Nothing Earth-Shattering
It is Saturday, June 15, and I'm at the Rod Hollow shelter at mile 996. And today was an 18.4-mile day, which I guess seems long, but it was a fairly uneventful day. Nothing earth-shattering to report. It was more of an I need to get from Point A to Point B type of day. But anyway, it rained quite hard last night, and as I mentioned, I’d set up my tent in a spot that was essentially all dirt, which meant that this morning, it was all mud.
So my tent had taken on quite a bit of splash back from the hard rain hitting the mud, which was lovely. I didn’t really have any options to clean it up, though, so I just had to pack it away, still coated in mud. Otherwise, it was a pretty typical morning getting out of camp — I ate some breakfast, collected my gear, and hit the trail by 7 o'clock. Lately, it's been much easier to get going early because it's light out and warm. So any impediments to getting up that I had earlier in the hike are now gone.
About three miles into my day, the trail spilled out onto a road that goes under Route 66. And I was thrilled to see that someone was there doing some Trail Magic. [Wife note: In contrast, I was not thrilled that there were no pics of said Trail Magic.] He’d hiked the trail a few years earlier under the name Smooth, and now he has a business where he shuttles hikers around. He said he was in the area this morning and thought he'd grab some donuts and some Gatorade and hand them out to any hikers he happened to see. So I sat down with Smooth for a few minutes and chatted before proceeding on my way.
The next section of trail wasn't particularly noteworthy other than that it seemed to attract a lot of people who were trail running or walking their dog or whatever. I saw a zillion day hikers, and the funny thing is, there's really no view. It's just a path with no real payoff. Generally, I’d say it's a pretty boring section of trail. So go figure.
At one point, I ran into a deer who had zero interest in getting out of my way. The deer in Virginia seem to be very tame, very comfortable with humans. We had a bit of a standoff, but eventually, it ran off and I was able to continue on.
I was sort of flip-flopping or leapfrogging all day with a guy I met yesterday, Gentle Yeti. And I learned that he got his trail name because there's a coffee blend by that name, and I guess it’s pretty good, or pretty special somehow, because he forgot it somewhere and ended up hiking a few miles back to get it. And that became his name. Not a terribly exciting story, I guess, but he’s a really, really nice guy.
A little further down the trail, I entered a state park called Sky Meadow State Park, and I’d kind of assumed that because it was a state park, there’d be some kind of picnic area there, but I was wrong. So I just found a rock to sit on while I had lunch, and Gentle Yeti joined me for a bit.
At that point, I’d done about 12 miles, and the trail was just kind of hilly, kind of flat, kind of down. Nothing really noteworthy. And then it came out at Route 50, which is a four-lane highway. There's a sign there that notifies drivers that there's a hiker crossing, but it clearly had zero effect on any of the drivers passing through. So it became somewhat of a game of Frogger, trying to get across.
Once I did, there was a bit of a climb, and then I made my way to the Rod Hollow shelter. There was a group of guys already here when I arrived who are hiking together, and they get together every year to do a section of the AT. So the shelter was quite full, which really wasn’t a big deal, since I prefer not to stay in the shelters anyway.
I picked out a tent site, ate a little dinner, tried to air out my tent as much as possible, and basically just called it a day. Not much to report. Kudos to anyone who made it to the end of this blog post without falling asleep. Maybe tomorrow will be more exciting.
