Larryless at Deer Park

So it’s Sunday April 14, and I am at the Deer Park shelter at mile 272 on the Appalachian Trail. I hiked about 15 miles today, and over the past three days, I've hiked 42 miles, which is kind of the high water mark for me at this point. Over the past seven days, I’ve hiked 82 miles. I'm trying to work my way up to average about 90 miles per week, but the past 82 have been very difficult terrain. I'm hoping — and I think — the terrain starts to level out a little bit as I head further north into Virginia. So, I'm optimistic, but my body is a bit sore, and my feet are very sore.

This morning, I woke up at the Roaring Fork shelter, and it was a very nice morning. The weather's turned very favorable, compared to the previous couple days in the Smokies, when it was freezing cold and raining. It was definitely a welcome change.

The first three and a half miles were quite possibly the easiest and quickest three and a half miles I've experienced thus far. It was just gentle downs, gentle ups, lovely stream crossings, nice vegetation, nice views. So that was a really fantastic way to start the morning.

The first climb of the day was at Walnut Mountain, and at the top, there was another bald, so that's three balds in North Carolina so far. It's kind of fun to go up to the peak of a mountain and just have a nice grassy field up there. It really augments the views quite a bit.

The next five or seven miles on the drop down from Walnut were fairly inconsequential. Then there’s a very long descent into Hot Springs, and at one point, you get to sort of this gap, and there's a sign that says that the Deer Park shelters are 3.4 miles away. I stopped for a minute to look at the map, and it looked like a fairly benign 3.4 miles. But that turned out to be patently untrue.

I don't know if it’s because I was tired — you know, I was nearing the end of three long days of hiking — or what, but those 3.4 miles might as well have been 10. It was just a slog. Every uphill was painful. Every downhill was painful. That Blues Traveler song “The Mountains Win Again” certainly came to mind. It's funny. Mean reversion's a bitch, right? You get the easy 3.5, which means you’ve got to pay that back somehow. And I certainly did on those final 3.4. I finally dragged myself up to the Deer Park shelter, and at the time, there were only two other people there. Since Hot Springs is so close at this point, a lot of hikers just push on into Hot Springs. They just make a really long day of it, get to Hot Springs, and then take a zero the following day.

But this is a nice place to stop. Nobody actually stays in the shelter, though. It's kind of older and a bit janky, but there are a lot of nice tent sites around it. Wes is here, too. He doesn't have a trail name yet, either. I've seen him several times over the past few days. And there’s also a very nice woman named Time Out, and she’s certainly been taking her time on the trail, which is good for her. Praying Mantis showed up, followed by this guy named Ryan and another guy — a Canadian — named Russ, but he keeps to himself most of the time. He seems very nice. I've seen him plenty of times, but he just kind of retreats to his tent whenever he gets to a shelter or a campsite.

Salty!

The nice weather, coupled with the (seemingly?) reduced threat of norovirus, is sort of increasing the social activity quite a bit. So Ryan, Praying Mantis, Timeout, Wes, and I all sat around the picnic table for a while, just talking. And I learned a couple things that were funny. The first is that we were fortunate that a guy referred to as “LSD Larry” had not shown up at the shelter. Apparently, he roams around the trails, and he kind of claims the Deer Park shelter as his own property. I guess some people had put warnings on the Far Out app about him, but I hadn’t checked it, so this was news to me.

The second interesting thing I learned was that there's a Japanese guy on the trail who is hiking the entire AT in a karate gi — including the shoes. And apparently, he hikes about 25 miles a day! He's well ahead of us, so there's no way I'll ever see him, but I would have loved to have bumped into him. Seems like an interesting guy!

And then the third thing was that when Ryan was at Standing Bear hostel — he stayed there the same night I did, but he was in the bunkhouse — Maria, who is the proprietor of Standing Bear, called him into the main house to give her sort of an informal report on how things were going. So there were three, maybe four, guys hanging around the hostel that night, and I don't mean any disrespect by this, but they all kind of looked the same. They were all sort of stocky, with giant beards, and they were just wandering around. The place is called Standing Bear Farm, and I didn't have any idea what they might have been farming there, but I had just assumed that these guys worked there in some capacity.

Apparently, though, “farm” is just part of the name. They don't really have a product, and it turns out that those guys were sort of freeloaders. They’re not even hikers. They just hang out and smoke weed and drink beer and sit around the campfire. I talked to them a little bit when I was there and thought they were pretty amusing, but I guess Maria was trying to figure out a way to get those guys to move on.

Well, it's a nice warm night tonight, and I’m probably going to get into my tent the latest I have so far. It's about 8:30. Tomorrow should be a fairly easy day. I'm planning on moseying down to Hot Springs, which is only a few miles down the trail, so I’ll get to have sort of a Nero, followed by a zero with a great friend of mine. I’m really looking forward to that.

A little bit of patchwork for now