[at-l] On and Off Trip Report (VERY long)

[Bluetrail at aol.com (Bluetrail@xxxxxxx)]

All through our pre-hike weekend together I kept telling Jon how scared I was of what I could and couldn?t do on this hike.  He didn?t say anything, and I was fuming, feeling ignored.  Just the same, when it came to packing up, I saw he had been listening.   He carried the tent, the stove, the fuel, the cookpots, the bear bag rope, and ALL the food (enough for two people for 5 days).  The only shared equipment I had was the water filter and a little first aid stuff.  He had heard me.

-------For those of you who remember the at-l ?Wanchor Reports? of two years ago, yes, it?s the same Jon.  He?s killing himself trying to prove he?s serious this time.  And I?m letting him.

Up at 5:00 a.m. Monday, July 28, to drive from Culpepper to Shenandoah National Park.  Bobby, the shuttle driver Jon had arranged a month before, showed up at the Lewis Mountain campground right on time, and we loaded our stuff (except Jon forgot his hiking sticks) into Bobby?s van and drove 50 miles south.   We started hiking somewhere about 10:00.  It was another very hot day, with rising humidity.  We started out uphill and seemed to continue uphill all morning.  Stopped and talked toTrenchman, a northbound thru hiker.  Trenchman said he?d been thinking about quitting for the last 800 miles but was still going.   Refilled our water at a piped spring.  Ran into several southbound Scouts.  

By 2:00 we had come back down to the road, only about 3+ miles.  It was hotter and even more humid.  Jon said it was too hot to climb the upcoming mountain, and set up the tent.  We threw in our backpacking mattresses and crawled in.  Jon slept for 2.5 hours.   I slept about an hour and spent the rest of the time getting more and more crabby as I tossed in an ever-growing pool of my own sweat. I felt defeated and dreaded the next uphill climb.  When Jon woke up (I think my sighing woke him up), he said, ?Now what??   I said, let?s stick out our thumbs and hitch back toward the car.  He was fine with this, so we packed up the tent, climbed over the stile to the road, and stuck out our illegal thumbs.  Soon the thunder turned to rain.  We put up our 12 oz. backpacking umbrellas and sat on the stone bridge, waiting for a northbound car.   At last a van stopped.  Two college-age kids from California who were spending the summer following Phish around picked us up and drove us to the Loft Mountain campground (their destination).  We got out, now only 26 miles or so from the car.   

After a coke from the campground store and dinner cooked out not far from the store, I was ready to go on.  The trail started out downhill and then was actually flat for a while, even though everything was quite wet and the trail was almost covered with knee-high grass.   Then about 8:00 a.m. the treadway started up again.  I was going slower than ever.  Jon wordlessly passed me and disappeared ahead.  As I had thought, just when it was almost dark, I found him again.  He had set up the tent and bear bagged our food.   It started to rain again.  I crawled into the tent, took a pain pill, and went to sleep.  

We actually slept until sometime after 7:00, awakening to mist and dripping trees.  Jon had put the tent in the only flat spot he could find?right in the middle of a side trail, just feet off the AT.  As we packed up, a doe kept peeking around the corner to watch us.   She was probably about 20 feet away most of the time

We decided to fix breakfast at Ivy Branch spring.  There was a picnic table (and an old stone building) next to the piped spring.  We cooked breakfast (oatmeal and coffee for Jon and chai and cheese grits with jerky crumbs for me) while a buck, his antlers still in velvet, investigated us thoroughly.   He even walked around the building to see if we looked any better from the other side.