SNP Hike Day 4: Adventures in Stealth Camping

Tuesday, 9th of September, 2003.

Pinefield Hut to Bearfence Mountain Hut: 20 miles (planned)

Pinefield Hut to Pocosin Cabin: 17 miles (reality)

I’m up early and down the fruit bar breakfast in good order while Almost There and Poor Richard are packing up to get going themselves. I say my goodbyes, telling them that I am heading all the way to Bearfence Mountain in the Central District for the night, while they are aiming for Hightop Hut just a few miles down the trail. It’s an easy day for them and then they do some longer hikes to get to hotels for a couple of nights of soft beds and hot showers. Chef seems to think that’s a good idea, so I suspect he’ll be going the soft road too. I thank Almost There again for his chicken couscous recipe which I will look forward to trying sometime, and kick on out of camp after cleaning my blisters off in the stream one more time and patching them up with big pieces of moleskin. I am very glad I brought the extra bag of moleskin as I am going to use all of the open package and then some at my current rate. And so I kick off down the trail again.

It is another wonderful day: nice sunny weather with cool temperatures. I’m sweating, of course, hiking a goodly distance each day. I should confess at this point that I have been carrying what is proving to be a pointless diversion (or as one person called them, a Fred: Fantastically Ridiculous Electronic Device). I talked myself into getting a GPS last year and I am hiking with it recording a “breadcrumb trail” as I hike. Like I need a computer record to prove I did the hike? It also means that I have a little running screen in my hand telling me how far I have walked and what pace I am hiking and what time of day it is, all the time. This is like driving a car and always looking at the dashboard. But knowing I have a long way to go today, I keep glancing at the pace column to see what my speed is, and mentally kick myself into slightly higher gear each time I see myself slacking off. I’m doing about two to two and a half miles an hour most of the time. At that pace, it is going to be ten hours without stops to Bearfence Mountain. I’m going to try to keep my hiking at a 2.5 mile pace. It’s not uncomfortable at all to do so, but I keep peeking at the pace meter to be sure and have to spur myself on a little now and again, usually when the path gets a subtle upslope.

I have a new appreciation for being overweight. It is surprising just how much harder it is to hike, especially on upslopes, with the pack. And I am probably fundamentally fitter with an extra forty pounds or so on my pack than someone with forty pounds around the waist. What a thought! I don’t feel any great sympathy for Chef, but I can understand his motives in looking for shortcuts and hitch hiking as he does. But why come to the woods to hike along the side of a road? I am actually feeling a little lighter: I think the food I’ve gone through in the past few days might outweight the additions of the emergency camp stove I picked up at Loft Mountain yesterday. And I don’t want to be too cocky, but I have a subtle feeling that I may have walked off a little of my own extra chubbiness around the waist. At least I have had to cinch up the belt strap a bit more.

I have three road crossings and then reach Hightop Hut. Any lingering thoughts about stopping for the night here and making an easy day of it are now completely gone since it is only 11:30 AM and there’s oddles of daylight. I have an early lunch and polish off the last of the cheese from yesterday’s visit to the campstore, and kick on ahead. The bigger moleskin patches seem to be working: my heels are annoying me if I focus on them, but if I turn my attention to something else and keep my mind occupied, it does not bother me. Sad to say, a lot of stupid advertisting jingles and odd fragments of contemporary pop music are running through my mind. Beats wallowing in pain and self-pity about my feet, though.

About an hour or so out from the hut, I reach the end of the South District and see my first major road in days. U.S Route 33 cuts across the park here at Swift Gap and it is an odd feeling to see semi-trailers and lots of cars after days of seeing just the odd car now and again where the trail crosses Skyline Drive, and hearing the hum of motorcycles in the distance. I get across and think it’s easy from here with just another nine miles to the shelter, or eight if I am feeling weak when the time comes and pause for the night at Lewis Mountain Campground instead. But I am playing mental games with myself: think about the distance to Lewis Mountain, and then that I’ll only be a mile from my goal of Bearfence Mountain Hut, so why stop now? As I am playing this mental game, the trail is slowly climbing upslope and I am slowing down and my feet are making noise about those blisters and generally being weary and tired and sweaty and unhappy with the world. One bad thing about these boots is that they are made of Goretex. Great for wet paths and mud because it doesn’t get in the boots. But they are waterproof both ways: the sweat from my feet is not able to soak its way out of the boots and so my feet are very warm, and a bit soft from soaking in my own sweat all day while hiking. No wonder they are blistering when they are so malleable and soft. Coca-cola jingles and bad renditions of Whitney Houston or whatever god awful music I can think of is not cutting it anymore. So it’s mental games time.

The trail turning for South River Falls is three miles, so I think about hiking three miles. Another three and a half miles from there to Pocosin Cabin. Then just two more to Lewis Mountain. Then one to Bearfence Mountain Hut and a stream to shove my feet in, or at the very least, a place to ge the wash cloth wet and cold in water again and rinse the feet and face off. Three miles. Three miles. Three miles. Two and a half. Just another hour. Two... Oh, where is that blasted concrete post for South River?




Finally, feeling a bit the worst for wear, with thinning light as some clouds come in and give it the glooming feeling of oncoming evening (even though it is hours ‘til sunset still), I reach South River Falls Trail turnoff. A quick pause for water and I get going again. The mental calculator is going a bit silly in the back of my mind and I realize that my pace is falling off, and nudging myself is not picking it back up. I’m doing two miles an hour no matter how hard I push myself. At that pace, I am going to get to Bearfence Mountain a little after dusk. And I am going to be very very tired when I get there. And I have that I gotta go feeling. Can I hold it in ‘til Lewis Mountain an hour and a half away? I can walk off the trail and take care of things in the woods, but who really wants to do that when they can clench and hold out for a while longer? I keep on and get to the turnoff for the Pocosin Cabin, which is just a short way off the AT.

The Klingon Bastards! People rent the cabins, so I understand why there is a lock on the cabin. But a lock on the latrine? I search around a log the right height off the ground, dig a moderate size hole and hope my aim is good. Too much information? Anyway, I take care of things and rebury it in the organic soil layer so nature will take its course.

My feet are really really unhappy with me and I decide it is time to quit for the day, no matter than I am just three miles from the hut I need to reach. There’s a picnic table here on the porch of the cabin and no one is here. I pick out a spot on the ground next to the cabin that is flat so I will “stealth camp” here: chose a spot that is not legal (you have to be several hundred feet from any of the cabins, according to the backcountry permit) and camp there with the goal of getting out early in the morning before anyone realizes I’ve been there. No one is staying at the cabin and I’ll follow Leave No Trace practices, so my impact on the place will be minimial. Strictly speaking, the rules say you can camp at a cabin in case of emergency and if a park ranger does come by, I’ll plead about the condition of my feet.

And they are not pretty when I get the boots off. The backs of the heels are well covered with the blisters, which are now quite large and wide open. The moleskin has long since rolled off down into the socks somewhere. It actually hurts to walk around even the camp sandals as the strap touches the raw spots time and again. I’m halfway serious about trying to call Melissa to ask her to drive all the way out to the park to get me and calling it quits right now. But it is a work night and it’s a long drive and there is no mobile ‘phone signal and I would have to hike the two miles to Lewis Mountain to meet her anyway, so it’s an idea that is not going to come to fruition at all. So I set up my campstove, make a good nice hot dinner and sit and do nothing ‘til the sun sets. It’s a beautiful night and a damp washcloth to the face does wonders for my attitude. Once it gets dark, I can see all the way into the valley ahead of me and watch the lights of cars on Route 29 heading down to Charlottesville. My grandfather’s house in Oregon had a view from the living room window at night into the Willamette Valley very similar to this, and it is a very relaxing feeling.

Until I notice a set of blinking lights moving towards me very fast, and a fighter jet blazes over Lewis Mountain with an outrageous roar of thunder. That pilot must really trust his maps because he was lower than me as he came in and climbing to clear the peak, and must have been only a thousand feet above me if that as he went over. The noise from the jet fades off fast, but it has really annoyed the owls and there is a cacophony of screeches and growls and angry muttering from the trees for a good fifteen minutes. One thing for sure: I had no idea there was so much life so close to me. There must be a good twenty or thirty owls in the vicinity.

This quite naturally leads to a little alarm about the thought of bears. I scout around and don’t find anything I completely like for a spot to set up my bear line, but decide to work with what I have and toss the line up a tree and hang the bag well away from where I am going to put my sleeping bag. With the spring right here, there’s a chance they will visit in the evening some time to get water and I’m left to hoping that they take no interest in me. Black bears generally are not interested in people and I am quite ripe smelling at this point, so they will have no confusion about my presence. With that nervous thought, I settle off to sleep on a nice spot pad of grass under me instead of the hard wood floor of a shelter. I’m wearing socks in the sleeping bag so the blisters don’t stick to the sleeping bag in the night, and that seem to be working. My feet are forgiving me now that they are resting.

It’s a peaceful camp spot and I enjoy it a great deal. It’s my first night in the park all to my own, and while I have always had the trail itself to my own, it’s nice to have the peace of the place uninterpreted by crude jokes for once. I do realize with a little dismay that my 12 mile hike tomorrow from Bearfence Hut is instead going to be a 15 mile hike from here to get to the Rock Spring Hut past Big Meadows. But as much as that is, I’ll never have a day as hard as this one, and while I did not make my goal for the day, I made it to a spot for the night that’s more pleasant and peaceful than anywhere I have stayed in the park yet.

Tune in tomorrow for my debute as a National Park Runway Model, a hut full of attractive women and only a Kiwi to distract me...

J aka “Red Sock”