Core Dump

Lousy customer service with UPS

2007-11-09T05:07:00.000-05:00

I am a reasonable person (I think): when someone screws up, I will ask for and accept an apology and move on. But recently UPS screwed up and it created a lot of trouble... and the company refused to acknowledge any error or make apologies, and then cited legalities when I pushed for an apology and reimbursement for the value of the lost package. Given their refusal to deal with my complaint at all, I am boycotting UPS. I figure with using other shippers for my online purchases and sales, as well as overseas shipping, I will have cost UPS enough lost business within a year to cost them at least as much as it would have to apologized and dealt with the damages. But that's not enough: They need to know what I am doing, and maybe I can encourage enough others to make them rethink their approach to customer service. I just wanted an apology. I got legal mumbo jumbo. Hence this web page to inform people why I am boycotting them.

By way of contrast, I should add, I also recently had trouble with United Airlines. My wife and I travelled to Hawaii. On the voyage from San Francisco to Kona, a six-hour dinnertime flight that advertised that a meal was part of the flight service, exactly six dinners were packed for a plane with 158 passengers. We were not among the lucky six. I wrote United, they apologized promptly and gave us a coupon for $100 future service, good for one year. That's how customer service is supposed to work: you make a complaint and the business tries to resolve in a way that makes the customer happy and encourages the customer to use their service again. United will more than make up that $100 in "lost" service and I'll stick to flying with them when they are a reasonable choice. UPS could well learn from their example.

The story in full

I was going to travel to Russia in late October of 2007 to visit my in-laws. As I have done several times before, I sent my passport to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington D.C. along with all the applications materials via express mail, with a returning express mail envelope addressed to me. In the past I have always used FedEx: they had a location across the street from my work. However some time in the past year, the location closed. So I used the convenient UPS store near my home instead. They even printed the label for the envelope for my returning package for me. Remember that point, because it will be important. It had my address on it, as my receipts show. I checked. These packages, with the envelope to mail it all back to me, went in the mail and arrived at the embassy quite promptly.

Alas, the trouble began a week later when the embassy sent my visa back to me (UPS tracking number J1875541673). The embassy recorded that the address was my home address, and handed it to UPS on October 18. A few hours later, the package was scanned arriving in Landover, Maryland and thence later the same night to Baltimore... and thence it disappeared. It should have arrived at my home on Friday, but I waited for Monday (as there is no weekend delivery to residential addresses). So it was Monday afternoon and no package before I realized something might be amiss and typed the tracking number into the computer system online to see where my visa and passport was... and discovered it had last been seen several days before. That report went in to UPS at 4:30 pm on October 22. Meaning to convey the urgency of the package, I pointed out that it had a passport with visa in it for overseas travel in the near future. Big mistake: if they didn't know what was in the package, they could not have been so creative as they would soon prove to be.

Within hours, the missing package was located in Laurel, Maryland (the logical sorting centre for my home address) and sent on its way. Happily expecting the package the next day, I was unconcerned... until my wife informed me the passport has not arrived at the house during the day. At 4 pm on October 23, I plugged in the tracing number J1875541673 to find out what had happened now... and discovered it HAD been delivered. Just not to me. Someone named "Harrison" had signed for it at an address on C St. in Northwest Washington D.C. A little research online (UPS provided only a street address and that someone had signed for the package) showed that it was the mailroom for the U.S. State Department.

WTF? That was not the address on the envelope when it left my hands! I called UPS to report the package mis-delivered. They said the driver was already back from his rounds, so they would not send him back out to retrieve the package, but would do so the next day. In the meantime I called the Russian Embassy visa division and confirmed that the address on the envelope when it left their hands was still my home address. Somehow while my package was misplaced, it got a new address label (or most likely, a sorting machine stripped the address label, which is how the package got lost. Then when I called to report it missing, instead of sending it to the address I gave when I reported it missing, they recorded that the package contained a lost passport and they put the lost passport office address on the envelope.)

Feeling a tad annoyed, but at least certain I knew where my package was and that it would be retrieved, or failing that, that I could go into the city and get it myself (not feeling very trusting of UPS after they had now lost and then mis-delivered the package), I called the next morning, to be informed that the driver, in fact, had no such instructions to retrieve my package and there no record with UPS whatsoever of my call the previous afternoon to report the mis-delivery (and also a statement of surprise that they had not sent the driver out immediately to retrieve the mis-delivered package the previous day).

A few more calls over the next few hours ascertained that the driver claimed that the mailroom claimed they had not received a mis-delivered package. That is to say, the driver said that the mailroom staff said that there was no package with the wrong address. I was able to neither confirm nor dispel the driver's version, so suggest that UPS applied a new address to the package. UPS was unconcerned that the address on the envelope was not the address it had had when it was given to them in the first place, nor that it did not match the address I gave them for the delivery when I reported the package missing. They have remained steadfast in their claim that they did absolutely nothing wrong and even if they did, the customer service agreement limits liability to the replacement cost of the package and absolutely no responsibility for any incidental costs caused by mis-delivery or lost packages. And they even found a way to wiggle out of that too.

As far as UPS was concerned, their business was done: the letter was delivered and the fact the address had nothing to do with its intended destination was really not their problem. And no, they were not interested in all in any proof I had that it was NOT the address on the envelope when this all started.

This also meant that while the person on the ‘phone with me might be personally sympathetic, UPS would not offer any assistance in retrieving the package, calling the mail room, getting things straightened out and certainly would not provide a letter of apology from them. When I then tried to file a claim, they denied ever hearing of the issue and creatively considered it more than fifteen days old and hence beyond their having any obligation EVEN THOUGH I HAD BEEN IN NEAR CONSTANT CONTACT ABOUT THE PROBLEM WITHIN DAYS OF THE PACKAGE BEING INITIALLY LOST AND REPEATEDLY FILING COMPLAINTS AND REQUESTS FOR REDRESS.

A couple of days of calling through the State Department mail room and their passport services offices never did locate the missing package. With my travel date looming, I had to replace the passport and get a new visa. Since UPS refused to provide a letter of apology, the Russian Embassy could not waive the application fee. Both the State Department passport services office and the Russian Embassy were kind, helpful, and worked very rapidly to replace my missing papers. I had to pay the standard passport and visa application fees, but in both instances, they waived all the expatiated service fees. I had a new passport in an hour, and a new visa in it within the same day. Wow!

The saga, alas, did not end there. When I called UPS to request reimbursement for the delivery fee (since it was not delivered), to complain that their unwillingness to provide a letter of apology cost me $100 in a new application fee that would have been waived if they had provided the letter, and that I got whacked with a $97 new passport application fee not to mention all the angst of dealing with all this right before travelling and having to take most of a day from work to deal with all this.... Well, their response was, and I quote

Unfortunately, a Guaranteed Service Refund must be requested within 15 calendar days from the scheduled delivery date. Since 15 calendar days have elapsed, I am unable to process a refund.

Per the UPS Terms and Conditions of Service, UPS is not liable for any incidental or consequential damages resulting from delayed delivery or attempted delivery. Additional information regarding our service guarantee can be downloaded at the following link

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/service.html?WT.svl=Footer

Again, I apologize for any problems this late delivery may have caused.

Please contact us if you need any additional assistance.

[name removed for this blog]

UPS Customer Service

I did indeed contact them again to point out that they mangled the delivery, they caused the problem, and while their policies might give them legal reasons to protect them from liability, it was hardly good customer service. No response. And by now, also no surprise.

Here’s what I want UPS to do

write a letter of apology to me

write a letter of thanks to the State Department passport services and mailroom offices. Those guys worked pretty hard over a couple of days with frantic calls from me trying to find the passport, and waived all the expatiated processing fees they could have legitimately socked me with. People paying quite a lot of fast processing did not get the speed of service I did.

write a similar letter of thanks to the Visa division of the Embassy of the Russian Federation.

some kind of compensation for the ~$200 worth of expenses I incurred because of their incompetence.

If UPS can do at least some of the above, I'll take down this posting and consider the matter resolved. Let's just say I am not holding my breath, based on my experience with them so far, however.

So what to do? There are a lot of options. Shrug it off, accept that paying for two visas and a new passport was just part of the cost of traveling? Certainly that's what UPS seems to want and assumes I do. At some level, I pretty much figure the $200 in fees and lost work time is just lost and I have to write it off.

Complain again to customer service? That doesn't seem to be working. Einstein (or someone else) said that stupidity is trying something that doesn’t work, and then keep trying it expecting a different result.

File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau? I'll be doing that, but I'm not expecting much of it. I'd be pleased to be wrong, however.

File the complaint with something a bit more brutal like Rip Off Report? That might be emotionally satisfying, but I'm not sure it would have much useful in the way of results. The site is terribly disorganized. More important, it is pretty indiscriminate in its collection, which rather undermines its authority (not withstanding that when you Google many companies' names, one of the highest rated Google links will be the Rip Off Report page on them). My genuine complaint is going to be next to a patently false rant about the sexual proclivities of the CEO. What's more, there are pretty serious and reasonably supported allegations that the site operator is running something akin to extortion: for a fee (which is pretty hefty), he'll add an editorial comment to the effect that the information is considered false. A good many of the ranting complaints may originate with himself, and then he asks for a fee to editorialize it (which, if true, certainly seems like extortion). Finally, if the matter were ever to be resolved, the site never takes down material: the complaint would be permanent and I want it to be resolved, not forever outstanding.

So here’s my deal: this page is up on my blog until UPS makes some effort to resolve my complaint. I realize this is not exactly a high traffic web log, but we work with what we have. I am boycotting UPS in the meantime, and pointing anyone and everyone to this blog to explain why. All my online purchases will use another shipper, all my overseas shipments (and with family in Russia, that's no small matter!) will not use UPS, and all my online sales will be shipped with another company and I will prominently display links to this blog page in my online sales pages to explain why... until such a time as the matter is resolved or the internet is replaced with something even better and stranger and all the links die of excessive old age.

I strongly encourage others to consider alternatives to UPS. They deliver things just fine if nothing goes wrong, but God help you if something does go wrong. UPS certainly won’t help and they will deny culability for everything.

And that’s saying nothing about fighting with their automated answering computer to get customer service, dealing with calls getting dropped as they were forwarded, or getting disconnected when put on hold, all of which happened several times in the midst of this adventure. But that seems to just be a standard part of business these days.

Autum Leaves and Pooh Sticks

2004-11-14T23:00:00.000-05:00

Note to regular readers: Some of you are aware I have been working on a new log entry tenatively titled “Proud to be American” (which is ironic, since I’m not). The work continues, but is not yet done...

As I write today, it is fall in Maryland. The poorly pruned cherry tree in front is naked of its usual cheery leaves. The two stately oaks on the back are likewise shorn of most of their leaf cover and thus the heavy damage from cicadas earlier this year is no longer visible. The ugly scarred and partly rotten maple on the side of the house has shed a lesser fraction of its leaf load, the last green and yellow leaves still hanging on. If all goes to plan, this will be that tree’s last fall. Its heartwood is rotting from a failed attempt by the previous owners to cut it down, and from a peculiar pruning job. The tree has survived their attentions, but one of these days, a storm is going to catch it the wrong way and it will come falling down. Probably on my house. So as much as I may miss it, it will have to go. Besides, it is a superhighway to the roof for the squirrels.

But for now, it holds on to last leaves of the summer and a stiff brisk breeze now and again knocks the leaves free to float to the ground and erase all signs that I just mowed the lawn and raked the leaves. The compost bins are full to overflowing and yet the leaves still keep coming. The neighbor’s front yard has a huge pin oak tree probably eighty years old to judge from its girth, and that will take over the shading of my home this coming summer. I remain thankful that the builders in this neighborhood, in the late 60s, did not suffer the modern compulsion to cut down every last tree before starting construction. But my pride in the stately trees does not extend to endangering my house nor tolerating the squirrels of destruction on the roof, especially since my neighbor shares a roof with me and is none to happy to have squirrels scrambling over his head in the early morning as they are wont to do.

Autumn brings it happy cycle around. The garden is now retired and the tomato plants no longer producing tomatoes in vast and endless supply as they had been doing through the late summer, burying me in an avalance of tomatoes and parsley and mint and oregano. The basil I was able to keep up with, but the rest... well, I brought a lot of tomatoes to work and my freezer is full of them to boot. I tried a couple of years ago to thin the crop and toss the green fruit in the compost bins, but the next year everywhere I put down the compost, I got volunteer tomoatoes. It looked especially strange when put in the compost as fill dirt where the old shed foundation had been, then seeded the new patch with grass... and got a rich bed of tomato plants trying to outgrow the grass. But for their habit of dying in the first serious frost, the grass might never have won.

As I bring plants into pots and inside for the winter, the squirrels are madly putting acorns in strange places, not the least of all places the pots, so I often come home to find the pepper plants transplanted to pots tipped over where the blasted creatures have dug them up seeking places for their nuts. I’ve finally learned that the shock of being brough inside with less light and more warmth right after transplanting is probably easier on the peppers than being ripped apart by squirrels. Of course in the spring, the squirrels will rip them apart all over again seeking those same nuts. I recall my first year in the house being amazed at all the volunteer oak trees that started sprouting in one of the larger pots. The squirrels killed them off in two days once the pot was moved outside.

It is a magical time for my two cats, especially for Carmel. Carmel, despite being a disgustingly cute looking cat with chocolate siamese colouration and bright blue eyes, is a bit psychotic. I think he was rescued from the street a little too late and some of that essential feralness had already established itself, but maybe the poor beast is just a bit daft. He is terrified of people and desperate for attention at the same time. The only way to pet him is for him to think you are not looking at him and he will allow you (or even demand you) to pet him as he wanders by. There are odd exceptions: I can pet him and look at him at the same time if I am seated on my bed getting dressed in the morning, sitting on the toilet seat, or perhaps sitting down having a ‘phone conversation. An open window is like catnip to him, and opening a window will make him run from some place in the house to jump in the open space, a trick he has not unlearned no matter how many times it is shortly followed by me putting him in a cat carrier and taking him to the vet.

Carmel will not play with me. His brother Zorro (a non-genetic relationship: Carmel was rescued from the alleys of D.C. and Zorro from a barn in Rhode Island) is thrilled at times with the laser pointer, and Carmel just doesn’t get it. Zorro comes up into my lap and demands love and attention now and again, usually when I working on the computer or reading a book or a paper and in no position to deal with the aggressive wet nose attempts to shove the laptop, paper, or book aside. Carmel does occasionally deign to play with one or another of the cat toys around, but won’t engage in any play with me. All games must be solitary. He is the cat that walks alone, like Rudyard Kipling’s cat.

There is one unusual exception to this and it comes this one time of year. I call it Pooh Sticks, though that game of A.A. Milne fame bears little resemblence to this. Carmel is driven quite batty by the sight of a single leaf falling. And since I have a back deck some ten feet off the ground, which gets a liberal covering of them, I can drop them one by one down onto the ground below and Carmel will chase down each and every one.

Somewhere in that little cat brain, there is something that makes particular leaves special. All leaves are at least cursory chased. Some are more actively hunted as they come down and quite actively stomped on when they land. A few get a nominal chewing. And a couple this afternoon ranked good enough to justify a good cat jump off the ground to intercept them before they hit ground. Curled, flat, big, small, brown, yellow green, maple, white oak, pin oak... I have no idea what it is that makes particular leaves special, but they are taken down and killed mercilessly.

And never mind there is a carpet of leaves so thick on the ground that both cats could completely disappear beneath it with ease. No, it must be that exactly, only that leaf, and the moment it is dispatched, Carmel is looking back up longingly for the next to be let loose from my hands. He has boundless enthusiasm for this game and is yet to give up prior to my patience being exhausted or the leaves on the deck all being gone. It is rare for it to be the latter.

The homeowner ritual of raking the lawn of its leaves is always a peculiar one to me. I have in the past raked the yard clean and of course come out the next day to find little sign that I’ve done the work as a whole new batch has recarpeted the lawn. It usually takes three or four attempts to get them all done, and the leaf piles exceed the compost bin capacity by quite a bit to boot, so the piles will tend to migrate across the lawn again until the next good soaking rain wets them down in place enough to stay. But I seem to be the luddite of the street, with many opting to blow the leaves with forced air gadgets. One neighbor actually has an odd vacuum cleaner device to pick them up out of his gravel and backyard pool decking. Those in the front he feeds to a shredded and thence onto a tarp to pull them away into the BGE property behind the houses where the power lines come through. BGE, to the best of my knowledge, has never expressed any opinion one way or the other about the annual compost donations.

Some neighbors go quite mad with their blowers. I cannot leave windows open at night for the roar of the gas and electric blowers each evening as some suburbanite decides that a one day coating of leaves on his lawn and driveway is an insult to his manhood, and for another half hour each night, the leaves get pushed around by forced air onto the street or into a pile from which they will wander at will in the wind.

Or perhaps, once it gets dark, to be reformed on their lawn to spell out “Blow me” in large leafy letters. But I, of course, would know nothing about that.

For now, though, I content myself with the small joys of Pooh Sticks and knowing that, at least just for this one day, I have been accepted by the most discriminating of cats.

Chip Flick - My contribution to the English language

2004-11-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

There are a wide variety of terms used to group and classify movies. There’s “Sci-Fi” for science fiction, action-adventure, romance, comedies, romantic comedies, documentaries, fantasy, westerns, and the odd running series that makes a genre of their own (James Bond, Star Wars, etc.). Some are quite good (Carl Sagan’s Contact, High Noon), some bad (Glitter), and some so wretched awful they prove space, time, and good taste are all circular by turning into movies you cannot miss (Plan Nine from Outer Space). And there are the cult classics for which there is no explanation (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buckaroo Banzai, and so on).

Each appeals to different people and different audiences, and film critics who fail to understand this, or somehow think this is irrelevant, just end up looking clueless. I particuarly loved it when a recent Washington Post reviewer slammed a James Bond movie for being vacuous. Hello? Intellectual stimulation and 007 don’t have much common ground. Check out your sense at the theatre door: no one ever pretended James Bond was cutting edge film.

Because of these audience tendancies, some films get subgrouped by the audience they appeal to rather than the film type itself. “Guy flicks” are aimed at teenaged boys and men wishing to stay in touch with their innner teenaged boy: lots of action and adventure, fast moving plot (fast enough, perhaps, for you to not notice that there is not much in the way of plot), and probably a few very hot women here and there for eye candy dressed in just enough clothing to avoid the dreaded M rating (for immature audiences only). “Chick flicks” are aimed at women wishing to send aside reality for Prince Charming fantasies in which Guy Meets Girls, some non-sensectial thing seperates them, then because the Universe has fated them to be together, Love Wins The Day, and after years of seperation (or about 90 minutes of wasted celluiod), are magically reunited (often dumping at the last minute whomever they were just about to marry). The common element to both is that they are geared to their audience rather than the film itself, so all sorts of logical contradictions and foolishness are completely tolerable. Occasionally you get a red herring crossover that tries to be both (Jerry Maguire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but they are rare. And often make more sense than prototypical guy flicks like Shanghai Noon or chick flicks like Serendipity, Fifty First Dates, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

However, some years ago, I coined a phrase for a then-emerging new genre, which I coined the “Chip Flick”: a movie that attempts to compensate for its shortcomings in acting skill, plot logic, pacing, and so by the excessive use of computer animation in an attempt to distract the viewer with stunning visuals to the fact that, stripped of such visuals, there ain’t much there at all. In this day and age of copyright, patent law suits, and all, I just wish to be clear on the record: I am the responsible party for creating this term, and the Oxford English Dictionary should cite me me me me as the source for this term since I first used it roughly five years ago.

Keep in mind that at the time I made fun of this approach, I was actually working in a computer generated animation position (albeit not one in the commercial film industry), and this is not a blanket condemnation of CG animation at all. Some films make careful and thoughtful use of CG effects, or have such strong sustaining plots to which these elements, and my coworkers, are the sort of people who will pause Monsters Inc. to replay scenes where the monster Sully’s fur gets blown around in the wind because it is such a visually stunning piece of graphics animation which is both eye candy to animators and makes perfect sense in the plot, which is well sustained and logical and would work perfect well if they just used little cardboard cutouts instead (and I would like add a note of thanks to the makers of South Park for lowering the standards of CG animation low enough that anyone can play in the field). It’s not the animation per sey that I am objecting to, it is that it is being used to compensate for the absence of all the critical elements of good story telling through film.

Where I get in really hot water, alas, is that my prototype for this is a movie with terrible acting, a series of gaping idiotic and obvious holes in its fundamental premise that are laughable... and some of the most stunning and compelling computer generated special effects seen to date. In fact several new techniques and innovatative approaches to animation were created in the making of this film that they have spread far and wide into advertising, or in frequent homage references in films since.

I speak, of course, of The Matrix. I was stunned. I thought it a remarkably smooth and well polished film, but fundamentally pretty stupid. While my colleagues were raving about the effects, or talking about the deep philosophical questions of how we know the reality we see is real, or whether there was a second or third layer to the matrix, and so on, I’m sitting there going “Humans as batteries? Just how stupid are you?” Why do the digital avatars have the capabilities and limitations they have: there is no reason for them at all. It makes no sense. But, as I said, I seem to be in the minority indeed on this. Perhaps there is something to this: the effects in this case were so stunning that the forebrain activity is totally surpressed, like horny men staring at a Playboy centerfold.

So I have a new prototype that won’t get me lynched. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Stunning all digital computer generated animation with an almost realistic visual feel... and no plot. At least no one is going to harange me for making fun of a film based on a video game.

Adventure Sprint Triathalon

2004-10-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

As some fraction of you fair readers may be aware, I just “competed” in an adventure sprint triathalon this past Sunday (October 3rd, 2004) in Richmond. “Compete” is in quote marks there because winning, or even coming close to winning, was not among our goals. Finishing is good enough for me: we were there to have fun. My own personal goal was to see if we could finish in under four hours: The event looks “easier” than a marathon and I’m sure from past experience I can pull off an under four hours (based on my recent experience of running the Montgomery County Marathon in the Parks in 4:42? Never mind the logic: I did Iowa City in 3:16:57 once. But that was twenty years and fifty pounds ago.). But that four hour figure is based on pretty much nothing and I’ll be perfectly pleased to just finish.

Turns out that will be a good thing.

The theory behind the Adventure Sprint Triathalon is that part of the adventure is not quite knowing what is going to happen. It is not just a course, but an obstacle course, and done as a team of three together. The web site on the race is very vague: 5-7 miles of running, 10-15 miles of mountain biking, and 1-3 miles of kayaking, with about ten (I counted four: they must have mean base 3 or something) special events. The vagueness is deliberate: you do not know exactly what you are getting into until the evening before the race when they announce at least some parts of it.

On the afternoon before the race, there are a series of clinics on the events. Some are useless: lots of interesting stuff about ways to be really competive in the mountain biking section, for example, but all information you would have to have had several months ago to implement and practice. The one useful thing from this particular clinic is they talk about strategies for how to work with a challenge of three riders but only two bikes, one of the challenges they might throw at us. The elite team doing this clinic explains that they all got identical fashion clip pedals, so they have the same gear and they “leapfrog”, changing up who is running and who is riding so no one person gets exhausted. We will not end up having this challenge, but it proves to be potentially useful information.

Another interesting clinic that they give twice is about the kayaking, and they also have practice kayaking sessions which Evonne and I take advantage of. The kayaks are inflatable canoe shaped things with seating for one or two (in theory) and Evonne and I practice two person techniques. Thinking I have it down after the practice, I nominate myself to be the rear paddler in the boat for two with Evonne and have teammate Grant take another kayak on his own, under the theory that the practice and my arm strength will be best for the task (not entirely false assumption, but it will turn out that Grant is actually the more experienced kayaker and it will show). The James River is currently in heavy flood from recent rains (including the visit of Hurricane Ivan two weeks before that put much of the riverfront in Richmond under water), and the kayaking portion of the event is just above the fall line, so a bad false move and a poor recovery and you are not only out of the race, but about to go down the rapids. I’d estimate them at Class II or III, but these are not glorious kayaks and if you shoot the rapids, it is going to be because you are inexperienced and just the sort of person whom should not be trying this.

I should add that I have never met Grant before the afternoon before the race. He is there with his wife, Jill, who is also running the event with two of her college friends, Margs and Liz, in the all-female team The Sirens. Our team is Amish Army. Don’t ask, I cannot explain it either. But team names are interesting: there were also such teams as Three Older Women With Too Much Spandex and Three $80 K-mart Bikes. Evonne's friend Sean is also here (and the pictures you see in this weblog are all courtesy of Sean, by the way) and Liz’s friend Jesse (What, another one?) who also is getting the camera and cheerleading duties.

After the clinics, we all gather for the orientation. And this is where the vagueness of the website starts to make sense: Most of the race is supposed to be a surprise, and now is the moment they will reveal it to us. First, they go through the basic orientation stuff. When the transition area (where you can store bikes and gear) opens in the morning, some of the basic rules we already know (you cannot get any help of any kind from anyone outside the race, so this includes having your own water, food, bike tools, etc.), some basic rules we do not know (bikes have to be walked on Browns Island getting in and out and dismount and mount areas for the island, and the stage across the major bridge over the James will be strictly enforced, “scootering” is not allowed), and then onto the moment of truth. First event, 6.5 miles of running. Then suddenly the organizer asks if there is anyone here who does not know how to swim. And promises that whether or not it is raining and no matter how slowly you chose to run tomorrow, you are going to get wet.

We are swimming? In the James River? In flood? Oh dear me...

Okay, next is “7++ miles” of mountain biking. ++ miles? Does this mean the ride will be highly technical stuff? Or just that someone has spent way too much time doing Object Oriented Programming? But at least it is way shorter than the advertised 10-15 miles. Mountain biking is the part that has me the most concerned since I have the least practice and experience and my training experiences have been an interesting mix of dismounting to walk and terrifying myself by trying to ride through places I probably should have gotten off and walked. Then about 0.75 miles of kayaking. Got it. Then “another 7++ miles” of biking. Uhh, it had not occured to me that you might not do all your distance in one go. This is going to be interesting... They also tell us nothing about the special events and promise us only that the directions for those events, which we will have to carry in a carry case with us through the race, will be given to us just before we start tomorrow morning.

This orientation will turn out to have a couple of lies, or at least be misleading. In fact there will more than one piece of misleading information given to us, but we will get to that as it comes.

Orientation also builds a sense I was getting through the afternoon already. Now I am a reasonably fit person: I can get up one day and hike 15 miles with a 40 pound backpack and, blisters not withstanding, get up and do it again the next day. I’ve trained for this event, admittedly not necessarily with incredible diligence, but I have no fears about completing the course in the maximum allowable time of six hours. But looking around the tent where we are all gathered (about 210 teams of three people each), I notice that these people look incredibly fit. I’m the lumpy looking one: this is not a place for someone with body image issues to be! Fortunately the kayak trail also gave me good reason to not be too intimidated by appearances as Evonne and I were able to outpaddle almost the entire field of try-out folks. There was two women who blazed across and a few others who showed skills comparable to us, but lots of people struggling just to make the kayak go forward. I think they are gym strong rather than field strong: the sort who can bench press four times as much as me, but couldn’t carry a backpack for a whole day of hiking.

After the orientation, we regroup and discuss having dinner together, but since Liz, Margs, and Jesse are staying with Grant and Jill at their home an hour away in Hampton Roads, they are heading straight out as they will have to leave the house around 5:30 AM to get to the opening of the staging area in the morning. So they head home and Sean, Evonne, and I wander through the restaurant district, without seeing anything that screamed that we just had to go there. At least not tonight: there's a number of interesting looking places with live music and Irish Pub, but when you are in the middle of working very hard to stay hydrated, a beer is a really bad idea. Near the end of our walk, we come on the Rivah Cafe and get waylaid by the greeter who insists we want to eat there and since it looks both reasonably priced and as good as anything else we have seen, we accept.

To find we are the only customers. Does everyone else know somethings we don’t?

Dinner proves to be quite good when it comes, and customers do come in. It takes us a little while to realize that it is actually not that late, but with autumn on us, it gets dark earlier each day and we had not realized it was only around 6 PM when we found the place. The wine list is tempting, but we stick to water and ice tea with our dinner.

And then it is off to our respective hotels (Evonne and Sean got a cut rate for runners at a hotel right near the waterfront and the race, while the special was gone and I found a low rate on the edge of town near the freeway through an online service) and call it a night. Before I turn in for the night, I set the alarm and spend some time with a map of Maryland fantasizing about possible canoe trips with my new canoe. But in good time, I turn in for the night.

The next morning, I get up, get a very quick breakfast, set up my stuff for the event, pack, leave, and park in the lot near Browns Island before the attendent is ready for us all, so I end up getting free parking. Whoa ho! Little thrills for little minds. Or is it that great minds are easily amused?

It turns out for all the fuss about getting to the transition area early to get the best spot, there is nothing to fight over: it is all more or less assigned. Our team number is is 12, presumed on the basis of Amish Army being up near the front of the alphabetically ordered list, since The Sirens probably entered and paid their registration around the same time as us, but are down around team 152 or thereabouts. The announcer gives us a slightly rude surprise: we must wear our helmets for all the events all day. Grrr.... I was really wanting to wear the cap for the run where it would soak up the sweat. The helmet is going to be a soupy mess by the end of the day.

Amish Army before the race. Notice the lack of mud.

They assemble us at the start line and we find the first of the lies from last night. No, we are not going to get our instructions a few minutes before the race as promised, but they will be issued at the first special event. This is so we cannot read them and plan ahead. Which turns out to be a good thing, but again, I will get to that. The race is also going to be started exactly the wrong way, with the co-ed teams like ours leaving right at 8 AM, the all female teams five minutes later, the all male and elite teams another five minutes later. In other words, all the fast people are going to spend the first hour or so smashing their way through the rest of us, trail ettiquette be damned. There is also no sorting out before the start line based on estimates of start times.

But off we go, and along the river and across the very long pedistrian suspension bridge under the freeway to Belle Island on the far side, and up into the woods. The trail is narrow and there is no room to pass, so we are always stuck at the pace of the slowest person around, which is a problem for me since I tend to go downhill slowly and uphill rapidly, the exact opposite of everyone else, which makes going up very hard on me since I cannot use my momentum. But we seem to set a reasonable pace over the hill on the island, noticing that the bike path is marked out as staying on the roadway around instead of the narrow trail we are on. That will make life that much easier later. We rejoin the bike path on the far side, cross a bridge to the shore proper, and then start wandering in the woods besides the railroad tracks, going through some very rocky and muddy spots that are going to be hell on the bike later, then ford a stream and have to run down inside the culvert. Ah, is this what the helmet is for? The culvert opening is maybe all of five feet high, so we have to run scrunched over. But on the far side, it is up into the woods and up the bank we go. It seems to be going surprisingly fast and indeed Grant confirms we are running 8-8.5 minute miles, which is a bit faster than we thought we would with Evonne’s ankle issues. The path winds us up the banks and up back onto the roads and across the James River again on the bridge. But there’s an interesting twist. Back on the Browns Island side, there is a huge backup at an unexpected obstacle. The all-male teams are starting to catch up with here and get a bit hyper-aggressive and try to cut in line, but just as aggressively get shooed back. The problem is that everyone needs to stop and go down a seven or eight feet long ladder one at a time, then turn around and run over a metal grate catwalk clearly intended for maintenance use only. So we have a bit of a quiet rest here waiting for our turn to get down and run the catwalk.

It is a slightly odd experience to be running on an open metal grate just a few feet wide with rails on either side... and the raging torrent of the James River in flood maybe all of six feet below us. The direction of the run is upstream, so the water kept getting closer and closer. After a hundred metres or so, the steel grate gave way to a wide round concrete pipe on which we had to run. That was okay, but it was a curved surface with a narrow space for us to be running along. And now the river is right up along the side of the pipe perhaps two feet below the top and there is no railing. Then it is only a foot below. Then lapping at the top. Then swirling over the tops of my running shoes. And while the shore ahead with volunteers and people with lines to throw us should we fall in, are all visible ahead, and things are backing up again here, it is still a bit of a ways to go and the pipe is now no longer visible at all through the murky muddy water. It is a job of pointing yourself straight ahead, taking it a bit on faith that the pipe is where you think it is and planting your feet carefully to not be swept off the side nor mistep. By the time we reach the assistant helping us jump over to the shore, the river is up around my calves and the pressure from it running down is hard enough that a misplanted foot is going to send me over the side. And this is a big pipe with water flowing over and around and under it, so it is at least six feet down in the water here. Eck! The guy behind me is getting anxious to force me to move along faster since there is no way he can pass me, but I have no intention of going too fast to be sure of my footing. The end comes, I catch up with Evonne and Grant who were ahead of me, and the frustrated fellow behind me takes off into the woods. It is a short run up towards the transition area where we encounter our first special event and get handed the special events instructions which we do not read as we are being told what to do by organizers and can see what others are doing.

Concentrating on the directions while teams do the cinderblock walk in the background

We have three cinderblocks and a blindfold and must cross a ten foot wide space touching each other at all times (I think: anyway, we did it holding hands the entire time) by standing only on the cinderblocks. Grant goes first, Evonne dons the blindfold and goes next, then I follow, picking up and passing the cinderblock to Grant to put further across and we sidestep all the way across at a reasonable but unrushed pace.

We were lucky: the instructions for the event were misprinted and said you had to do the crossing with two blocks, not three, and when The Sirens arrive a few minutes later, they would lose a few minutes reading the instructions, spelling and content errors and all, watching other people go across on three, and trying to work out what they were supposed to do. As it will turn out, we never need the instructions as we are told what to do at each stage, so the requirement that we have a map carrying case and bring the instructions with us will be a bit superfluous.

From there, we run into the transistion area, get water and a quick bite (I’m doing simple fruit cereal bars and water, but others have Balance Bars and fancy sport food and drink. I’ve found, even under the gruelling demands of a several hour long event like this, those things to helpful or necessary, and most taste pretty awful.). We’ve been on the course for not quite an hour now as we get our bikes and run with them down Browns Island, across the bridge, and into mounting area to pedal like mad to the suspension bridge again to get across to Belle Island and the trails over there. As we are going across, we see the first of the elite teams on their way back already. Well, we already knew we were not in their class.

Belle Island is a nice ride on the bike: a pretty wide open fire access road kind of track with space for me to open up on the bike without running anyone down and, more important, where I am not getting run down by some of the more gungho energetic people behind me. Then it is across the bridge and onto the narrow paths we were running on an hour or so ago. And this is where things get a bit dicey: the testerone poisoned hyper aggressive men (draw whatever conclusions you wish from this, but it was always all male teams smashing people aside with sharp elbows) got a bit testy about passing here. On one section, we are riding on a concrete pipe (same style as the one we were running on just after the ladder), so there is no passing space, then there a concrete wall to manuveur around and no space on either side, but lots of space just beyond it. One fellow forces me into the wall rather than wait the two seconds it would take to allow me to get past the barrier and out of his way. Trail ettiquette be damned.

We have another stream fording and down into a different section of the culvert pipe where it is high enough to stand up and ride on the bike, which I do try, only to have a steep climb on the other side that requires dismounting just a few feet further on, another stream and culvert to go through, and now for the next several miles, we have a fairly challenging piece of trail. It’s a lot of rocky narrow trail with climbs and drops that would be at the limit of what I could do, but much of it I probably could do on my own, but sharing the trail with 600 other people, it is impossible to get the momentum to go up the steep parts and get out of the way gracefully for the more energetic people trying to force their way faster down the trail. Tempers get a bit frayed here, both from the course being hard and the stop and go cycle that keeps anyone from really building any momentum. At one point, Grant in the lead completely wipes out when his tyres hit a downed limb, he gets out of the way, I manage to get across slowly higher up without sliding out too bad, but I’m splayed out on the trail and faster than I can get out of the way, another woman comes up behind me and wipes out in exactly the same spot and way as Grant and chews me out for not being out of the way as she gets back up. I stay as much out of the way as I can and as soon as Evonne catches up here, and there is a break in the backlog, Grant and I force the limb off the course so it doesn't cause any more accidents.

Another mile or so on, after a few more interesting obstacles such as having to ride the bike on the top of a concrete wall over a stream with a five to eight foot drop on either side (but wide enough that Evonne, which she reaches it, has space to dismount and run beside her bike rather than risk a tumble), we have a very steep set of stairs to get down, which is where Team Balance Bar (the lead team) blazes past us: they are on their second loop around on the mountain biking already. Team Nike ACG and Team Red Bull will also make it past us here, more or less, within just minutes of each other. But the really technical riding past this stair step thing is much less prevalent and for the most part, we are able to actually ride on the trail from here to the bridge over the tracks, and from there the course is almost all fire track kind of surface the rest of the way back to the suspension bridge (though there is one tricky spot where we have a foot wide spot right next to a chain link fence and a steep dropoff with brush to go through, but we manage to ride through there without incident).

Near the suspension bridge back across the James River, my bike suddenly starts to ride very strangely. I push on, but I cannot keep up and Evonne and Grant pull a fair bit ahead of me here. It’s not ‘til I get to the bridge and dismount as required that I realize that not only do I have a flat tyre, but there is, in fact, a good four inch long nail sticking out of the back tyre. No thumb tacks here! I push across the bridge, chuck the nail in a rubbish bin right at the remount spot across the bridge and gingerly ride back to Browns Island to catch up to the transition area, point out the nail issue, get more water, another fruit bar, decide to see if the back wheel will magically heal itself while we are gone, and we head for the kayak part of the event.

Starting the leapfrog through the mud

But first we have to go to a giant mudpit where the instructions say to leapfrog across. Grant starts and he lands quite deliberately full body lying down in the mud. Quite without thinking, I follow suit. And after leaping over his arms, I land and hit my knees hard on some rocks underneath the mud. Naturally hardest on the left knee which is already giving me a little grief about all the demands of the day: it’s a long standing annoying, but not problematic, injury from my years of field hockey in high school. I’m a little more careful of my knees, and less careful about leap frogging to form (whatever that is: I thought leapfrogging was more of on-hands-and-feet hunched over thing than lying on the ground... or in very soft slurpey mud. Grant some time after the event tells me that we needed to lie down in the mud. Well, he was the one reading the instructions. Given the errors in the instructions already uncovered, I’m a little dubious that this is what was intended.).

Caked in mud!

Wow, what a mess! Coming out of the mud pit, hobbling a bit from my knee, I figure I have added about fifteen pounds to myself with this mud. We all try to brush off what we can as we run down to get the inflatable kayaks. Where it is as we heard earlier: three life vests and three people, but two kayaks and two paddles. Grant and I settled ahead of time that I’ll carry Evonne as a passenger and he’ll go on the single kayak. Of course it turns out they are all single kayaks, but we get into the river and head off.

Part of the reason I thought I should carry Evonne was I figured I would be the strongest paddler amongst us. I’ve got good arm strength and endurance from smashing up and removing the rubble from a concrete sidewalk and old shed foundation this past summer, and I’ve been out on the water a few times and seem to have a better sense of steering and such than most in the past. Grant did not get a chance to practice yesterday whereas Evonne and I did and I am confident of my sense of the kayak. That confidence is not misplaced: even with the passenger up front, I make it across the James main stream in reasonable time and pace, even with a few quick breaks to try to splash water on my hands to get the mud off so I am not rubbing it into my hands as I paddle. But Grant is clearly far more in his element than I and gets all the way across and around the far buoy and to the pulloff point on Belle Island well ahead of us. We get there, and taking a cue from others, waste a bit of time splashing around in the shallow waters there trying to get the bulk of the mud from the pit off us. I get enough off my knee to see that it is not a horrible problem, but it is bothering me a little and certainly has some scrapes and might be swelling a little. Nothing that is going to stop me. We pick up the two kayaks and carry them to the next put-in point where Evonne leaves us to run across on the suspension bridge and Grant and I take off on our own, one kayak each, and power back across the James.

Some teams have opted to tie the kayaks together and have two paddling together, but I recall from the practice how tricky this is and I don’t see any team at this point doing it all that well. Of course we are well into the race by now and the competitive teams are well ahead of us by this point, so we are surrounded by other teams of comparable ability to ourselves, which is to stay they are not stellar, so maybe this is a good strategy with more skilled folks. All I know is that my seat back is not working for me at all and I am holding up all my weight with my back muscles as I paddle and while this is getting me across the river and upstream of the buoy as required, it is hard going and I am going to have a very sore back and an intense desire for a massage when this is all done. Alas, no such luck.

Negotiating the spider web obstacle

Grant easily outperforms me getting across, and Evonne is there to help us get the two kayaks across and take them back onto Browns Island, turn them and vests and paddles in, and step into the next special challenge just before the transition area. It’s a “spider web” where we have to have only two people touching the ground, team members always touching each other, and get across a webbing of ropes a foot or so above the ground without touching them. Grant takes Evonne on his back, and I hold her hand, and we step gingerly across.

I think the judges are bored or inattentive or just don’t care too much by now. I think I just graze one line and Grant thinks his shorts might have touched another, but neither infraction gets us sent back, so off we go and it is time to search for someone with a wrench to get my back wheel off.

Yeah, I got a cheap bike and it doesn’t have quick release. And my patch kit and crescent wrench are in the car. I think. Maybe they are on my dining room table at home. Either way, it does not matter because we are not allowed to accept outside help, so I cannot ask Sean or Jesse to go get it (if they are even there) nor can I run off the course to get them either. But we can get help from other teams. Grant finds someone with a Leatherman style thing with an adjustable wrench head and we try to muscle the bolts free with that, but cannot seem to get the leverage.

Fortunately, there is a fellow from Team Streak (At the time, I thought they said they were The Streakers, but let’s not get all Freudian here). Their team is the only elite team with no corporate sponsor. By day, he works on a farm in Pennsylvania and anyone who can armwrestle a tractor can certainly work the bolts free, which he demonstrates. He introduces himself, but I miss his name (Turns out it is, and I promise I am not making this up, Flash Barchick. Something tells me this is his, err, professional name.). Anyway, we get the wheel off and Grant gets the spare tube he has out... and naturally, it is a different size. Oh dear. Okay, now our strategy is that I am going to run behind Evonne and Grant. The good news is that I have heard that the second loop on the mountain bike is significantly shorter, like maybe four to five miles instead of 7++ (yeap, they misled us again, didn’t they?). Flash, bless his heart, instead offers me to use his bike. Suddenly I’ve gone from having a decent bike with a flat tyre to having a stellar bike with front suspension and everything. Flash is a bit shorter than I, so it is not sized and adjusted to me, but this is not a long ride nor am I going to hold anyone up any more with this. We’ve probably spend a good ten to fifteen minutes on this by now. We fuel up again, get water, and get back out onto the course.

Heading out for our second biking loop, looking like poster children for a Tide commercial

Just as we are getting onto the suspension bridge, we meet Liz running back across from the kayaking component.

As I said, it is more of the same as before, though instead of going through the second culvert and up the hill and into the technical climbing, we are now doing a bit of trail riding that is less challenging, down the stairway from hell, across the railroad tracks, and back. But while we are riding at a reasonable enough pace, none of us is even remotely trying to race fast at this point: we are ready to just keep together at a comfortable pace that does not exhaust us. Just as we are getting near to the suspension bridge back, we have to go back into that narrow space along the fence again which we rode without trouble last time, but Evonne is weak enough from several hours in a row of serious exertion that her handle on her steering is not as firm this time and she manages to take a pretty nasty spill here into the brush and is a bit in mild shock from it. She refuses to ride any further on this narrow spot and instead we all dismount and run alongside our bikes... at least for about a few seconds. Evonne is running so fast with her bike Grant and I cannot keep up with her and have to get back on the bikes and ride! The course opens up again shortly after this and it is all open path from here, so Evonne gets back on and we pedal for the suspension bridge, me carefully avoiding the spot where I think I picked up the nail, and back to the transition area, where I thank Flash profusely and he responds by coming with us to the next challenge out of the transition area (No, we are still not done yet!). I nominate Flash for sainthood (But can you see the Pope sanctifying a Flash Barchick? I doubt there’s an Imam around open minded enough to do the trick either. But here I am digressing again.).

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

The first of the two obstacles between us and the finish line is the hidden secret thing called Jacob’s Ladder. It’s basically a slightly complicated set of monkey bars, save that they are all made of rope. We do not learn this ‘til later (thank goodness!), but Team Nike ACG was coming in a good clear second place for the entire event when one of their team fell and broke her wrist here, just a hundred feet from the finish line, and had to quit the race. Anyway, between the eager volunteers helping us, ourselves helping each other, and Flash’s instructions and help (all of which is allowed to make it across), we get through in good form.

Heading over the wall. The dude minus the shirt is our angel of mercy, Flash Barchick.

Now for the real kicker. We have to get all three of us over a 12 foot high wall. That’s about three and a half metres for your metric folks. We know the strategy and had a plan for this, but Flash disavows us of it right away. He wants to send me up second “since you send the weakest member of the team up second” (Thanks, Flash. Then again, you did just loan me your wonderful bike and help us across the Jacob’s Ladder and I am the only team member limping, so I guess I deserve that.). Evonne climbs up Grant’s shoulders, he stands up which takes her near the top, then a volunteer reaches down to help her get hands over the top and with Flash and I pushing her feet up, she goes over. Now we do the same with me. I am taller than Evonne, but a lot heavier, but manage to make it up anyway. Now I anchor the rope and let it down for Grant to climb, he scrambles up and over, we go down the other side, and run the last fifteen feet to cross the finish line after having been on the course for 5 hours, a minute, and some seconds.

Crossing the finish line!

After some self-congratulations for finishing, and a quick drink or five of water from the station set up there, I head for the first aid station to get the knee cleaned and disinfected, and we stand around for a very short period of time before Liz, Margs, and Jill show up and scramble across the wall to finish about eight minutes behind us (which is actually about two minutes faster than us since they started ten minutes later). They must have pedaled hard and fast to lessen the gap during that last mountain biking lap.

Amish Army after the race. We look happier than when we started, don’t we?

And that is the full report on the triathalon. We did go to a nice microbrewery afterwards for lunch, and since we were not worried about being hydrated for more running, we could finally actually enjoy a nice pleasant pint of the local conconcotion. I am sure the city will be wondering about the mad flush of mud down the restaurant’s drain as we washed up a bit there after having changed into more decent and less muddy gear, but still had mud past the elbows when we arrived. I think they were used it by the time of our arrival, though. I counted a lot of cars with bike racks in the parking lot, including the overall winners, Team Balance Bar, a couple of tables over.

After a pleasant lunch together, it was time to head off our seperate ways for home, which was a good two and a half hours of driving for me with the injured bike in the back. I got home and got three of the four things I most wanted in the world right then: a hot shower, a clean change of clothes, a nice glass of wine, and a really good back massage to loosen the knots from kayaking. Alas, Zorro is not trained in shiatsu techniques, so I had to do without the last.

Jesse

The Flight of The Canoe

2004-09-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-22T18:05:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-10T13:01:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-09T12:30:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

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

2004-09-07T09:30:00.000-04:00

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”

SNP Hike Day 4: Adventures in Stealth Camping

2004-09-06T13:30:00.000-04:00

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”

SNP Hike Day 3: Going to Town

2004-09-04T15:40:00.000-04:00

Monday, 8th of September, 2003

Blackrock Hut to Pinefield Hut, 15 miles

I wake up in the morning early, with another night of surfing back and forth between sleep and half-wakefulness. As promised, the snakes have not taken me in the night. I do check my boots carefully for uninvited guests and slap on new moleskin patches on the blister spots on my heel. I listened to Poor Richard and Almost There last night talk about their plans to modify their hiking to take in a night at one of the hotels in the park, probably at Big Meadows and perhaps again at Skyline. A soft bed and a hot running shower does sound awfully good, but I still have a long way to go afterwards, so I’m sticking to my plans of hiking between the huts all the way through. I have three full changes of clothes and I’m trying to save one for Saturday morning, so I’m in less smelly clothes come the time I meet Meredith at Gravel Springs Gap. But there is no missing that I will be a little ripe.

Suarte and Sweat’s talk of routinely kicking out 20 to 22 miles a day has me feeling a little inspired, so today’s 15 mile hike, the longest so far, is sounding quite do-able. I’ve looked ahead and after Pinefield Hut, there is another hut just eight miles on, then another twelve miles further. So tomorrow I am thinking about kicking forward a full day. But we will have to wait to see what fifteen miles today is going to be like. I get my breakfast bar, don boots, consult the map, and head off with my hat on my head. It’s getting a bit salty around the rim from two days of heavy sweating, but it has been sunny every day, so with my hairline, the hat is quite necessary and welcome.

About a mile down the trail, I get to where the Appalachian Trail wraps around the peak of Blackrock Mountain. This is definitely worth pulling out the camera! I have a view in three directions from well above the land around me here, even though I’m nowhere near the peak. The mountain is a huge pile of rock rubble, and looks like it would be a fun and challenging scramble up to the peak to look around. But I decide to stick to hiking today and put the pack back on and head off.

My goal is to make it to Loft Mountain around lunchtime. It’s about seven miles from the hut. And it is time to break my promise to myself about being full self-sufficient through the park. I’m just a tad nervous still about how fast that last gas canister ran dry on the campstove and I want to see if I can find another option.

The hike is pleasant, though I can feel the blisters are growing a bit and the moleskin patches may not be staying in place. When they stay in place, the blisters are present, but don’t intrude on my awareness. When they slide out of place, it is a little more obvious.

Around 11:30 AM, I roll into Loft Mountain and find the campstore and, glory be, a bathroom. I’m tempted by a shower, but getting clean just to get grubby all over again seems a bit much. I do, however, appreciate the flush toilet. The latrines so far are all perfectly fine, but a pit toilet is still a pit toilet, and they are usually bring your own TP affairs: if they do have paper, often it has been nibbled or maybe even gotten mold, so not stuff you want to use. I came with my own in a ziplock bag so it does not get wet. Thank you Mary-Ann Ray (of D.C. Appalachian Mountain Club fame) for teaching me to always bring your own!

I do splash a goodly bit of water on my face and it is a little amazing just how much salty grim builds up when you sweat all from the exhertion of hiking and have nothing more than a wet washcloth at the end of the day to clean yourself. Feeling a bit refreshed, I indulge in a cold soft drink just as Poor Richard and Almost There wander in to the campground. They head right for the store to get cheese and some other things, then across the way to the showers. I think I hear the sound of two very happy men back there when the water starts to run...

There is something to hiking 27.4 miles (yes, the guidebook is quite specific about that distance) to get a store to really appreciate it. Ah, it’s marvelous. Mind you, a good bit of it is highly impractical: I think a microwave dinner is not a good idea. In fact, even campers can’t make them, so why are they here? Nothing withstanding the happiness of Suarte and Sweat last night, I decide not to get a six pack of brandless beer, as it is still eight miles to go and the pack is heavy enough already and I don’t want beer that much.

The stove selection is about what I feared: the canisters for my stove that I cannot find anywhere else are not here either. I would have been surprised. They do have Coleman fuel stoves, but the models are large and heavy and so are the cans of fuel. But I do spot one little thing that takes solid fuel tablets. I read the label and realize that to boil water, I am going to need about three or four tablets a go and there are twelve in the pack, so I pick up two more extra boxes of tablets and put them in the equipment sack in my pack.

It’s been a non-issue on this hiking trip with all the nice weather, but I have packed my pack with garbage bags, each one seperated from the others in terms of what is in it. One for clean clothes, one for dirty, one for food, one for equipment. This trick is one I learned on a backpacking class run at the Mohican Center with the Appalachian Trail Club last fall. It’s a good trick to keep things dry even when it rains as no pack is waterproof even with the fancy rain covers and such they sell these days. It is nice to have my dirty undies seperated from the clean ones, but another advantage is packing seems to go pretty quickly. I also realy appreciated this this past winter when I went back country skiing on the Appalachian Trail near Zealand Notch in New Hampshire. I fell over a good deal and of course I was the one carrying the blueberries in my pack... Blueberry juice got on everything in the food part of my bag, but nothing else and even the food was largely stained on the ziplock bags it was in. The blueberries in the pancakes in the morning tasted just fine despite their “pressing” beforehand!

Anyway, I get the stove, tablets, and a block of cheese as a small indulgence. I notice Naglene bottles, but I have been getting moderately adept at filling the bottles I have with the pump, so I don’t see a compelling reason to get a new bottle that will screw onto the filter. Still, it does amuse me that on this first ever trip with this filter, I have managed to fail to use one of its selling features. I also have bear line with me, another thing I learned about in the backpacking class, and I’ve had no need for it staying in the huts with the bear poles provided.

Anyway, after a nice lunch break, and a quick conversaton with Chef when he rolls in looking for any and all possible shortcuts, and saying goodbye to a happily cleaned up Almost There and Poor Richard, whom are now enjoying a cold soda, I’m off. I notice just as I am getting onto the trail a patch of milkweed plants and sure enough, there’s a few monarch catepillars crawling around on them. Cool! They are so interesting and different looking than your average wooly bear or generic catepillar...

The hike through the woods is uneventful, but I am very ready for the end when it comes. I’m starting to have what J.R./Easy calls “Shelter Delusions.” I look through the woods and think I see what looks like the roof of the shelter through the woods and pick up the pace with a little excitement only to find, of course, it is just a shape of a fallen tree. But I do finally find the path down to Pinefield Hut and it is time for the most estatic moment of the day: taking off the hiking boots. The blisters have spread a bit and one of them has popped. And the socks, of course, have a lot of dirt in them, so there is crud getting in the open spot. It hurts to brush it off, but there is a wonderful little stream running right through the middle of the shelter area. I go downstream a little to find a nice spot where I can put my feet in the wonderful cool stream water. Oh man... This is good...

While I am soaking, Almost There and Poor Richard come into camp. They shed packs and shoes and shirts and join me with feet in the stream. Almost There sees my blisters and gives me a good run down on advice about treating them and ways to avoid them in the future, all of which I have heard. Except wrapping my feet in duct tape. I have a small roll with me for emergencies, but the thought of what it will be like to pull that off each night is more than I can bear right now. I’ll try putting on a bigger patch of moleskin in the morning on the spot.

Chef lumbers into camp a while late grumbling and moaning and gets stuck into his dinner. I gather he had little luck hitch hiking today and the road is not much shorter than the trail to this hut on this hike. He probably managed to cut a mile or two, but had to walk it all. I have to admit that, if I do kick forward a day tomorrow, I will no longer have these guys for company every night. I am prejudiced by the whole scene the first night with Chef talking about how awful homeless people are, so I am not going to miss him. I’ve warmed a bit to Almost There and Poor Richard, who both are talking about how much they are enjoying semi-retirement and doing hikes like this and wishing they had started doing them when they were my age. I know, it is very self-affirming and so I like them better for it. But there it is. They also don’t snore: I may not be being woken by Chef’s snoring, but once he gets going, there is no getting back to sleep until he shifts positions and stops snoring again.

This hut is easily the nicest one I’ve seen (yes, all three of them!) with a pretty stream running right through the middle of the area, and a bit oak tree behind the hut. Of course it is fall, so acorns are plinging off the hut roof all the time, especially when the squirrels get perturbed by something and rain them down on us.

I study the hiking guide again to see if there is a better way to get a day ahead to meet Meredith on schedule Saturday morning, but tomorrow still is the best day if I am going to stay at shelters each night. Even if I relent and try a hotel room for a night, I don’t see a better day. Fifteen miles today did work, but I was very ready to be done. I’m not certain 20 miles is going to happen. I could try to do 18 miles to get to Lewis Mountain Campground and see if I can find something there, but without a tent... I can also, courtesy of the permit, back country camp anywhere as long as it is at least 100 feet from any trails and at least a quarter mile from any campground (and not in some special places in the park like Camp Rapidian or near the peaks of Stony Man Mountain or Old Rag, but none of those places are nearby). But again, without a tent, this is potentially unwise especially since I may not be anywhere near a spring and will need to set up my own bear line and so on. I’m pretty keen to stay in the shelters if I can every night.

I doze off lightly for the evening after a good dinner of curry and rice and listen to the acorns and the snoring through the night. Big day ahead and I still can’t get a full solid out for the night sleep. But tomorrow, if all goes on plan, I cross one major milestone on the hike: I go through Swift Run Gap, which takes me out of the South District of the park. Of the three districts (South, Central, and North), the south is the biggest. So tomorrow will be my first day moving onto a new map.

Ta ta for now, and tune in tomorrow for Adventures In Stealth Camping!

J aka “Red Sock”

SNP Hike Day 2: The rat ate my sock?

2004-09-02T16:00:00.000-04:00

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”

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

2004-08-31T20:05:00.000-04:00

Saturday, 6th of September, 2003.

Rockfish Gap to Calf Mountain Shelter, 6 miles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J aka “Red Sock”