OK, it has been a few weeks so this will be a long update. My last post was from Damascus Virginia. I had a zero day in Damascus and re-supplied, cleaned up, did laundry, replaced some gear. Damascus is known the be the AT Hiker town, and the annual AT Trail Days, 4 day, hiker festival is held there in May. I didn't care for Damascus and couldn't get out of town fast enough. Most everyone I've talked to on the trail hold the same impression and didn't care so much for this town. Well the one thing that I was hoping to avoid was snow. I left Damascus to climb Virginia's highest Mountain, Mt. Rogers. They were calling for snow. On the second day out of Damascus I started the 6 hour climb to the summit and the 4 hour climb over the backside of the Mountain, called the Grayson Highlands. When I started my climb at 6 am, it was cold, and just started snowing. By 9 am I was hiking in 3-4 inches of snow. I was the first one on the trail and was blazing the way. By 9:30 "Mouse" (who I first started hiking with near Hot Springs on Easter Sunday), another hiker caught up with me and passed me and she blazed the trail over the Grayson Highlands. We had constant 30 mph winds with regular gusts of 50-60 mph. It was wild. When we got to the top of the Mt. and crossed the Grayson Highlands, it was a guessing game because the "white" trail blazes that mark the trail are painted on the rocks and on some occasional poles and the snow and ice were covering the white blazes. We made it without getting lost. The Grayson Highlands are known for this herd of wild miniature ponies. The weather was so bad we never saw the ponies, but could see their hoof prints in the snow. A group of us (mouse, stretch, earlybird)slept in a shelter that night on the backside of the Mt, and we were still at 4000 feet of elevation and the cold wind blew all night, it was the coldest that we all had been on the trail. It took two days to hike out of this section and we all ended up in the town of Atkins, VA and stayed at this dump of a hiker hotel called the "relax Inn". We were so grateful to have hot showers, hot hamburgers, and clean laundry. That night it poured buckets from midnight to 7 am. After a hot breakfast a group of us headed back on the trail by 8 am. By 9 am it started pouring and rained buckets until 2pm. All the brooks turned to rivers, all the rivers flooded over roads and bridges. The trail became a makeshift stream. We were hiking in 3-4 inches of water on the trail, and it when we were climbing it was like a stream running over our shoes. There was one point that the trail crosses a brook that is normally about 8 to 10 inches deep, but this day there was so much water that the brook turned into a stream and flooded over the bridge by 3 feet. We went to the farm house next to this brook, now river, and asked the woman for directions back to that trail.. We took a 2 mile detour down some roads and got back to the trail.
I spent had my first 30 mile day, I hiked 34 miles for a hamburger and a pizza and tented by a brook that night. The next day I had a short hike of 15 miles and stayed at the Woods Hole Hostel. This hostel is a 100 year old log cabin made out of cherry wood. Then I ended up in Pearisburg, VA. I made friends with the "gunrunner" and "doug aka spok". I took a zero day here and connected with three other hikers from Santa Barbara, CA ("the three amigos") and we rented a car and drove 25 miles to Blacksburg, VA (home of Virginia Tech, nice town) and went to the outfitters for new shoes. I had worn out my shoes and had little tread left to the point that they were dangerous. The outfitter didn't have the model of shoe I was wearing and sold me a different model from the same manufacturer. After 5 days of hiking in these shoes my feet, ankles, and leg muscles were killing me. When I got to Dalesville I found an outfitter and had to lay over Sunday until they opened on Monday and was able to purchase a new pair of shoes. The new shoes are working out well and I"m back to hiking comfortably.
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