Stormy Weather
It’s 8 p.m. on Sunday, May 26th, and I’ve been holed up in my tent for the past 90 minutes, riding out a rather aggressive storm. I ended up hiking just shy of 14 miles today, and I’m at a tenting site that’s just off the side of the trail. I woke up this morning at around 6 o'clock at Fullhardt Knob Shelter, got ready, and was on the trail by about 7 o'clock, which was pretty good timing, considering that I switched up my breakfast routine to have some granola and powdered milk and Carnation Breakfast, all mixed together. That turned out to be a good breakfast. The only problem is that I wanted about three times as much of it, and I need to save some for the next several days. So that was a learning moment for me — gotta bring more granola next time.
The first couple miles were pretty uneventful. The water supply at the shelter last night was a cistern that collects the rain coming off the roof of the shelter. I didn't really want to trust it too much, so I got as little water from it as I felt I could get away with. Fortunately, I had shown up at the shelter with a decent amount already. So I left the campsite this morning with just enough to get to a nice stream about three miles down the way where I could refill everything.
Today's terrain for the first maybe seven or eight miles was just kind of walking around in the woods, doing some pointless ups and downs. Got some elevation and some views but nothing terribly exciting. I stopped for a snack at a shelter along the way, and then after about 9.5 miles, the trail exited onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. So that's the first place the Blue Ridge Parkway directly intersects with the AT, and what made it even more exciting for me was seeing that there was some Trail Magic there. There was a guy there from Roanoke who calls himself Don the Apple Man — he’s a very, very nice guy — and he just had a nice spread of cookies and Twinkies and things like that, plus a cooler of Gatorade and a bag of clementines.
I made a beeline for the cooler and immediately chugged some Gatorade, because, as I noted in my previous post, in my haste to get back to the trail on Saturday, I managed to leave all my electrolyte mixes at home. So I needed to take advantage of that lovely Trail Magic as much as I could. In the end, I had a couple Gatorades, I had a couple clementines, and I ate some carrot cake cookies, which were really good.
After refueling a bit, thanks to Don, I headed on my way. And the way the trail runs kind of alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway — and Skyline Drive, which it does further on — is very familiar to me. Anyone who lives in the general Charlottesville area who's ever hiked up here probably knows what I’m talking about. You just kind of stay within fairly close proximity of the parkway, and the familiarity of it was very nice and sort of comforting in a way.
One challenging issue of the day was that the weather was very hot. So, not much of a breeze, pretty sunny, pretty hot. Definitely a lot of sweating going on. I didn’t see many people on the trail today at all, but I did bump into a SOBO hiker — I already forgot his name — who had almost completed the trail last year but had to go back to work. So now he's back and trying to complete the remainder of the trail within 12 months, because that’s what qualifies as an official thru-hike. You have to walk the entire length of the trail within a 12-month period — not necessarily a calendar year, but within 12 months of whenever you started.
I sat down and talked to him for a little while and then continued on to the entrance to Bobblets Gap Shelter. It's a 0.2 mile side trail off the AT down to the shelter, but I had to do it, because it was the only water source for a while. While I was down there filling up my water bottles, I checked to see whether there was any tent space. There wasn't, but I met a guy who was laying down in the shelter. He was dressed kind of like a guru — long gray beard, loose sarong, large bamboo pole. I talked to him for a little bit, and he told me that he's been trying to get to a point in his hiking where he can hike exclusively at night with no illumination provided. That's what the bamboo pole is for — so he can feel his way around the trail. He was an interesting guy. He said he wasn't ready to leave for the night yet, so he was just resting up.
I gathered up my stuff, drank some water, and headed back to the trail to find a place to set up camp for the night. And as I was hiking out, I noticed that the wind was starting to pick up significantly, and I could actually feel the barometric pressure dropping. So I checked the satellite weather, and there was a rather large front coming in. At that exact moment, my phone just started blowing up with all sorts of notifications about the storm that was approaching. There was a notice on my phone that said I needed to get inside the nearest building right away and go to the room that was at the lowest point and closest to the center. And I’m thinking, Or I could get into a tent almost two thousand feet up a mountain! I was a little bit nervous, actually. So I quickly set up my tent and had just enough time to cook some dinner and snarf it down before the bad weather really moved in.
I’m hoping all the trees around me stay upright. Unfortunately, I think my patch job might be failing a bit in some areas. My tent seems to be dripping a little. That probably means either (A) I’ll need to revisit some of my patches, or (B) I’ll have to face the music and replace my tent. I’m guessing that as the weather warms up and the summer presses on, we're going to have some severe thunderstorms, and I'd prefer not to have a tent that drips.
The other complicating factor is that I still haven't patched all my bug netting, either, and it seems like with the severe weather, a lot of bugs have decided to seek refuge in the tent with me. I’m riding out the storm with some bug friends in here. Anyway, it’s supposed to rain all night, so we’ll see if my friends and I can get some sleep.
