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”