SNP Hike Day 2: The rat ate my sock?

Sunday, 7th of September, 2003.

Calf Mountain Shelter to Blackrock Shelter, 13 miles.

Sunday morning is bright and beautiful when I get up. I did not sleep particularly well, but neither was it badly: I have the rest of having a full night of sleep and yet the sense of having been awake much of the night. Hard to explain, but I just do not sleep quite the same way camping as I do in my own bed.

When I get out of the sleeping bag, the two guys from Charlottesville are stirring already, but the three fellows hiking north with me are still out for the night. But the shelter is not a quiet place and our stirring around and getting stoves going for coffee gets them up. I get my pack down from the bear pole, but have not quite mastered the rod to bring things down and end up dropping my pack from about eight or nine feet up when trying to bring it down. I think I have the sense of how to do this in the future, but it is a bit nerve wracking to hear that heavy thump of the pack hitting the ground just as it occurs to me that the camera is in that pack. Uh oh (I seem to be saying that a lot on this trip!). Good fortune is with me: the camera is undamaged and the only apparent victim of my clumsiness is a tub of garlic hummus, which has not escaped the container much. A quick wipe with a wet cloth and that is fixed, and the tub is sealed into a Ziplock bag for now and will be part of my pita bread and hummus lunch later today.

I should add that I am going totally vegetarian this week. Not out of any moral conviction or health kick, but just because meat is hard to travel with in a backpack and keep fresh, and the Instant India dinners that tempted me at Trader Joe’s are all vegetarian creations. I have pita bread and hummus for my lunch for the next few days. As long as I eat my way through those in the next few days, the hummus should stay fine in its sealed containers. I might relent later and get some cheese at a camp store for lunch sandwiches. And maybe see if they have gas canisters or some kind of little portable stove as I do fear I won’t make it all the way to the end of the hike, and all my dinners do rely on heat. They might be palatable cold, all but the interesting Italian soup thing I have saved for the last night.

I’ve also taken a page from the book of Easy/J.R. On one of our previous weekend trips, he had a pair of sandals clipped onto the back of his pack and the very first thing he did when he got into camp for the evening was to take off the hiking boots and let them, and his feet, air out, and change into those sandals. It was pleasant to take off my boots last night when I got into camp and nice to have the sandals for camp. Once I’m packed up and ready to go, I turn to the boots.

The boots are moderately new: I needed something to replace my well loved hiking boots of the past twenty years when they finally started falling apart. The Raichlen boots I got seem nice, and I have been walking in them on and off for the past month to get them broken in, which I think I have done. They seem a reasonable fit, though this hiking trip is going to be the real test. J.R. thinks I am nuts because they are a very heavy duty solid boot, but I want something that is going to be fine on rocks later this year in the Grand Canyon, with very solid ankle support, and for future hiking in Australia, I think I want something with a solid high ankle just in case I piss off a snake accidentally. After good common sense, good solid boots are your best defense against snakes since they tend to go for the ankles. But as I go to get the boots, I notice I have only one of the two socks there that I left on top of the boots last night to air and dry out.

The guys last night were joking about rats nicking off with loose clothing left out which I took at the time to be a joke. I am suspecting one of my shelter mates of pulling my leg in a snipe hunt fashion, but no one seems to be noticing that I am noticing my boots. I use the time to brush my teeth to quietly scout around the shelter for my missing sock (not one of the famous red socks responsible for my trail name, mind you), but don’t see a sock stashed away from me anyway either by a rat gnawing it for salt or hidden from view by one of my hiking fellows here. I get out another pair of socks and get the boots on and head out for the day. No jokes for the guys: I really do think a rat stole my sock!






The morning is sunny, but still quite cool. I was a little chilly in T shirt and shorts, but start warming up fast once I get moving. An hour or so in, while gradually working up a slope through evergreen trees, I have to stop and get a stone out of my boot. It’s a nice spot to stop and take a breather and look around. There is something about pausing in the woods, which I have totally to myself, to really see them in real detail and appreciate them. While I hiked, the ground cover changed from mixed dedicious trees and shrubs to this area of white pines, and I never noticed much while hiking. I take some time to see, not just look at, the woods around me and get more of details and sense of the place rather than the subtle tunnel vision of trail ahead of me all the time. After a nice rest here for a while, I pick up again and continue hiking.

About an hour or so later, I feel a bit of a tinge in my right boot around the ankle. I was sure I got rid of that stone! I find another spot to sit down and have lunch as the little fruit bar has long since worn off, and I take off the boots. This is not a good idea to do in the middle of the hike since I have big feet that are prone to swelling when they get warm as they have been while hiking, and there’s the risk that the boots will not go back on. But it turns out there is a small blister starting up on my right heel. I’m slightly annoyed with myself: I really should have worn liner socks inside the hiking socks and perhaps tried to break the boots in even more than I did. I thought I would be okay, but apparently not. I get out a patch of moleskin and cut it out to cover the spot and put the boots back on after demolishing the hummus. I pack the trash into a large Ziplock bag. Yesterday I noticed there were often trash cans at the overlooks on Skyline Drive, and the park rangers are coming around regularly to empty them, so I will not have to pack out all my trash from the entire week.





This part of the park was burned in this part of the park several years ago and with a careful eye, you can see not only the more obvious fire scarred stumps, but also that most trees here are only a few years old. Apparently in very high winds, a hiker tried to light his stove and the matches kept getting blown out before the burner would light, so he tried lighting a piece of toilet paper... and burning paper from the ashes scattered into the woods and started a major fire.

After another pleasant break for lunch, I continue on my way to Blackrock Mountain Shelter for the night. It’s a very full day of hiking for me and I roll into the shelter around 3 PM or so, the first one in for the day. It is an estatic experience to get out of the boots. The moleskin seems to have stopped the blister from growing, but it is there and there might be the beginnings of another on the heel of the other foot. Uh oh again. But I shed my boots and get into the sandals and go down to the stream right near the shelter to filter water for the evening.

While I’m down there, I hear Poor Richard and Almost There roll into the camp, and a little while later, the chef fellow makes it in looking like he has had a hard day of it. The first thing he says when he sees me come up from the spring is “Did you see the snake?” I sense my leg being pulled again (I’m still not completely convinced that a rat took off with my sock), but he pulls out his digital camera and sure enough, he had just got a picture of a good four or five foot long copperhead snake that was sunning itself right in the fire pit not more than ten feet from the shelter. I must have passed within a few feet of it without ever seeing it. Wow! It took off when the chef fellow whacked at it with a stick. I am getting the sense that this guy does not have much in the way of bush wisdom: a snake is something to leave alone, especially if you already know it is venemous. But the snake is gone.

Chef also shows a series of images he took with the camera through the day. Hmm... Looks like this guy didn't do much hiking: he seems to be on the roadside rather than the trail, which is a slightly more direct route here. Almost There suggests when Chef is out of hearing that he might have been “yellow blazing.”

The Appalachian Trail, through its entire length, is marked with white blazes on the trees. Easy to spot, easy to follow, at least in the well maintained areas (and the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club is the gold standard on the AT for train maintenance and high quality maps). Side trails for shelters, springs, overlooks, and detours have blue blazes. Yellow blaze is a nickname for hiking on the side of the road where the road edge is marked with yellow paint: it is another way to say Almost There thinks Chef has been hitch hiking. He did come into the shelter the opposite direction on the trail, like he had been dropped off north of us where the trail next crosses the road. Chef does not look like the sort of purpose who could backpack thirteen miles a day day in and day out and keep it up...

Two guys come rolling into camp maybe a half hour or so later looking thin with scraggley beards and smelling like hikers. Not that I am grand myself, but I peg them as being thru hikers by sight. Sure enough, it is Suarte and Sweat, two brothers who have been hiking south from Maine since some time in April as soon as the snow started to melt off the White Mountains in New Hampshire. They started earlier than most people and might even be the first south bounders coming through the park for the year from Maine. They endured right through the middle of the dreaded black fly season in Maine and New Hampshire: fine as long as you move, but as soon as you stop any time, you get swarmed. They talked about reaching shelters in the Hundred Mile Wilderness and still having to set up tents to get into an area with fly mesh to escape the torture. Oh, that does not sound like fun!

They are moving at quite a brisk pace now, kicking out about twenty miles a day. I am feeling a bit the whimp for being worn from a mere 13 miles today! And then they really surprise me, pulling out crackers, cheese, and (I kid you not) a six pack of beer from their packs. No, they have not been drinking their way from Maine (can you imagine the weight of a week's supply of beer?), but apparently they dropped most of their gear in the mail when they got to the Pennsylvania border with Maryland and will be picking it up at the post office near Rockfish Gap tomorrow. The thinking was to do a piece of craziness called “The Maryland Challenge” in which you hike the entire distance of the Appalachian Trail in Maryland (about 30 miles) in 24 hours. Some people even do the “Four State Challenge” and make it all the way from the Pennsylvania-Maryland border to the West Virginia-Virginia Border on the trail, which adds about another 15 miles to the entire jaunt. Seems a bit nuts, but then hiking over two thousand miles already is a little nuts. They did the Maryland Challenge without problems and since then, have been carrying very light packs every day and going into town and getting a day or two of basic supplies each time and getting fresh food that would spoil after more than a few days, and indulging in things other than lightweight meals. In Shenandoah, you can keep your pack weight quite low since there are camp stores throughout the park, and if you are willing to stop in every day or so just off the trail and pay the prices they command, you can have fresh cheese and yes, beer, every day.

They are very friendly guys, which I think is pretty near to being a requirement on the trail, and share the beer. I try one to be socialable, but stick to my Instant India dinner for myself despite the cheese and crackers and sandwich offer they share. Almost There pulls out his little stove and makes another of his couscous with homemade additions meals that looks and smells wonderful. I ask and he whips out the recipe card for me as a gift. Cool! Basically it is homemade dried bits of chicken with some spices and dried fruit tossed into plain dry couscous, so it is very lightweight and to cook it, all he has to do is heat the water to a boil, toss in the stuff, and let it sit in the water and reabsorb it. A simple meal, very little cooking and needing very little in the way of gas (He also carries one of those ultra light weight titanium pans for the water which heats up very fast, and has the matching titanium spork which does not scratch the pan.). My pilaf dinner is good, but nothing in the same class.

While we are enjoying dinner, we have yet another person join us for the night. We call him Marlboro Man. He is hurting a bit and wondering about why anyone thinks backpacking is fun. But he is really badly equipped: all his gear is stuff got with Marlboro points (collect 20 UPC codes from your cigarette packages, get a little day pack kind of thing). The backpack is a poor quality little day pack, his stove is a monster Coleman thing that is great for car camping, but must weight quite a bit to carry, and his tent is a K-Mart thing that again is really intended for car camping where weight is not an issue. The straps on the pack have no padding. No wonder he is not having a good time! He’s thrilled to be handed a beer, but then he sees no less than three baby copperheads come sqiurming out of the fireplace and decides he is not sleeping the shelter, but sets up his tent in the campsite a little ways away in the trees.

Maybe there is some wisdom in that as I read the logbook in the shelter which records a lot of snakes hanging out here. Apparently Blackrock Mountain nearby is a very good place for them with lots of rocks to sun themselves and places to slip away and hide from predators and to hibernate in the winter. The shelter has lots of them. The good news, though, is that copperheads really hate the smell of hikers, so they tend to take off of their own accord when hikers show up. But when we are not there, they feast on the mice. The end result: this shelter has virtually no mice, unlike most, but the snakes leave people alone.

A good dinner and some fun chatter with Suarte and Sweat, and then I'm done for the night. Having learned my lesson, I’m attempting to be graceful and keep the pack on the rod to get it onto the bear pole for the night with a bit more grace than at Calf Mountain last night and this morning. Seems like I got the idea this time.

And that’s it for this day. My first real full day of hiking, so I am quite ready for the bed.

Tomorrow, scaling Blackroad Mountain, adventures with blisters, and more snakes!

J aka “Red Sock”