The Flight of The Canoe

Yes, this is a total break with tradition to write about something just after it happens instead of a year or more after the fact... but I had an amusing adventure yesterday.

It starts, actually, some time back. After the misadventures of trying to reach Mallows Bay, I realized that I wanted to get back there and that there did not seem to be any outfitters around within a day’s paddling of the location. Roughly a year ago, I started looking more seriously at canoes and kayaks, seriously enough to have purchase an adaptor for the roof rack to take them, but did not find anything that really motivated me enough to make it happen. A monster plane ticket (It's about $2000 a pop for me to go home to Australia for Christmas, as compared to a “mere” $1500 at other times of the year) also ran sucked the wallet dry and by the time I was no longer reeling for that particular financial insult, the passion for the canoe had dried up and moved to the back of my mind.

Some recent events brought it back to the fore, however. One was helping my friend Meredith move to her new condominium home from the basement apartment she had been renting for two years or so prior. She has a kayak which has been sitting unused in the backyard at the old place, and at least at move-in time, was seriously shy on any place to put it at her yard-less, storage-less new home. I offered to store it at my place temporarily, where it has been sitting darkly taunting me.

It turns out there is some sizing to kayaks and little Meredith and clunky big ole me are not compatible, at least at the level of kayaks. I haven't worked out how to get in the thing even if it is adjustable somehow.

But I did bring it along to a wonderful camping spot on the Cacapon River a month or so ago when my friend Pam had her birthday camping weekend event up near Berkeley Springs in West Virginia. Fantastic spot right on the river, very quiet and peaceful and a great place for a good splash in the water. Of course I don’t fit in the kayak and Pam who is significantly smaller than I (what with lacking spare tyre in the middle and all) was barely able to get in the kayak, while I borrowed her inflatable sit-on-top kayak (Fred, the Float-a-boat). It was wonderful fun and reminded me that this was something I would really enjoy doing, not withstanding that I managed to shatter one of the joints on Fred’s paddle. Opps! Sorry about that, Pam (and I still owe you a new paddle, don’t I?)

So I went back to looking seriously at canoes and kayaks again after that trip. A bit of thought brought me to close in on the idea of a canoe: it has more space inside and is a bit more versatile for overnight camping and such and seems a little more in tune with me. And a canoe was a lot less than a recreational kayak with suitable luggage space, more flexible about having one or two or even three aboard while remaining manageable to paddle and steer on my own. But cheaper is not cheap, and a new canoe was more than I was willing to part with.

E-Bay to the rescue (after determining that there did not seem to be anything second hand in the local classifieds). I found lots of used canoes for sale... in Washington State and Minnesota. Sale requires pickup. Yeah, not going to happen. But there were a few reasonable priced canoes in apparent good shape, including one just hours from ending its bid cycle up in Allendale, New Jersey, and another a bit further in the future to bid ending in Roanoke, Virginia. I did the bid after checking out the description of the canoe (17’ Old Town with an extra seat and fishing pole holder installed, in good nick and well cared for, decent pictures showing it) and a few hours later, became the proud owner.

There’s a catch, of course. I’m in Maryland, a good four hours drive south. I get in touch with the seller and it turns out that he’s about to go on travel, so I have to wait a week or so before going up there.

During that week, I start to get the “What the f*** did I just do?” sensation when I get out the measuring tape and start to realize what a 17’ boat really is like. This is the advantage of a store: you can look at the thing on the shelf and it dawns on you BEFORE YOU BUY IT that maybe this is just a bit big. Seeing as how you could put your CAR in it! I have a Saturn Station Wagon which is a moderately small car... and about 3-4 feet shorter than this canoe! How am I going to transport this thing? And once I do, how on Earth am I going to handle it on my own?

A visit to the Saturn dealer for other reasons reassures me that, well tied down front and back, the canoe should be fine on the roofrack. As far as handling it on my own goes, I can get one of those little wheeled trailer things for pulling it around. Getting it on and off the car is going to be interesting, as will carrying it places where there are no roads or boat ramps. Maybe I am going to need company for these things.

Hmmm... maybe it is time to start taking this pursuing a girlfriend thing a little more seriously? :-)

Anyway, I arrange some time off work to leave here in the afternoon, get to Bergen County in the early evening, get the canoe, and drive back all in one rather long day. Specifically, yesterday.

The trip up was uneventful, but the moment of truth is interesting. First, people in New Jersey (or at the very least in Allendale) have apparently subscribed to the New Math or something. I find the street number 740 when I am looking for 700, but the house numbers are (brilliantly) very hard to spot where they exist. In fact it turns out that 700 is just two doors down from 740. Huh? I’ve been in buildings that have no thirteenth floor before, but there should twenty houses between these two addresses, right?

I get to the place, see the canoe, and it’s a beauty. For a family of four and their dog perhaps. What the f*** have I done? It’s got a nice flat wide bottom (very good for touring and lake paddling since it is stable, but not a speedy design since it puts more surface area on the water and is less streamlined. Also DEFINITELY not designed for rough or white water.) and it is quite wide. In fact when we get it up on the roof rack, I have to remove the bike rail since the canoe covers the entire roof of the car up there.

Uh oh. Putting the canoe on the car like the diagram in the manual in the roof rack says, hull up, puts the bow right smack in the middle of my view out the front of the car and dangling in the air at least six feet in front of the windscreen. I might as well drive blindfolded. We flip it over and right side up, I can see out, but I am nervous. Air pressurse should, if I understand my Physics, be trying to pull the canoe off the car as I go now, instead of pushing it down on the rack. But this is the way it fits on the car. The seller and I futz with the straps across to hold it on the rack, and double bungee cord it back and front. It seems stable enough when I try a few tug tests, but the boat does bounce around a little alarmingly when I pull out onto the road. But it does stay in place... even once I get up to highway speeds on Route 17 heading back towards the Garden State Parkway.

I do notice that I am being very gentle on the gas. The canoe seems to be just fine up there, but every time I get up around 55 miles per hour, there is some sympathetic hum that starts up from the front strap and it is like being right next to a DC-3 prop engine running full bore. Not even John Farnham cranked up well beyond my usual volume setting will drownd out the roar right above my head. Am I going to have to have my ear drums pummeled this way for four hours straight?

I also face an interesting problem once I get on the Garden State Parkway. My car very recently got an E-Tag (I think the local name is EZ-Pass, an electronic toll booth tag that goes on the windscreen underneath the center rear view mirror so it does not block the driver's view at all, but can be seen by the toll booth sensor.). Is the toll sensor going to be able to see through the rather opaque object sitting on the car?

Turns out when I get to the first of the toll booths not to be an issue: I guess the sensors must either be eye level and get in under the canoe, or use microwaves or some frequency range to which canoes are transparent. I kept aiming for the toll booths that took money as well as E-tags just in case until I’d gone through a couple of sensors just to be sure.

I should add, even in this day and age of high gas prices, the biggest cost of this expedition was tolls: the Chesapeake Bay Bridge ($2.50), the New Jersery Turnpike (about $3 each way, though it never tells me what the tolls are since in the electronic lanes, you don’t get the ticket with the price on it), the Garden State Parkway ($0.35 six times... couldn’t they just set up one set of toll booths instead of dime and quartering you every ten miles?), the Delaware Memorial Bridge ($3 for two miles... Yeah, Memorial Bridge, I'll remember you alright!), the John F. Kennedy Expressway/Delaware Turnpike ($2), and Harbour Tunnel under Baltimore ($2). Taking the Chesapeake Bay Bridge up also allowed me to avoid the Maryland Turnpike ($1?) and a second whack from the Delaware Turnpike ($2). Good thing I saved at least $400 over the price of new canoe to make this worthwhile!

The Garden State Parkway was annoying: the roar from the straps if I nudged above 55 mph was quite loud. Then I took the ramps down to get onto the New Jersey Turnpike... and once I got back up to speed, no noise. I look up out the front... and no canoe! I cannot believe the thing slid off the car without me hearing the racket, not to mention the horns from annoyed and terrified drivers behind me finging a huge object in the middle of the lane. A few tenths of a second later, it occurs to me that I can still see the two bungee cords on the front of the car leading up into the air above me, obviously still attached to something, and I can see out the rearview mirror and see the towel on the second of the two bungee lines there to warn people my car is longer than it looks. Turns out that going around one of the ramps at the posted speed was just enough to shift the canoe which now is sitting a little further back and slightly angled to the car’s forward motion. But it is secure and in place... and not making the awful roaring noise at freeway speeds. I can hear myself think again.

I take the next food stop to pull over and get a very late dinner, but not before first checking out the canoe on the car. Let me tell you, the car looks VERY strange in the parking lot in the night with this monster on top. The shift took tension off the front strap, allowing it to slide a little, so I set things back to right and snug it all up carefully again, get the dinner, and head on home again.

Everything is quite secure and fine and the roar is still gone, but getting up to freeway speeds (and the speed limit on the NJ Turnpike is a swift 65 mph these days), the car develops another interesting habit. The canoe bounce around a little in the wind and tends to take the car with it. I’m secure on the road and the canoe is secure on the roof, but it is a little like being in an airplane in turbulence... and I’ve got a long way home. The canoe will do this to me anytime the car is over 60 mph the whole way home, so I am feeling MIGHTY tired by the time the off-ramp to the last freeway on the way home comes up. I’ve been muscling the steering wheel for nearly three hours by this point and managed to spend the evening right from eating dinner all the way back home like I was in the aggitate spin cycle in the washing machine...

I leave the canoe on the car overnight. Like washing the car, this of course summons punishment from the rain gods since the canoe is right side up on the car and filled with several gallons of water in the morning. Just what I need: MORE weight to deal with as I get the monster down. I succeed, but I'm not sure how I will gracefully do this in the future on my own.

But that is for the future. I’m excited about my new toy and looking forward to driving out to Southern Maryland some time soon and taking it out on the Potomac, or maybe exploring some other public waterways in the near future. But who would have thought I would need air sickness bags in the car to drive the canoe places?

Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

A few years ago, my friend Helen told me about one of Washington’s Ten Best Kept Secrets: The Ghost Fleet of the Potomac. An article in a Washington Flyer magazine had mentioned this ship graveyard on the Potomac River that is little known even amongst locals yet a long standing testament to government gridlock and congressional folly. The graveyard is located on the Potomac River in southern Maryland, and it may well be the largest single graveyard of ships in the world in one location. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 ships are left abandoned on a spot called Mallows Bay a few miles south and across the river from Quantico, Virginia. But there is no access from the land side, and the water is very shallow in the area which prevents any but the most shallow draft craft from entering the area. Essentially that means a canoe or kayak.

I was fascinated and did a bit more reading about the site. The most detailed resource I laid hands on is historian Donald G. Shomette’s The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, but he also provides an interesting condensed history of the fleet of ships online on the Maryland Department of Natural Resources web site.

The vast majority of the ships are abandoned wooden hulled steam ships built in a crash construction program after the United States entered the First World War. Estimates at the time suggested that the U.S. would need of the order of 6 million tons of shipping capacity to transport troops and equipment, which was roughly twelve times the amount of shipping constructed in the twenty years prior. Congress acted quickly to propose the construction of some 1000 shipsfrom a standardized design made with either Douglas fir or white pine. Of the proposed 1000, contracts to build 731 were drawn up.

The timber construction had two major benefits: the ships could be made more rapidly than those with steel hulls and their construction would not tie up existing ship building capacity. The timbers in question were available in good supply. The objective was to make the ships within 18 to 24 months. The ships would be powered by steam, a relatively simple power plant design geared more towards rapid production than long term viability.

However, no such large program can ever be pulled off without snarls and problems, and indeed a number came up. There would be political infighting, bureaucratic foot dragging and excessive documentation requirements (a sort of ISO 9000 certification prerunner), to unanticipated technical issues. The first ship was completed by December 1, 1917, just nine months after President Wilson had placed the U.S. on a war footing. But by October 1918, only 134 boats were complete and another 263 were partway constructed. When the war ended on November 11th, not a single one of the boats had yet attempted an Atlantic crossing.

The program did not shut down immediately with the war’s end, however, and builders continued to finish up their contract obligations to make the boats. Some did eventually see trans-Atlantic service, and in all, 264 were completed and brought in service.

After the war, world trade contracted severely (in fact by some economic estimates, world trade would not recover to its 1914 levels until around the 1970s), and with the reduction in trade, there was a huge glut of excess shipping capacity, refered to as the “The Great Tie-Up of 1920” as shipping was brought into port and essentially abandoned. The wooden boats suffered an additional blow as their coal power steam engines were rendered obsolete by the advent of the more fuel efficient and powerful diesel engines.

The remnants of this fleet then suffered further blows. Constructed for a cost in the range of $700,000 - $1 million per ship (very roughly, $12 - $16 million 2004 dollars, or about in the range of $4 billion total, putting it in the same general ballpark as a major contemporary space mission such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Such comparisons, however, are somewhat faulty both in the very large rough assumptions of inflation and the growth of the economy. $1 million was a much larger fraction of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product of 1920 than an inflation adjusted $16 million is today, meaning that the cost of this fleet could easily be compared with annual costs of entire space program for a year or two, not just a single major mission.). Coupled with their construction faults from rushed efforts to complete them, and obsolete design, the wooden ships were quite a financial millstone and Congress sold off the salvage rights to some 233 or so of the boats to rid itself of the $50,000 a month storage costs.

The series of salvage operations and events are better documented elsewhere, so I shall not pursue them further, save to say that by the 1940s, most of these hulks, and a few others brought in for salvage, were abandoned in Mallows Bay. Western Marine and Salvage Company attempted and failed to economically recover the scrap metal value of the ships it purchased from the government in 1922. At the height of the Second World War, scrap metal shortages brought Bethelem Steel to attempt the same feat without economic success. The fleet came to be left to amateur scrap metal recovery efforts, and ultimately to be a largely forgotten graveyard of ships tossed aside by economic and political events.

And so over time, the ship graveyard on the Potomac passed from living memory. The hulks gradually rotted away for the most part, but sedimentation from the river filled in around them and preserved some or left shadows of their former presence in the form of ship hull shaped islands in which small trees and grasses took root. The shallow waters of Mallows Bay, sheltered by the hulks, became an area where sea grasses struggling elsewhere took root and provided natural habitat for fish, water birds, and crabs.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has been discussing for some years now the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve and creating access from the banks. As things stand now, however, the only way to reach the Ghost Fleet is by paddling in by kayak or canoe.

And thus begins my own personal adventure.

A little research on my part found only three access points to the river nearby. The first is a marina at Quantico across the river. This seems to be the most popular route to the graveyard to judge from web log reports from avid kayaks. The Washington Flyer also listed an outfitter working from Quantico offering rather costly guided kayak trips across the river to the site out of Quantico. A second is a boat ramp or pier located at Purse State Park on the Maryland side about two miles south of the Bay. However, neither Purse State Park nor Quantico appeared, at least in my research, to offer kayak or canoe rentals for the avid yet unequipped adventurer, not withstanding the guided tours, documentation of which my web research failed to find (though the Washington Flyer did list name and contact details, long since lost). The third put-in point near the river and upstream a few miles is Smallwood State Park, and here I found that canoe rentals were available at the park in addition there being a put-in point. Glory be!

So on one fine sunny October morning, my friend Helen and Melissa, another friend talked into the day’s adventure, joined me for the drive down past Indian Head to Mattawoman Creek and the Smallwood State Park. We got there close to opening time and rented a canoe and set off.

I had estimated from a map that the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek on the Potomac was roughly six miles north of Mallows Bay. A very little math concludes that this is a journey of about twelve miles. This should have rung alarm bells in my mind: a twelve mile day hike is a reasonably substantial hike, and paddling is hardly speedier nor more effortless than hiking. Furthermore, not quite figuring into that mental math was a non-trivial distance of perhaps a mile and a half from the park to the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek. But with three people, I figured we would have no problem. Or perhaps more accurately, I guess I just did not figure.

And off we sent into the wild blue yonder. It was an easy voyage out to Mattawoman Creek from the park’s edge and a pleasant bit of paddling down into the Potomac on what was to prove to be a very pleasant, warm, and sunny day on the river. Once clear of the Mattawoman Creek, we quickly came upon our first wreck of the day.




Alas, this steel hull remnant, whose history I have been unable to find, is not one of the Mallows Bay Ghost Fleet and served only to taunt us onward. After shifting seats to give tired arms a rest, we paddled southward with the river’s flow down past the next river open and under the massive power pylons across the river near Quantico. After a good two hours or so, we had managed to merely arrive at the starting point of typical full day guided (and expensive) kayaking trips from Quantico, though at least we were on the correct side of the river. Onward we went.

By around 1 PM, tired and sunburnt, it became clear we were not going to reach our destination. Reconstructing our position from maps after the fact, I believe we got within a half mile of Sandy Point, the northernmost limit of Mallows Bay. But it is probably a blessing we never got there to see what we would be missing and thus turned back somewhat unsatisfied, but without the sense of having narrowly missed our goals. Not far back towards the park, we found a place to pull off, complete with a picnic table not far from the water’s edge, took in a pleasant picnic lunch and break, then turned back north for Mattawoman Creek and the state park.

Unbeknownst to us, our presence, or rather our lack of presence, had been noticed by the park service and the outfitter renting the canoes there. Concerned that we had strayed into a power boat right of way and been swamped and perhaps either stranded or run down and drowned, they called in the Natural Resources Police.

Oblivious to this, we noticed a boat coming up in our general direction while paddling hard up the Potomac back towards Smallwood State Park. Complete with police lights. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be on the road to be “curbed” by the police. Yeap, a power boat got a canoe to “pull over”. Not for speeding, of course, but it turned out that in one of those criminal acts that is plainly apparent after the fact, but never crossed our minds, we had in effect stolen the canoe for the day. It was never intended to be allowed out of the state park. We got a gentle lecture from the police officer who mostly seemed relieved to realize he was not going to have to spend his afternoon dragging the bottom of Mattawoman Creek looking for drowned corpses of three city idiots who got a canoe run down by an inattentive and possibly drunk power boater. He did warn us of two things as we headed back. First, there would be an officer awaiting us at the dock to “talk to us” and that the closing time for the dock was actually an hour earlier than advertised to us before because it was the last day of the season and there was an annual end of season picnic for the staff and could we please pick up the pace to get back in time.

We did our best, but recall this was a very long paddle, especially considering how long a distance we had gone already and that the current was now somewhat against us. Anyone who thinks they can arm wrestle Melissa or myself or Helen might be in for a rude surprise. We did quite a muscling job to get back. And while we got such pleasant rewards as seeing a bald eagle fishing near us on the way back in, we still made it about five minutes late.

For the original closing time, that is, not the early one.

Needless to say, we were not expecting to be very popular when we got there. And the promised long arm of the law was there to give us the stern lecture about the evils of renting canoes with ill intent, with scaring park employees, and denying them their picnic time by coming in so damned late. We pleaded innocence on nicking off with the canoe off the grounds of the state park, claiming with some believable gullibility that we had not realized that that was one of the rules (and quite frankly, given the size of the water area of the park, I to this day cannot fathom why anyone would rent a canoe under those limitations: paddle a hundred metres in a few minutes, and it is time to give up and come home). We apologized for the inconvience of our late arrival and our own failure to correctly anticipate the level of effort and hencetime for our voyage.

I should at this point add three important points to this narritive. The natural resources policeman at the dock assigned to give us the stern lecture was very young officer and male. Helen is drop down gorgeous, and Melissa is quite the head turner herself, though having dated her at one point, I will confess to not being an completely disinterested party in that assessment. The poor officer never had a chance: he would try to give me the stern lecture and then couldn’t help himself but moderate his tone in Helen’s presence.

Lesson learned: never get in trouble with the law while canoeing without a gorgeous blonde or two around to help you out.

Truth be told, the officer was (in a male sense) not to shabby himself. Or as Helen put it over ice cream later “He could have spanked me, as long as he kept those beautiful blue eyes open when he did.”

Sunburnt and forgiven by the law and surprisingly enough, not told to never ever rent canoes from them ever again (We haven’t anyway), we took our sunburnt leave as the park closed for the late afternoon and the poor lady whom had patiently waited for us for hours put the canoe away and closed the shop for the seaon. A stop on the way home for ice cream and our day was done.

But the siren song of Mallows Bay still calls to me years later. I wish to rest my eyes on Wilson’s Folly and the hulks of yesteryear on the edges of the Potomac, to visit with time to spare to explore, to seek, to ask, to understand, to do so legally and unencumbered, and perhaps to pose that most wonderous question...

So what are the other nine Best Kept Secrets of Washington? And I can I visit them without getting in trouble with the law this time?

The Rock of Love

Originally written 1st of September, 2003

Not far from my home, there is a very nice pleasant trail through the woods. But it is a trail with a little catch: it’s more than 900 miles one way to the nearest end to the south, while its northern terminus is perhaps a third yet still further away in Maine. I speak, of course, of the amazing edifice known as the Appalachian Trail. I learned of it some years ago and began taking little day hikes on the trail, taking in the entire state of Maryland on the trail in the course of a year of these little hikes. And gradually the trail took hold of me.

This is a dangerous condition. Every year roughly 2000 souls with that same grip launch themselves northward at the crack of spring from Springer Mountain in Georgia. These people have set aside their life for the next several months to the task of walking along the eastern shore of the United States in a mad race to reach the towering edifice of Mt. Katahdin at the far end before winter in Maine closes Baxter State Park in October. They are also racing on a shorter term against the coming of summer in the south when the hiking becomes miserably sweaty: getting as far north as possible before the humidity and heat becomes unbearable is another major objective.

By mid June, the survivors of this initial barrage flow through northern Virginia and Maryland, by which time slightly more than three quarters of them have come to their senses and given up. Their numbers will dwindle further, with just a tenth of the original hikers reaching the icy goal of Katahdin... where they will then have to turn around and come back since the trail’s end is at a peak with no other access, so it is back down the trail to the nearest road to make an exit. Just like Georgia, in fact: It is a day’s hike into the woods just to reach the start of the trail somewhat in the middle of nowhere. It’s not the most promising of starts.

A couple of years after I began my little strolls in the woods, another writer in New Hampshire took note of the trail in his own backyard and became possessed of that same notion as I and so many others to hike this monument of human folly. He failed, quite utterly, and wrote a wonderful and entertaining novel about the hiking attempt called A Walk in the Woods. A friend, and not a hiking friend mind you, complained that the book was misleading in that you did not find until the end that they did not succeed.

These two failures, mind you (the author got a buddy to hike with him), managed to walk some 800 miles of the trail, including a goodly portion of the ominious Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine near the the trail’s end, where the black flies swarm so thickly that they annually carry off two or three backpackers into the woods.

Only the crazed standards of the 2150+ mile long AT hiker would call such people failures.

I did point out to my non-hiking friend that you knew things were not going to work out well when the author’s overweight hiking partner arrived in New Hampshire with a huge bag of Little Debbie snacks to tithe him over.

The book was a smash hit and the author, Bill Bryson, has almost become a household name. Mention “Appalachian Trail” to almost anyone who has been the arms of the trail at some point or another, and their favorite character or part of Bryson’s novel spouts forth. I would not have had to read the book at all for all I have heard about it from others in the last two years. Merely say the words “Never, ever, make me feel guilty about eating pie!” to a hiker and you are liable to get a giggle and be regaled with the rest of the story around that quote.

My personal favorite: “If you meet a bear, do not climb a tree. You will just end up fighting the bear in the tree.”

Lest someone ever tell you that literature cannot change the world, this book is a lesson warning. That figure of perhaps 2000 hikes a year was the number before Bryon’s book went into print. When A Walk in the Woods came out in hardcover shortly after his hiking misadventures, the numbers skyrocketed: people came from all over the world to explore this trail after reading about it. Now I hike my little sections and find myself at odd times face to face with half-starved men with flowing beards and cakes of salt crystals from their own sweat on their pack straps and that special scent only emitted by hikers who have not showered in at least a week, who turn out to be from Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand and whom just dropped everything to hike this trail after reading about it.

Finally this year after a several year peak, the number of thru-hikers (the special name for those who hike the entire trail in one fell swoop) has begun to fall. But amongst those heard heard the siren call is a friend of mine, whom we shall “Easy.”

Let me explain: he is a nice and very easy going person and this may even be why he has this name. I didn’t give it to him. He certainly did not give it to himself. Macaroni did. As in Macaroni and Angel Hair, the Noodle Heads. I have no idea where they got their names either. I have never met them and perhaps never will. I certainly do not know their real names or lives: they could be my next door neighbours for all I know, or perhaps the next door neighbours of those wild Dunedin men. One of those strange traditions that most follow on the AT is to have a “trail name.” My working theory is that this is to make it easier to hide from the law, but it is just a theory. And Easy might have got his name just for the humour of watching him come into camp and introduce himself: “Hi! I’m Easy!”

A trail name is usually given to you by another hiker for something distinctive you do or some characteristic trait. Easy is trying to peg me: “French Press” for the coffee plunger I brought backpacking recently. He thought it a ridiculous thing to pack. He was right, but I did so enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning. Another hiker found my red hiking socks quite a source of merriment and so “Red Sock” has floated. I think I had better go with that before Macroni meets me and dubs me with moniker like “Loose” just to see what happens...

Another friend on the same french press hike has no trail name, but she carried a rather spectacular knife in her pack, probably best suited to skinning deer. She thought it would be fun to make a pizza on the trail, but the only impliment in the house even vaguely like a pizza cutter was this huge deer knife of her brother’s. Never mind the logic of baking a pizza on the trail. The knife got christined “Pizza Slayer.” It must be a humbling experience to have your cutlery to have a name when you do not. Rather like waking up to find that someone has narrowed the intellectual gap between you and your credenza.

So I have heard the siren song of the trail and have been gradually hiking off sections of it. I am about to spend a week in the woods hiking the 100 miles or so that runs through the Shenandoah National Park. Last year I hiked south from the Maryland border through West Virginia and northern Virginia in a series of day hikes that took me to the northern end of the park. At this pace, my approach, called section hiking, will take in the entire trail in the next 20 years or so: a good lifelong goal in some ways.

Easy points out this is actually the hard way to do it: After a week or so of hiking, you settle into a routine and your body has adjusted to the fact that you’ve decided to do the energetic equivalent of a couple of marathons a day. It takes a while, but the entire body shifts into this new mode of operation where you are burning something of the order of twice your usual load, right up at the theoretical maximum of what the body can do, putting right in the league with cyclists on the Tour de France. Only much much slower. Lance Armstrong would kick out the entire AT in a couple of weeks. And my way, of little hikes lasting a day and then turning around to go back to the car, means not climatizing to the hiking, but doing this twice, since after hiking 7.5 miles one way, you have to hike back again to get to the car. That’s ten million steps to Easy’s five million. And he’s younger than me. And he’s already done the entire thing. Clearly it would seem that I am doing this entirely the wrong way. But then again, my approach is more compatible with having something else to life than the trail. Like a job. And a mortgage. And much smaller cat sitting bills: you can ask a friend to look after the two ravenous beasts for a week, but five months?

Easy has also been telling me about the traditions and patterns of the trail. Like trail names. Or the fellow named Strider who took off through the trail at a great pace, in no small measure because he never carried more than a day pack and was met each day by a driver who took him to the nearest town where Strider stayed in the local motel on a soft bed in a comfortable room with showers and other standard amenities. It must be nice to have money: Strider happens to be the CEO of a large U.S. supermarket chain. By all reports, a nice person. But a CEO named after a Lord of the Rings character who rises to become King of Gondor and throw down Sauron, the most powerful foe of all that is Good in the Middle Earth? This supermarket chain just bought out a major alternative food supplier in Iowa that had been a mainstay of the community for decades and threatened to close it down if the town did not hand over major tax breaks. I detect the hand of Mordor, not Gondor, here.

Beyond trail names, there are more pleasant traditions. In northern Virginia, there is a hostel specifically for thru-hikers and others hiking the trail. In early July, as the hikers stream through the Blackburn Center on their way to make Harper’s Ferry for the 4th of July, there is a traditional big barbeque dinner for all the hikers. A couple of weeks later, as the same sorry lot arrive in central Pennsylvania and reach the halfway point on the trail, it is time for the Half Gallon Challenge: eat a half gallon of ice cream in the fastest time possible. Easy managed this in something like fifteen minutes.

That might not sound all that impressive, but consider what sheer guttony it is to sit down and eat an entire pint of ice cream. Now multiple that by four. Kind of incredible, isn’t it? What’s even more incredible is that these people are burning calories so prodigiously that an event like this is largely a threat of ice cream headaches: they will not be feeling fat or gluttonous the next day and that ice cream will be hiked off in good order. There are those who have been known to ask for more...

Or take the interesting habit of some hikers to go “yogi-ing.” Not the Indian meditation and body bending: think Yogi Bear from the cartoon. People in the more crowded parts of the trail, of which there are quite a few, are often fascinated to meet a thru-hiker and love to talk to them about their experiences and how they got into all this and so on. But some hikers are a sly lot: they want something in it for them, and find ways to slightly evasive and talking about how hungry they get to be with all the hiking (which is a convincing act, mind you: these folks are skinny as a rake by the time New Hampshire comes around), and don’t really talk unless they get food. A sort of fine specialized begging, if you will, for which there are rich rewards for the food giver (please keep in mind, I intend to be one of those thru-hikers. Be kind to them and pack some extra cheese and beer. Please do feed these animals.).

Something about thru-hiking also brings out the best in others. Easy and his cohikers (He was not consciously hiking with any one set of people, but since the pace is more or less comparable and people keep similar schedules, it is not unusual to see the same people several times over for an extended period of time.) got asked by a guy at one point over to dinner. He served up a good barbeque, gave them guests rooms for the night, a good breakfast, and dropped them off back at the trail, all for the price of good company and nothing else. Yet this kindness is so common, there is a special name for it: Trail magic. It might be as simple as coming to a shelter and finding that someone has left a novel sitting in the shelter for anyone to take and read. Keep in mind these are people who hike all day and often having gone twelve to twenty miles, still have daylight left, but no energy to go anywhere. An intellectual gift (if an old Star Trek novel can so be refered) is trail magic indeed. So might a newspaper: world events come and go without impinging much on the trail. Other times it might be some odd piece of gear from one hiker that they have decided they no longer want (usually because it is just frigging heavy, like a nice double walled stainless steel coffee mug) and leave for someone else. The Blackburn Center a day shy of Harper’s Ferry has a small locker with such things: in its grasp on my last visit were three books, a few odd implements like discarded spoons, and until recently before our visit, the aforementioned mug. The caretaker was surprised that such an object had made it as far north as the center... and that anyone would take it. Rumour has it that there is an outdoors supplier in Georgia who walks the AT about a week or so behind the first batch of thru-hikers and collects all the bits and pieces of gear they have tossed aside by trail. So cute little trowels for digging a latrine in the woods go to the wayside (A week in, you realize a stick will do the same and you don’t have to carry it to the spot.), as do spare tent pegs, perhaps whole tents, and some other things hard to believe. One hiker started off with an axe on his pack, thinking he’d have to chop wood all the way to Maine to make a campfire each night. I do hope someone introduced him to the wonders of a camp stove.

There’s even a oft-repeated claim that they found scuba gear on the trail one year. Maybe no one told them that there is now a bridge across the Delaware and you need not be stuck with poor George Washington's precendent setting decision at the river cross: Row versus Wade? He didn’t bring scuba gear either.

However, it turns out that trail magic, like so many other things, does have a potential dark side. And this is where the Rock of Love comes in.

Another one of those strange tradition of hikers is to pick up a stone at Springer Mountain and carrying it north with them to leave on Katahdin. A very small stone, mind you: it’s a bloody long way with lug a boulder and the pack is already pretty heavy, especially at the trail’s start, with other far more critical things like sleeping bags and tents and axes and scuba gear and such. All told, a full pack could be anywhere from 30 to 40 pounds and that is a one serious amount of weight to find out one morning you have gained in one fell swoop and now must lug through the equivalent of some 300 marathons. So if there is one thing you really do not need, it is a rock.

Especially a four pound rock.

But there was evil afoot that day. Macaroni spotted this particular four pound wonder and plucked it from the soil of northern Georgia and engraved on it the words “The Rock.” Attached was a small note on a rubber band reading “I am the Rock of Love. I am trying to reach Katahdin, but I have no arms or legs. Will you carry me?”

Now I should say here that Macaroni had no intention of personally carrying this crag through the woods northward. The idea was that each person who found it in their pack one day would then sneak the rock into another person’s pack the next. But also remember my earlier comment about people tending to hike together and at roughly the same pace. So the Rock of Love got passed around the same people for a while before escaping into a new circle where it circulated as it gradually worked its way northward.

Thru-hikers are a truly weird lot, though. Some had exactly the reaction you would expect finding an extra four pounds of boulder in their pack at the end of the day: Anger and disgust. One friend to whom I passed on this story likened it to a sexually transmitted disease: something you share that your partner really wishes you hadn’t. Except unlike an STD (unless I really have my biology all wrong), this is a burden shifted when shared rather than spread. Perhaps not quite an epidemic, though a single exposure does not garnish you with any resistance to future exposure... unless you were very wary.

But while some were dismayed, others “got in the spirit of it.” Or maybe got whacked in the head with a few too many boulders. Who knows? But at many of the shelters on the trail that year, the logbook would have an entry in handwriting about the day’s hike or other events, signed “The Rock.” So even those not carrying the rock, like the Noodle Heads, were able to follow some of its adventures from behind.

It got discarded in a privy at one point, for example (I am praying they meant BY a privy, not DOWN the privy) and had to be rescued. And it managed a reasonable and stately progress up the trail northward.

I should at this point apologize for an obvious oversight: I’ve not said anything about that very special bunch of people whom travel north to south, starting in Maine instead of Georgia. They start hiking three or four months later in the year, late enough that the black flies of spring in Maine have died down and the snow has cleared off most of the path in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. By the time they reach the south, summer is well and truly gone and they face slogging through snow and ice in the last month or two in North Carolina and Georgia if they have not hiked fast enough. Less than a tenth as many people start from the north as the south each year, and statistics for reaching the far end are only slightly better, and largely then only because only the most hardy and determined of souls will even try that approach in the first place. I spoke with one hiker who was one of only nine people who started from the north end of the AT in 1981. Three of them made it to the southern end.

The price of this non-conformist approach is that many traditions are lost on them: the Blackburn Center is still open by the time they reach it, but many other such hostels and other features southward are closing for the season by the time the hikers reach them. People who have opened their hearts and doors to the northward bound hikers fail to do the same to the southward types. Not out of unkindness, but sheer ignorance: no one realizes they are coming.

And so they miss the half gallon challenge and barbeque and 4th of July in Harper’s Ferry. It is not unusual for them to carry a little piece of Katahdin southward, thus in very small measure keeping the mountain from growing from stones cast upon its peak from Georgia. But they do miss such things as the Rock of Love.

Much of the hike, the Noodle Heads were ahead of the rock and unaware of its progress save by rumour and the tale now and again from others hiking faster northward. After all, The Rock of Love had a few more “zero days” (as days when a hiker chooses to take a break and make no forward progress is called). But late in the year, Macaroni suffered some foot problems and had to pull himself off the trail for a while to rest and heal. And while the Noodle Heads were off the trail, the Rock of Love continued its northward march and overtook them. So when they came back, there were the log enteries from the Rock ahead of them. And gradually as they were working their way northward, they got nearer and nearer.

The last night before Easy and the Noodle Heads, who were hiking together at this point, reached Katahdin, Angel Hair pulled Easy aside to share a surprise she had.

She had the Rock of Love. It had shown up in her pack the night before. And so the plot was laid.

Three days before Baxter State Park would close for the winter, and in horrible weather that was almost, but not quite, enough to close the trail to public access, they were to set up to the peak to finish their hike. That the morning, Macaroni must have thought his companions were going nuts. They asked him to help with simple silly things like checking a pack or asking about a bootstring or duct tape or whatever... anything to get him away from his own pack for a few critical moments while the Rock of Love could be slipped into the top, yet late enough in the packing that he would not find it while finishing his own packing.

2150 miles and change after starting in Georgia, and in the worst weather possible, they succeeded in a five month long goal and summited the mountain. And there after suitable self-congratulations, Angel Hair became a little speech about love and life and coming full circle. Macaroni started to look a little worried, like perhaps his wife was suffering exposure from the weather or going a little soft and strange on the new age silliness... but after finishing her talk, she asked him to open his pack.

Where he found it.

So should you find a stone upon the peak of Katahdin in Maine engraved “The Rock” and wonder... It is the Rock of Love and it has no arms or legs, but would very much like it if you would take it home to Georgia now.

SNP Hike Day 8: The Voyage Home

Saturday, 13th of September, 2003

It was another usual night on the trail in the Gravel Springs Shelter: Even without anyone else in the shelter with me snoring or moving around, with no mice running around, and a very gentle relaxing sound of rain on the roof, yet I still spend the night surfing back and forth between sleep and half-awakefulness. In the morning, I have that same slightly odd feeling of having had a night of rest and yet as if I was awake all night.

After getting up, I head out to the bear pole to retrieve my food bag and get a simple breakfast of a fruit bar and water. The rain has eased off a great deal, but there is still a good deal of mist in the air and light rain showers come and go. But it is light. I can see when I get to the pole that the authors of the guide to setting up the line were not kidding. The ground around the pole is strewn with trash from critters getting into bags and ripping through whatever they found there. I diligently collect up the trash and add it to my collection, in the process finding the missing caribiner from last night that slipped off the line after bouncing off my head. No good deed goes unnoted, I guess. Good to have that back again. Now I can attach my sandals to the outside of my pack and look the studdly AT hiker than I am not.

Daylight of course came a long way before 10 AM, the meeting time I set up with Meredith, so I sit in the shelter out of the rain and read the shelter log a bit more, which is entertaining reading. Bored people with a lot of creativity and not a lot of outlets have been here... There are drawings, poems, stories, odd dialogues with imaginary people which I cannot follow, in amongst the mundane enteries of mundane events. Came, eat lunch, left. Kind of like a weblog, except it reads in chronological order instead of reverse chronological order.

10 AM comes and there’s no Goddess of Mercy and Rescue (known to the rest of the world as Meredith), so I conclude it is time to grab the backpack, don the evil hiking boats once again, and head up to the parking lot about a quarter mile up the road. My bung leg is much better after a night of rest, but there is still a strange twinge with each step and I’m really hoping that Meredith is not keen to hike as I will feel guilty trying to talk her out of it. The blisters have huge patches of moleskin to cover them, at least.

Meredith is at her car waiting, but just about to head down the trail to the shelter. My fresh clean clothes and the shower last night have helped things a good deal, but I am sure I am not exactly at my finest: Good thing she is already a good friend as I look a bit scraggely with a week of beard. My beard, I should add, is a bit like my scalp: dense in spots, sparse in others. There is a reason I do not sport a beard regularly!

Meredith is clearly geared up to go since she could never make the message in my calls suggesting the hike will not happen. She has clearly got a fair bit of new gear for the hiking trip about which she is enthusiastic. Or she would be, if it wasn’t raining. Talking her out of the weekend trip down to Tom Floyd Shelter is wonderfully simple.

I toss my pack into the back of her car. This turns out to be a slightly interesting feat. Meredith is a fairly small woman and has a very quiet demure manner for the most part (a smile is her natural state of being) and a light foot on the pedal. So this low slung sleek sports car is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve never understood the purchase as it seemed rather out of character. But she loves her Eclipse and I cannot say too much. My grandmother got her first new car when she was in her late 70s: A deep orange-red Pontiac Firebird. There is no accounting for fancy...

We drive back down out of the park and onto the Interstate back towards Washington while Meredith fills me in on all the news of the world in the past week. There’s a big hurricane stirring its way to the U.S. (which will strike Maryland some five days later, with devasting results), President Bush is alas still with us, but Jonny Cash is not: After his wife died earlier in the year, he lost a good deal of his will to live and stopped taking care of himself, a fatal move in a diabetic.

I manage to reach Melissa at home in Washington with Meredith’s ‘phone (my lump I’ve dragged through the woods all week is completely dead at this point) and let her know that I’m coming a day earlier than planned. Melissa warns me that “I’ll have a surprise, but don’t worry it doesn’t involve the car.” Hmm... Good thing about it not being the car: A careless driver in her neighborhood managed to knock the side mirror off her ex-boyfriend’s car parked on the side of the street not so long ago.

One surprise is that there is a Howard football game about to go on when we get to Melissa’s house, about a block from the stadium, so Meredith is unable to park and come in with me and finally meet Melissa’s cats. Melissa works with cat rescue a great deal and Meredith loves cats, so she is interested. Not to mention that Meredith loves the idea of living in the city and this would be a chance to see the home of a friend there for the first time. But not this time: Meredith drops me off and I head in and say hello.

Turns out there are a few surprises. The first is that Melissa has found a new housemate, the terribly attractive and probably too young (ah, rationalize the rejection...) for me Erica. And my first impression is a smelly be-bearded straggly man with a limp. Ah well.

Erica moved in during the past week and came with her cat Inego. I call him the stretch limo of cats: Inego is a beautiful sleek black cat that is just amazingly long in his body. Even monster Zorro looks short next to this guy. One of Melissa’s cats, Carlyse waddles up for her attention once she works out that I’m a known okay person again. Zorro, Carlyse, Inego... that’s three black cats plus tabby Stripes. So why are there five black cats? It is confusing at first: everywhere you look there is a black cat and you are wondering “Okay, which one is this?” Chocolate siamese Carmel is hiding in the basement in the rafters where he has been staying pretty much all week, though Melissa has been able to reach up and pet him and he is not acting like he is suffering... just uninterested in coming down and being social.

Seven cats! You wonder how she manages...



Bobby and Belinda (months later at home in Odenton)


Turns out the answer is not without some issues. The two little black cats are Bobby and Belinda, kittens that Melissa rescued from the street a month or so ago and whom I had met before and forgotten about. They seem to be sisters about six months or so old whom some never-to-be-sufficiently-damned twit abandoned and whom stuck together with each other through the hardship on the streets. They have been growing well now they are in a home and getting reacquianted with being around people. They look very strange with the shaved patches on their sides from the neutering surgery.

It turns out that Zorro has been a bit of pest to the other cats (no surprise there) and Melissa thinks that in the future, I should look into getting cat sitter since having him in the house with her girls and Inego has been a bit much. Fair enough. But Bobby and Belinda have also stirred things up with Stripes in particular, so I have a three for one offer I cannot refuse: Zorro has been triplicated and I have three black cats now. And as it turns out, that is all I will leave with: Carmel refuses to come out where he can be reached, even for me, so he gets left behind to be caught at a later time and brought home (and this indeed does happen a few days later). Bobby and Belinda mewl like it is the end of the world coming home in the car: Clearly they remember being carried away and abandoned after their last car trip and very very unhappy. But after a cleanup, they start to install themselves in the house and within days, accept me and establish that they are queens and alpha cats and Zorro and Carmel are their underlings. Surprisingly enough, this works out fine. Months later when it is time to find them a real permanent home together somewhere, I am very sorry to see them leave and the house will seem empty with just two cats. But that is far in the future.

Personally, though, as soon as the two kittens are cleaned up and in the house and have learned where the litter boxes and food dishes are located, it is serious bath time for me. A glass of a nice red wine, a plate of cheese and crackers, and a tub full of hot sudsy bathwater... ah, it is heaven on Earth.

And thus, for the most part, ends my journey through Shenandoah National Park on the Appalachian Trail. Five days later, Hurricane Isabel would slam into the area and take out electrical power for several days, which was just fine with Bobby and Belinda who knew no better and just thought it was wonderful to have the guest human in the house all the time for four days straight. Wind damage and water logged ground turned soft by the rain would cause major tree downings in the park, which was closed to the public for weeks after the storm, though Skyline Drive would be opened in sections as crews cleared the road.




Tree blown down by Hurricane Isabel in Shenandoah National Park near Pass Mountain


A week after Isabel, I would go back to the park to work with the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club to clear trees from the trails, feeling that I owed the park something back for the wonderful experience it gave me hiking through it. A week later still, I would backpack the last section from Gravel Springs Shelter to Tom Floyd Shelter and back with my good friend J.R./Easy, taking one of the side trails around on the way down to add distance and variety. The trees were down and uncleared there off the Appalachian Trail, so it was an interesting hike. We even came on bear cubs just off the trail at one point. We also ran into John McCrae, the SNP North District manager with PATC, who asked me to count the downed trails on the last part of the AT out to Floyd Shelter, which seemed to impress Easy (the knowing Jim McCrae part, not my ability to count to six! Or was it eight?). On the basis of this encounter, Easy recommended that I become a Volunteer Coordinator for the Maryland Outdoor Club, which I have (at the date of this writing) now been doing for about nine or ten months. So the hike has cast a longer shadow on my life than just a pleasant little walk in the woods.

And as for Meredith and her adventure, about another month or so on yet still, she and I and Easy and my friend Gina (the one with the knife Pizza Slayer) would do a wonderful weekend hike from the Jim and Molly Denton Shelter a day’s hike north of Tom Floyd Shelter, hike through the fall colours through Manassass Gap, the Thompson Wildlife Management Area and its gaggle of enthusiastic hunters, to stay at Dick’s Dome just south of Sky Meadows State Park. So she did get in her hike and the chance to use all that new gear and enjoy the experience, though at ten miles she was ready to be done and had Easy proposed marriage when she showed up and he handed her an unexpected Guiness kept cold in the stream, I think she just might have accepted. He didn’t, she didn’t, but there was no leftover beer and Meredith will hear no evil spoken of J.R. ever since.

Jesse a.k.a. “Red Sock”

SNP Hike Day 7: Cheeseburger in Paradise

Friday, 12th of September, 2003.

Pass Mountain Shelter to Gravel Springs Gap Shelter, 14(?) miles

I did not cheer long enough for the mice: the a--hole’s backpack straps did not get chewed through in the night and he greets me in the morning with cheery and sarcastic “See, the bears didn’t get me.” Lovely. I get my breakfast and start packing up and I am greeted with a wonderful sight: another hiker coming already for the morning from the north. Why wonderful? It means I am not the first one on the trail today and it is not going to be another “Frodo goes to Mordor” walk through spider webs galore. Apparently the old fellow came in from Elkswallow, having stealth camped there for the night after realizing that the shelter marked on the trail profile map on the side of PATC map for the North District is not marked on the full topographic map and, in fact, does not exist. I later learn that it has not existed since the days of the Reagan Adminstration and the imploding of park services under James Watt, who believed the world was going to come to an end very soon, so why preserve it when you can extract maximum value from it now? National Parks have been on a long downhill slide ever since, and still are on that terrible glide path as witnessed by the absence of any working pay ‘phone for twenty miles in any direction from here (though plenty of non-working ones carefully documented by frustrated hikers who came on them and tried to make a call) and the closing of campgrounds and retraction of services, like the closing of the Panaroma Restaurant back at Thorton Gap. Anyway, there is no shelter there, though there is a picnic ground, store, grill, and gas station.



It is a beautiful misty morning, the first day I’ve had all the time I have been here where it is not sunny. It’s a nice cool slow feeling and perfect for hiking: not so wet that I’m going to get soaked, and cool enough to keep me from sweating as much. I get into my pack and boots and head up over the slight incline of Pass Mountain and then down across Skyline Drive and the long curl around and up to Elkswallow. I do not realize it at the time, but Pass Mountain is a designated wilderness area where no power tools are used and management of the land is deliberate very light handed. Even tasks like keeping the weeds down along the Appalachian Trail is done with hand tools, as I will learn nine months from today when I work for a volunteer trail crew with the Maryland Outdoor Club. Unaware of why, I realize it is very pretty and special place. The fog condenses the feeling of the forest: it is like I am in my own little private world and a hiker just a hundred feet from me would have no idea I was there. I love hiking in the fog, and in snow while it is falling, for just this reason.

However, I am in for a minor surprise when a good three hours later I get into Elkswallow and the fog has not lifted. I’m not unhappy, mind you, as it is making this the coolest day and I am quite happy for that. But it is a slightly odd feeling. I get into Elkswallow and behold the Holy Grail. There’s a grill there and staff ready to make the most greasy burger your heart could desire. And I am ready for a nice hot bacon cheeseburger, a big cold soda, and fries after this 95 miles of hiking and vegetarian fare for days. If I had come on this place any time other than lunch, maybe I would not have indulged, but this time... I get my burger and all and sit back out at a picnic table to enjoy it. I’m not usually a big burger fan, but this is by far and away the most wonderful burger I have had in years. I am pretty sure it is the hiking, not the burger, but please don’t interupt me as I am busy eating.

While I am sitting there in ecstatic culinary bliss, two SoBos come through, trail names Inga and Stew Ball. They are a slightly older couple, probably in their mid to late 40s, who have flip flopped: They started at Harper’s Ferry in the spring and went north, came back after reaching Katahdin, and now are working their way south in hopes of reaching home near Hot Springs, North Carolina in time for Thanksgiving. They dwelve into a burger meal of their own, and while I am washing mine down with the last of the soda, Inga finishs her meal and announces she is going back for dessert. Oh, what an good idea! The idea planted, I go back and get a nice big Snickers bar though I decide to pack it out and have it for dessert tonight. I’m doing okay today, but given the state of my feet and the blisters, I am tempted to call it quits on the trail at Gravel Springs tonight and ask Meredith if she would not mind doing the last two days with me another time. If she really wants to do this now, which is possible, I’ll relent: it is not as if I cannot hike. But it would be very nice to stop now.

I say goodbye to Inga and Stewball and warn them about the chipmunks at the bear pole at Pass Mountain Shelter if that turns out to be their destination for the day. They thank me and head on. And I get back on the trail and continue the climb up Hogback Mountain.

The climb is slow and not much fun, but coming down the other side, the switchbacking is awful. My toes are really not enjoying this and even with the boots laced up tightly, I can feel a blister forming on the front of one of my toes from touching the front of the boots. And then it happens: partway down the hillside, I do... something. I don’t know what, but my right leg suddenly develops a terrible twinge and it hurts all of a sudden to put weight on it. I can walk, and continue to do so, but it is a very awkward and slow lumbering pace. I am so ready to get to Gravel Springs now... I have to stop and rest and have some dried fruit every thirty minutes or so, but keeping myself onwards with the thought that the hut will be a good place for a long rest and I can call Meredith from there and now, without even a guilty conscious for cancelling her plans, say that I cannot do that last ten miles from Gravel Springs to Tom Floyd Shelter. My leg is just not going to be up to it.

I get to the concrete post for the turnoff to Range View Cabin. Oh good. I know this place from frequent hikes up one of my favorite side paths here, Little Devil’s Stair. I know I am getting close here. And sure enough, in time, I find the turnoff and start limping down that trail. The fog has not lifted and in fact at times has thickened enough to be a slight rain. By the time I am going down the side path to Gravel Springs, it has turned all the way to a steady light rain. A tree down in the middle of the path floors me: I can’t climb up the side to get around and it is a bit high to sit on and swing over, but that’s what I try. But once I am sitting down, it is all I can do to stand up on the other side, and I actually sit there with pants on a wet tree waiting to summon the energy to go on even though I am perhaps two hundred feet from my goal for the day. I don’t know how long I might have sat there if it was not starting to rain a little harder, but I eventually summon the energy to get up and move down to the hut.

Never has there been a finer sight for sore eyes. I limp in and sit down and I’m just too tired to do anything, but get those boots off and sandals on. I know I should change into the dry clothes soon, but right now I just want to sit and do absolutely nothing.

It is a nice feeling to be in the shelter out of the rain as it picks up tempo. I do pull the picnic table in under the eaves to get it out of the rain. I turn my attention to the shelter log book for some restful reading while my body recovers and I nibble on the last of the dried fruit. While I am reading of other people’s adventures (and there are some good ones: Earlier this year, a mother bear and her cub were frequently seen near the junction of this blue blaze trail down to the shelter and the Appalachian Trail. Some hikers saw her and let her move off, at least one tried to stand his ground when she mock charged him to scare him off, and he whacked her on the nose with his hiking stick and she lumbered off and he came down to the shelter and got a change of underpants... and many other such interesting tidbits). One a ways back in July gives an elaborate diagram of how to set up your bear line here. It seems that the bear pole here has been mastered by the raccoons and they don’t need a helping overhanging tree to get into the food bag: They have learned how to strong arm their way up the bear pole itself. The authors worked out a way to string bear line with one section on one of the bear poles, another on a tree, and thus hang the food bag at least ten feet up and more than three feet across from the pole and tree, and the line is too thin to hold a raccoon without swaying and tossing them off. Ingenious! I decide to find the bear pole in question and set up my food bag the same way when the time comes to do so.

In the meantime, I pull out my clean clothes, soap, and wash cloth. The rain is really pouring down now and I can put my pot at the drain spout on the eaves and fill it with rain water running off the roof in half a minute. I suck down a big helping of fresh water and, since it is darkening now and pouring heavy rain, I figure I will not get any visitors at the shelter tonight and that I have the place to myself. So I strip down and have myself a little skinny dipping shower. The rain is enough to make the soap work up a good lather, and I can toss a pan of water over myself periodically to get a more thorough rinse. I have never felt so good and refreshed, though I am putting most of my weight on the left leg even after a good hour of rest here. That right leg is really much better, but I am very dubious about being able to hike out on it.

After my shower, I get into that last change of clean clothes. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite so fine as sitting down clean and dry and warm and refreshed after being soggy and smelly and exhausted minutes before. Now it is time to call Meredith and break the bad news.

But the bad news is on me. I can get a very minimial signal, but my mobile ‘phone has a nasty surprise for me. The power bar on the side of the screen shows that it has a full charge... right up until the moment I actually try to do anything. As soon as the call goes through, the power bars drop to near zero, drowns out what I am trying to say with beeping warnings about low power, and then automatically shuts off before I can get in a message to the answering machine. Then it beeps at me to tell me that I have a message, which turns out to be Meredith, but the signal is too weak and I cannot work out what she is saying before I get cut off again. I let the battery rest for several moments and try to call again. It goes through and I get Meredith in person, but I cannot tell what she hears and what she says. Well, that was pointless. So I am expecting her tomorrow morning at 11 AM according to the plan we made for ourselves before trying to change it now with calls and I just hope something of what I have said got through and she knows the hike is not happening.

Drat! I am mad at the ‘phone for tricking me all week with the strong power bar indication when I have checked on it. And I have lugged this piece of deadweight all week long only to have it be useless when I actually wanted it. Wonderful. But then that is why we had an initial plan to meet at 11 AM already set. But I thought reception would be better than this. Not much to do about it now.

I eye the big Snickers Bar, but decide it is time to have something really different after a week of Indian food. I get out the package of Trader Joe’s Pasta e Fagioli, a pasta and bean soup with Italian seasoning. I read the label: twenty minutes of simmering and they make a number of recommendations about things to add. I had peeked at this at the start of the hike when packing and tossing a small can of tomato sauce, and so I get the water to a boil, add the mix and tomato sauce and simmer, with my hands cupped around the flames from the stove to keep it from getting blown out by the breeze and to keep the heat going to the pan. For all my worries about the stove running out of fuel on me, it is still going strong and heats up the soup.

This is the very best soup in the world. I have not had soup this good in... well, I do not remember every having soup this poigiant and wonderful. It’s a good thing I have the shelter to myself because who wants to hear a grown man climaxing over a pot of soup. Yes, this is a SOUP PORN hiking log entry! Okay, I was not quite that demonstrative. But there was no reason not to be as it certain was how I felt! It is supposed to serve four, but I polish off the whole pot by myself (no one else there, after all) slowly over the course of an hour. Like any such sensual experience, it is best slow and drawn out and fully appreciated. I know men are presumed to falter prematurely, but with soup... never.

But the pot comes to an end and I must admit that I am almost satiated. The Snickers bar is going to have to wait a while. I get a nice big cup of fresh water to rinse everything down and turn my attention back to reading the pages of the shelter log.

Lots of grand adventures and wonderful stories from the people whom have come through before. None of been here, and recorded anything, in a few days, but the log book is about three quarter full and reachs all the way back to some time in May. I have a good deal of fun reading it. I do discover that, far from being indulgent at the grill at Elkswallow, I have been pretty circumspect compared to others. There are entries from people who had a second burger, and a very consistent theme is going back for blackberry milkshakes. The passion of the descriptions of this beverage sound a bit like my experience with the soup just now. Do Harlequin romance novel writers get their linguistic ideas from AT log books, perhaps?

Finally I am recovered from the soup enough to think a little dessert would be nice and I go through my Snickers bar. It is one of those super sized Giant bars and just wonderful. They say chocolate releases the same endorphins as you find in an infauted person. Being already in raging hormonal bliss from dinner, it’s hard for me to say anything cognizant on this topic, but submit it is quite plausible.

Now is the moment of truth. The gargage is collected together, everything bagged up, and it is time to set up my bear line trick on the pole and tree as per instructions in the shelter log. I tie the carabiner I have been using to secure my sandals to the pack to one end of the line and toss it up into the tree and over the first branch. I comes down, narrowly missing pranging into me, and I secure the line with the clip. My food bag looks strange limp against the side of the tree where I tied it in midway, but it makes sense once the other end of the line is fed up onto the bear pole and secured there. I admire my handiwork which is just like the diagram. The raccoons won’t get this.

But the bears sure will: it occurs to me that the food bag is almost level with my eyes. I’ve just set up a pinata for the bears!

So down comes the line on the tree and I weight it with the carabiner again and this time try to loop it up and over the second branch much higher up. It is a very strange experience to have a blue flashlight send light upwards into the air and more or less straight up in the direction of the falling rain. I am very grateful for my japara which is keeping me quite dry, but trying to look straight up into falling rain in the dark is a hard thing to do as the rain drops that slap into my face and right into my eyes are the ones just out of the cone of light from the flashlight so I don’t even have a sense of them coming until splat! And then, thunk. I get the line over the branch, but not without also getting banded on the head by the descending caribinger. I play the ropes out and secure it again and admire my work. Now the food bag is a good ten feet up off the ground beyond the reach of the bears, squirrels, and all the other critters. Of course it is also dangling in the middle of moderately heavy rain, so everything is getting wet, but I did wrap the contents of the bag in a garbage bag first, so it should be okay. And if not... well, I am going home tomorrow and can dry it all at home.

Satiated and happy and with my food safe for the night, I turn in. I’m clean, I’m dry, and there is something just magical about being in the woods in the rain and hearing the sound of the drops hitting the shelter roof. Eventually I dose off. I am finally getting used to the feel of a hard wood floor under the padding, though I still have the same light sleep through the night.

Tomorrow, I am rescued by a gallant damsel in a dashing sports car, and one of my cats goes triplicate.

J aka “Red Sock”

SNP Hile Day 6: Cheering on the Mice

Thursday, 11th of September, 2003.

Rock Spring Hut to Pass Mountain Shelter, 13 miles

I’ve had yet another night of light sleep surfing in and out of wakefulness, but I seem to be getting enough sleep to be able to go each day, so while it is annoying to feel half awake all night long, I seem to be getting the necessary rest. I get my breakfast, filter some water to have a full supply for the day, and slap on more big moleskin patches over the blisters before putting on the hiking socks for the day and heading out. I tolerate a bit more motherly advice from the New York ladies, then some scathing commentary about my GPS (apparently one of the two women had an ex-husband who was very attached to his gadgets), and I head off, once again first on the trail in the morning, so once again walking into spider webs from time to time.

About half an hour later, Rambling Ryan comes up behind me and hands me something I left behind. Thank goodness: it was my roll of toilet paper in the ziplock bag. I had given it to one of the Illinois girls when she had to visit the latrine and found no paper there and I had not put it back in my pack and didn’t notice in the morning. Thank goodness for small favours!

Rambling Ryan takes off up the path ahead of me. He is a much faster hiker than I, hiking the full trail at 20-25 miles a day. He is planning to “flip flop”: most hikers are called northbounders (or in some log enteries, “NoBos”. Suarte and Sweat coming down from Maine are the less common “SoBos”, while I’m a section hiker.) He will meet friends from D.C. in a few days north of here at Harper’s Ferry, take a few days off and visit some equipment stores in northern Virginia, then take off for Maine and hike south from Katahdin. The idea is to avoid the crowds created by SoBos and NoBos all starting around the same time if not at the same pace from their respective start points (the vernal equinox for NoBos at Springer Mountain in Georgia, a couple of months later in Maine for SoBos.) That big pulse of people coming in the same direction around the same time means there are some interesting trail traditions, like a big cookout dinner at Blackburn Trail Center every night for NoBos in late June and early July (Spending the 4th for the fireworks in Harper’s Ferry is a common goal amongst NoBos.). But there are those like Rambling Ryan who want both the woods and the shelters at night to themselves or at least to small groups.

In any case, I am please to be reunited with my toilet paper. I may have only two more nights left, but it is always good to rely on your own paper rather than that at the latrines. Ryan is trying to interest me in the idea of a big sitdown breakfast up ahead at Skyland, which I must admit has some appeal, but it is going to be a pretty full day of hiking today. The distance is only average, but not long after Skyland, I go near the peaks of Stony Man Mountain, which is the highest spot on this trail in the park, Little Stony Man, and Mary’s Rock. Then there is a good 2000 feet of elevation drop through Thorton Gap, then another mile of gradual climbing across the trail in the north district up to the Pass Mountain Shelter.




Skyland is very pretty when I get there with a wonderful view into the town of Luray in the Shenandoah Valley. I do avail myself of a cold soda from the vending machine, look for but fail to find some cheese at the store which clearly does not cater to hikers or even campers. I’m not going to get a carved bear for my pack... A quick visit to the bathroom to splash water over my face and remove a couple of hours of grim from hiking, and then it is time to head on again.

Stony Man Mountain is hard going up: my blisters are not happy with climbing as the weight is on the back of the heels. But the soda is giving me a bit more energy, so practicing taking two steps instead of one to each breath is keeping me moving up and along at a reasonable pace. I see the turnoff for the peak of Stony Man and decide to give it a miss since the view from Skyland was very similar and there is Little Stony Man and Mary’s Rock still to come for views. Coming down from the saddle point on the trail, my feet shift forward in the boots and I can just feel the ends of my toes touching the front of the boot. This is the bane of people like me with long thin feet: boots that fit still have to be laced up very tight to keep the feet from sliding forward on downhills, and boots big enough to have that much space in the front slide back and forth a lot. I take a break at Little Stony Man where there is a wonderful view again right on the trail, tighten up the boot laces again, look ahead to see Thorton Gap and Mary’s Rock in the distance, then head on again.

Just like every other day so far, the weather is very good and the skies are clear and sunny. As I come down the other side, I can see all the way out to Old Rag Mountain off the side of the main range through Shenandoah, as well as see the fire scars through the woods from the large forest fire that burned through this area three years ago. There are also a great many dead trees down on the ground from the damage done by Hurricane Floyd a few years back. I don’t know this at the time, but in another week from now, Hurricane Isabel will come through here and do yet more damage, with its winds funneled through Thorton Gap in particular. I’m amongst the last to see it before the storm, though of course I have no idea of this at the time.

The hike continues well and that feet sliding forward sensation is not bothering me as much as I come down from Little Stony Man, so I think I have it covered. One nice thing about downhill is that the weight is off the blisters. One bad thing is that it takes a lot of energy and concentration and effort to hike down gracefully with the 30-35 pounds of stuff on my back and me pretty well worn from a good morning of hiking. I take a pleasant break at the Byrd’s Nest Day Shelter for some more dried fruit and water, and then take on Mary’s Rock.

The climb up is not much to write about, though the occasional views through the trees are nice. There’s a small offshot trail to go up to the top and see all around in all directions, but I’ve got the shelter on my mind and have enjoyed the views from other spots already, so keep going. Besides, there is a store at Panaroma at the bottom that it would be nice to reach and get a block of cheese or something like that for Friday’s lunch now that my hummus has run out and I still have a single “loaf” of pita bread for tomorrow.

It is a long way down. A long long long way down. My legs are very very tired by this point and there is again that slight touching sensation of toes hitting the ends of the boots. I stop and lace up harder again, but forcing the blisters into the backs of the heels of the boots for a snugger fit is no kindness and only does so much good. I soldier on, reminding myself that my boots and gear are in far better shape than anything that soldiers wore through this area during the Civil War, Union or Confederate, and they did marches of 20 miles a day for days at a time on occasion. In wool uniforms. In the middle of summer, not a pleasant fall day like the ones I have been blessed with all week long. My respect for the level of effort in this has climbed a great deal during this week.

But that does not mean I am not very very pleased to have the torture of my toes and heels end when I get to Panaroma. There is a brief scarey moment when I realize the parking lot looks completely abandoned. Maybe the store has been closed just like the restaurant? But I am in luck and it is open. I get a nice cold orange juice and a block of cheese that goes in the pack for later, take an unusually long break sitting and doing nothing before taking up the burden again. It’s mid-afternoon and my feet are very unhappy, but there is just a mile more to go. And only a few hundred feet to go before finishing off another trail milestone and passing from the Central to the North district of the park, and thus onto the third map. It took me a full year last year day hiking to go through two maps from Harper’s Ferry to the north end of the park and I’ve done the same in just five days.

But I still have that last mile to go, so back goes the pack and I head on out across U.S. 211 where it goes through the gap and back up onto the slope of Pass Mountain. The woods here are a mix of trees like sassafras and oak, but shift towards pines as I get near the shelter. When I get to the shelter, there are a couple of people there. One is a SoBo whose name I didn’t catch. He asks me if I have seen a couple of people whom he describes, which matches some guys I saw on the trail a day or so ago. Apparently these are some of his hiking partners and he fell back a while ago to give his feet a rest and now is chasing to catch up with them. He is thinking he can reach Rock Spring Shelter for the night. I laugh: I’ve just spent seven or eight hours getting here from there and he wants to do this in the three or four hours of daylight he has left? With the climb up Mary’s Rock to start with? And with backcountry camping not permitted on Stony Man Mountain? But he is determined. So after heating up a dinner on a alcohol stove he made for himself (essentially a crushed beer can filled with ethanol, and a larger can with holes in the side and open top and bottom to hold the pan over over it: it is light and simple, though it tends to build up some black soot that needs to be cleaned off), he heads off. The other person is the shelter caretaker, a guy whose real name I am told, but forget, but whose trail name is Skyline. He is a nice and likeable fellow who chats for a while before taking care of some maintenance work.

Skyline warns me to use one of the bear poles in the woods at the campground site off to the side. Apparently there is a tree starting to grow limbs close enough to the bear pole that the raccoons and chipmunks have learned to run up the tree and jump onto the pole and raid the food from here. I comment that it seems like the bear poles have little to do with bears and a great deal to do with chipmunks and mice. Skyline laughs at this, but points out that they have had bears getting into the huts at night when people have neglected to use the bear poles. Just a few months before, one bear got into Pinefield Hut in the night and scared the heck out of the hikers inside while he helped himself to the food bag someone had hanging from a hook inside, thinking that was enough to keep it free of mice. Skyline mentions that he keeps having to take down the lines people put in the shelters with tuna cans on the line to stop the mice: other hikers see them and use them instead of the bear poles.

I scout out the poles and find the one which Skyline was recommending that I use. Apparently there are a lot of limitations in the park about managing the environment. While it is okay to mow the grass around the hut, taking a saw to a tree limb is not okay. And so the chipmunks that work it out get to feast on unnatural foods. It’s an odd way to manage things.

Despite my fears, and the presence of the emergency stove I got at Loft Mountain earlier this week, my antique hiker stove lights up just fine tonight and I have the one of the last of the Instant India dinners. I have one for tomorrow night and then the pasta bean Italian soup thing for Tom Floyd Shelter just outside the park for dinner Saturday night when Meredith hikes out with me. Mind you, looking at the backs of my feet, I am wondering if I should be whimping out and asking Meredith to just take me home Saturday morning. But after a good meal and rest, and finding the shelter to myself after Skyline heads for home and the thru hiker continues on his southward chase of his friends, I figure I’ll see how things are tomorrow. I’ve come a long way and it seems a pity to back out at the last minute so close to finishing the entire hike. I remind myself of Tuesday night at Pocosin Cabin, when I was ready to give up when I first got there, and ready to continue taking on the trail the next morning. A good long night of sleep and some rest and healing for my feet just might work wonders...

I settle down for the night after it gets dark and snuggle up in my sleeping bag. I’m just about to go to sleep when there is some noise outside and it gets louder and louder and then there is a blue light from one of the LED headlamps some hikers use. I don’t have the shelter to myself after all.

I don’t catch the name of the SoBo who just rolled in, but very early in the conversation I mention the advice from Skyline to put his foodbag on the bearpole in the woods, not the one just across the way. I hit a raw nerve or something as I get a lecture about how “I’ve hiked 4500 miles (apparently this guy has done the AT a couple of times, though not all of it in either of those hikes) and I never used no bear pole, no bear box, no bear line, and no bear never got me...” blah blah blah. He continues on this diatribe for a good few minutes and I get pretty damn irritated, though in my usual sit there silently and smoulder fashion. My older sister calls this state of my emotions “the black hole.” Of course it is dark and the stranger cannot see how mad I am and I’m not going to say anything since there is no point when he is refusing to listen. I just hope the bear from Pinefield Hut hasn’t been teaching his compatriots, but if that bear comes in, I do hope this damn fool has a Snicker’s bar in his sleeping bag with me so the bear gives him the full attention and not me.

Lest you think I am joking about bears teaching each other tricks, I should share a story from one of the rangers. Some years ago, there was a bear up near Big Meadows that learned she could mock charge day trippers. Since they don’t know bear behavior well enough to recognize the difference between a real attack and a mock charge, they (somewhat sensibly) run off, dropping their day packs as a distraction. The bear then helps herself to the contents of the pack. The park service was somewhat concerned, but not enough to do anything about it until she had cubs and they caught her at teaching them the same trick. After all, it is an easy high calorie payoff, low energy expended way to get a meal. Almost as good as finding a bird feeder. So the park service caught her and relocated her to another part of the park.

And a few months later, they get reports of several different bears in the South District where they released her now doing the mock charging trick. Park rangers tell the story to demonstrate that relocating bears as a way to solve problems with bears that learn to check out the humans at the campgrounds in the Central District can make the problem worse, not better. But it is an interesting experiment in bear re-education too...

Anyway, I am filled with angry thoughts at this damn fool. I start to doze off to sleep, but surf in and out of wakefulness through the night. I hear the guy make his dinner on the stove, finish up, set his bag on the floor in the shelter, and settle down for the night. Much later, I hear some scrambling around. It’s the first time I have actually heard mice in the night in the shelter and I presume it is because this damn fool has a pack with food and salty pack straps in the shelter. I’m away from the side of the shelter which they tend to run around for safety, and my stuff is all safely up the pole. So I sing a silent cheer to the mice and hope they chew all the way through this jerk’s packstraps in the night in their pursuit of salt. And with that happy thought, I doze back towards sleepfulness.

Tune in tomorrow for a Cheeseburger in Paradise and the glory of sitting in the woods dry while it rains outside.

J aka “Red Sock”

SNP Hike Day 5: Sleeping with Beautiful Women

Wednesday, 10th of September, 2003.

Pocosin Cabin to Rock Spring Cabin, 15 miles




I wake up well rested at the first glint of sunlight on the horizon... and with the sound of munching inches from my ears. That’s a rather alarming sensation, and I hold myself totally still and open my eyes. I’m wrong: the critter is actually several feet away, but the deer seems quite unpertubed by the presence of a large very artifical looking blue thing on the ground right next to it. I sit up carefully and gradually and the deer turns very unconcerned to look at me. No sandwich in my hand, so the doe goes back to her happy business of munching the grass here. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club which maintains this cabin clearly mows the grass down regularly and that brings in the deer for muching the extra tender grass. The doe pays me no mind when I go to get my food down from the bear bag nor when I approach her with the camera. She doesn’t want me too close, but she is quite unfrightened by me.

I go down to the spring and get a wet washcloth and wash myself down as best I can, then get into my first complete change of clean clothes since Saturday morning. I’ll wear this today, tomorrow, and Friday and change into the last clean set of clothes Saturday morning just before catching up with Meredith. Still, there is only so much a washcloth can do and I do have a bit of hiker smell to me after it all. I take my breakfast and break camp and I’m on the trail in just a few minutes. The bears left my bag alone last night if they did come to the spring, but I don’t think they were there at all.

One bad thing about being the first on the trail in the morning is that the spiders often have cast webs across the trail in the night and the first one in the morning gets to walk into them. I’m learning to spot them before hitting them and brushing them aside, but I can’t get them all, so I grab a suitable stick and some point and start strolling with the stick ahead of me. I must look a bit odd. But it works. Shilob is not going to get me...

More odd than I guessed as an hour later, I come to the edge of Lewis Mountain Campground. I see there is a spring on the far side of the campground, which I am aiming for to refill my water. My filter is starting to take a bit more work to make it do its job, and washing off the muck that built up inside it helped, but did not solve the problem. Obviously some fine grit has worked into the ceramic filter and it takes more time for the water to work through it. So a chance to get tap water without working the filter is welcome. Before I get to it, though, I find a group on the trail including a park ranger in uniform. Turns out she was talking about the trail and thru hikers and just then, I walk up looking appropriately unshaven with pack and all. So I am the star of the moment for a while as the guests ask me questions about hiking and what I am doing and goals and such. It’s a rather amusing experience. As I hike off, I hear the park ranger pointing out the camp sandals clipped on the back of my pack. Thank you, J.R., once again. Who knew camp sandals on the side of the pack was an AT fashion statement?

I find the water fountain at the north edge of the campground a short while later, fill up, and also take advantage of a garbage can there to offload the last couple of days worth of dinner packages and such. I know they don’t weight much at all, and certainly far less than the water that I just took on, but I am mighty pleased to be rid of it all the same.

I put the pack back on and have an uneventful day. The moleskin seems to be holding okay, though my feet are certainly letting a very slight climb as I get to Bearfence Mountain, and I am amazed at just how much I slow to a crawl with this slight uphill. I try to practice taking two steps to one breath to push myself gently to pick up the uphill pace, but still I am crawling pacewise with this slight change in slope. Note to self: never gain 40 pounds. Ugh! And to think that I have hiked for an hour and a half to get here to where I should have just been starting for the day had I made it to the Hut here like planned. But no problem: I’m on track for Friday night at Gravel Springs Hut now and if I have trouble making it to Rock Springs Hut tonight, I am also going past Big Meadows. I could even splurge on a hotel room and get properly clean. But I push on and other than a rest for lunch well past Bearfence Mountain, I’m doing well and moving along reasonably at least for my own pace. Suarte and Sweat would consider me a slug, but I’ve not been hiking for three months solid like them and now I am prepared to accept that this is okay.




Do I have some kind of deer attracting phermone on? When I stop for lunch past Bearfence Mountain, deer come right up me. Because they want my sandwich, right? Deer love hummus on pita? Nope, no interest in the sandwich. One of the does walks right up and sniffs me, not the sandwich and shows no interest in the food. What is going on? And is there something around like this that works on human women?

I reach Big Meadows in the early afternoon and it is literally right next to the trail, so I head up and take advantage of flush toilets and a quick face rinse in the running water in the sink, choose a picnic table, and get into my dried fruit snack pack. Yum! I am going to have to look for these packages of dried fruit from Trader Joe’s again in the future. Should I be getting advertising dollars from them for my shameless promotion here? The dried fruit is very tasty and don’t make me feel dried out like dried food some times does. J.R./Easy recommends against dried fruit because it tends to loosen the bowels and dry you out, so you go through more water, but I am not noticing either effect. I feel ready to take on the next few miles to Rock Springs Gap and so I continue along the trail. I’ll admit that I am very ready to be done for the day when I finally find the concrete post marking the trail down to the hut. There’s actually both a Hut and a Cabin down here: Cabins have four walls, a door, and a padlock on the door, and huts are three sided basic buildings for long distance hikers that were first built as accomodations by the Civilian Conservation Corp working in the park in the 1930s. It being the Depression, they didn’t want to spent the extra money putting in a fourth wall? I don’t understand the logic, but it sure beats carrying that lead brick of a tent I have back at home.

I arrive at the shelter and discover I am not alone. There are two attractive young girls, probably in their early 20s, down in the park for several days from Illinois. One is very quiet and shy and talks only to her friend and usually in muted terms, but the other is very friendly. I’m glad I changed this morning, though I still smell a bit strongly from sweating into the shirt all day. I go down to the spring and filter water for dinner and rinse off a bit to come back to the hut and find there are now two more women, both in their mid-50s at a guess, from upstate New York. I take a stab in the dark and mention the small town of Ontario just outside Rochester, one of the few places in upstate I know. Right on the money, they are both from there and one of them had her daughter go through the middle school in Ontario when my uncle Peter was a music teacher there, and knows him well from the years he was principal and thus very involved in the community. The world is small...

After we have all had dinner and chattered for a while, and I get more motherly advice about my blisters, one more guest rolls in for the evening. It is a fellow by the trail name Rambling Ryan. He got the name for writing very long enteries in the shelter logs when he writes. My kind of guy. Turns out he is my kind of guy in more ways than one: he’s a marine biologist of American extraction who lives and works in New Zealand for as much of the time as his visa allows (He has to come back to the U.S. periodically for at least six months in two years, or something like that, then he can go back and work for another eighteen months there). What a great deal! So we natter about things colonial and backpacking equipment, and like most Kiwis I have met on the trail, I get the lecture on the superiority of MacPack gear. Actually Rambling Ryan is a more sophisticated conossieur than the average New Zealander: he’s willing to say that MacPack makes very good packs, but some of their other gear like tents is not as good as some other manufacturers. I’m hiking tentless this week, but listen. He gives me the same advice as Almost There did to get a Sierra Flashlight tent for hiking. Actually, having done a backpacking trip with friends earlier this year where one friend had one of these, I’m pretty partial to the Hennessey Hammock tents, especially now they are making them longer for taller folks like myself. Rambling Ryan has never seen one of those and is curious. But at least for now, I have nothing to show him. We talk for a while longer ever well after dark as he has had a lot of fascinating experiences with his work and love of the outdoors and places he has gone and seen in New Zealand. I’ve been wanting to travel there for some time and this just whets my appetite all the more. It will happen in good time.

There’s an amusing entry in the shelter log about a particular deer near the hut. It followed the author around everywhere she went. First it was cute, then it was odd, then it was kind of creepy. Yes, the stalker deer is still around and followed me to and from the spring without getting close and without losing sight of me either. What is with the deer today? At least I know it is not just me: one of the girls from Illinois mentioned the deer following her to the latrine, which she warns us all is very disgusting and not to be used except in case of emergency: she found a tree elsewhere. There’s that too much information thing going on here again.

Eventually we all settle in for the night. It’s a comfortable fit with six of us in the hut, but with the bunk arrangment (the shelter has two floors! Sort of), it is actually less crowded than it was in Calf Mountain Hut the first night with same number of people. I slumber off to sleep with the pleasant thought that I am getting to sleep with four beautiful women. As always on this trip, I actually surf back and forth between sleep and half awakefulness, and several times still find Rambling Ryan writing in the shelter log. I see where he gets his name...

Tune in tomorrow for the highest point of the trail, being chased down the trail by toilet paper, and me cheering the mice!

J aka “Red Sock”