn in for the night. I take a little time to sit with my guidebook and do the math about my hikes. It looks like, mid week, I'll have one day of extra long hiking to get to Gravel Springs, but it also means I'll be kicking a day ahead of these guys. But I leave that for the future and get some earned sleep. I think I worked off those Krispy Kreme doughnuts pretty well.

This sleeping pad is not working so terribly well: it has some give, but I am feeling not much different from sleeping right on the wood flooring. The chef fellow snores a bit, but I don’t tend to sleep that deeping in the woods anyway and the snoring stops when he shifts around in the night. Once or twice I think I hear mice shifting around, but I take the advice of Almost There who is both an experienced hiker and an equipment nut (He was quite intrigued by my antique collection of gear) and sleep at least a bit of distance from the side of the hut and I am never bothered by them at all.

Tune in tomorrow when the sock goes missing, I get the first blisters of the trail, and I get to meet my first copperheads...

J aka “Red Sock”