No Bros

Today is Saturday, June 8, and I’m at the Loft Mountain Campground, which is a seriously huge complex within the Shenandoah National Park. It's a combination of an RV park and a car camping area, with some one-offs like me mixed in who are tenting. But it's actually nice to be at a very organized campsite. This morning, I woke up at a random site just north of the Turk Gap parking lot. I got going by about 7 o'clock. And for whatever reason — I mean, it's Saturday, so that's a possible reason — but early on in my hike, I bumped into a ton of people who were trail running. You know, wearing a hydration vest and no shirt and the special shoes and all that. Everyone seemed to be overly athletic and chatting the whole time. I probably saw ten trail runners in the first couple miles that I was hiking this morning.

Then after that, I bumped into a ridge runner, which is an employee of the state park. I ran into ridge runners in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but this was the first one I’d seen in Virginia. Her name was The Beast, which I assume came from a past thru-hike. She was very nice. And the funny thing was that when I was talking to her, I told her about where I’d camped and mentioned that I had my backcountry camping permit, which all thru-hikers are required to have when passing through Shenandoah National Park. But when I said that, she seemed surprised to hear it. She was like, “Oh, you have one? Oh, that's good.” I expected the ridge runners around here to be asking to see my permit, not be shocked that I actually had one.

The early miles passed pretty quickly, and it was nice and cool this morning, which was very welcome. I camped last night basically at the midpoint between the greatest distance between two water sources on this stretch, so I woke up this morning with just enough water to get me to the next refill spot, which was about 8.5 miles away.

When I got to the campsite that had the water source, it was 2/10 of a mile off the trail, so it was a 4/10 of a mile round-trip to fill up. And again, I realize that that doesn’t sound like a long distance, but when you're trying to cover a lot of miles each day, literally any detour is unwelcome. But I needed the water, so I didn’t have much choice.

I had a snack at the campsite, filled up my water bottles, and then got on my way. Next up was the summit of Black Rock Mountain. And warning — dumb finance joke — I expected to see a bunch of finance bros in vests, milling about the summit of Black Rock. But I didn’t.

At about noon, I checked my mileage, and I’d gone 9.6 miles. One milestone that I've been trying to hit — not all that aggressively, but it would just be kind of fun — is 10 miles by noon. So I’d made 9.6, but I'd also done 4/10 of a mile to get water, so technically, I’d hiked 10 miles before noon. I just hadn't hiked 10 trail miles.

I crossed Skyline Drive a bunch of times today and saw a ton of day hikers, which wasn’t really surprising, because it was a Saturday, and the weather was beautiful. Lots of people were out. When I was approaching one of the overlooks, I saw a pickup truck with the tailgate down, and someone was using a Blackstone grill and had a huge cooler. So my immediate thought was that there was Trail Magic there.

But I was wrong. This individual was just cooking for himself and his lady friend, and he had his giant Dodge Ram pickup idling, because his electric Blackstone was plugged into the outlet in the bed of his truck, which immediately made me want to slash his tires. But what are you going to do?

As the miles wore on, I had to start making a decision about where I was going to camp for the evening. The next official campsite after this one, Loft Mountain, wasn't for many more miles, and that would have meant a 20-plus-mile day for me, so I decided to peel off here just to see if any sites were available. The nice thing about this campsite is that if you rent a camping space for 30 dollars, you get your own picnic table, your own bear box, a nice tent site, and access to a camp store that sells beer, which I know because I might or might not have had one or two. And you have access to flush toilets. So all in all, a nice place to stop. I’d covered 15.5 miles by 2 p.m., so I felt that was good enough for the day and decided to just have a relaxing afternoon here.

I never saw a single other thru-hiker the whole day, which seems fairly strange to me. I'm not really sure how to reconcile that. Am I that far behind? Am I between a couple of bubbles? No idea, but I had a good day nonetheless.