Everybody Walk the Dinosaur
All right, it’s Monday, May 20th, at 7:20 p.m., and I’m already in my tent, which is probably not terribly surprising. Charlie and I are stealth camping at mile 711.5, approximately. At least that's what the Far Out app says. We stopped 1.3 miles shy of our intended destination for the night, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
We woke up at the Pickle Branch Shelter, got ourselves organized, and were headed out of camp at about 7 o'clock. Unfortunately, the Pickle Branch Shelter is a third of a mile off the AT, so by the time we got back to the trail, we’d already done a third of a mile. I know that might not sound like much, but after a while, every bit of distance counts, and you don’t really want to do any more than is absolutely necessary.
The first climb of the day was a long one. We hiked a bunch of switchbacks to get up onto the ridge, and the ridge was shaped like a Stegosaurus's back — tons of ups and downs and very technical things we had to navigate. Also, lots of rock climbs up and lots of rock climbs back down. It was excruciatingly slow — way slower than I was expecting.
Pickle Branch is at mile 698, so about 2 miles in, we hit the 700 mile mark. I feel like I need to put a little asterisk next to that, though, because we took the high water route yesterday, rather than fording a stream. And that road walking cut off roughly two miles. So that 700-mile marker maybe didn't technically apply for me when I reached it, but by 702, I’d definitely hit 700 miles.
About 4.5 miles in, we made it to Dragon's Tooth, which was lovely. I've seen YouTube videos where people actually climb to the top of it, but I elected not to do that. We hung out for a while and had a snack, though. It was nice to have good weather so we could actually enjoy being up there after the climb.
Although I’d woken up feeling fine and had some breakfast and stuff, not long after I started hiking, I started feeling cramps in my stomach. It was probably dehydration. I’ve tried to drink a lot all day, and I’m feeling better now. Maybe by the morning, I'll be better still.
Anyway, part one of the day was hiking the 4.5 miles to Dragon's Tooth, and part two was getting off the ridge that had Dragon's Tooth. That turned out to be even more technical than approaching it from the south had been, which is what we’d done. It was borderline rock climbing for a good portion of the way down, which is incredibly slow, of course. And hat's off to Charlie, because he definitely wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting it, either, but at least I've been hiking for a while at this point. So Charlie had to navigate a lot of very difficult situations today.
After we got down to the bottom, we had a ridiculous pointless up and down to get through to get water. The theme for this section of the trail is that it's pretty dry. Water sources just aren’t that plentiful. So we hiked 300 feet up and 300 feet down over the course of a mile just to reach a water source. And while we were there, we really loaded up, because the shelter we were planning to go to tonight doesn't have reliable water.
As a side note, we haven't really seen that many thru-hikers the past few days. I think that’s because a lot of them went to Trail Days in Damascus. I imagine we'll start seeing more tomorrow when they resume their hikes at various points along the trail, but it's been pretty quiet. We might encounter some folks over the next couple days, and I hope we do.
After we got water, we still had six miles to go, which included a pretty challenging climb. Charlie kind of put it in low gear and soldiered on like a champ. We traversed another ridge full of very challenging ups and downs — just another long Stegosaurus back. We had about 1.3 miles to go to get to where we’d expected to set up camp for the night, but then we came across a little stealth campsite on the side of the trail that looked really nice. It was part of the ridge and had a gorgeous view of the valley below.
We don't have a very long day planned for tomorrow, and at that point, we’d already done more than 12 miles — close to 13, if you factor in the approach trail from the Pickle Branch Shelter. So I lobbied for us to just park it for the night, and I didn't get much pushback from Charlie on the idea.
As soon as we’d set up our tents, we noticed the sign saying, “No Camping.” Oh well. Sue us. It's now 7:30, and I'm not convinced that anyone’s going to be coming by to bother us or enforce the “no camping” directive. If they do, we'll figure it out then.
So, huge day today. Lots and lots of rock climbing, and steep ascents and descents. Both of us are really tired. I'm hoping to be more on my game tomorrow after I've gotten more hydrated. We’re headed to McAfee Knob tomorrow, and we should have good weather for it!
