Tested

All right. Today is Saturday, June 22, and it’s about 7:30 p.m. I’m at the Days Inn in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, which is just on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Today, I woke up at the Pogo Memorial campsite. I'm not sure who Pogo is.

[Wife note: “The Pogo Campsite is named for Walter ‘Pogo’ Rheinheimer, who was an avid hiker and young outdoors-man, as well as the son of an avid outdoors-man. Pogo, as he was known, had hiked much of the Appalachian Trail at the time of his death, who went boating on the Potomac near Harper's Ferry with a friend and drowned when he was 16 years old.”]

The Pogo campsite is a collection of tent sites that are scattered around a wooded hillside on what is apparently the hardest surface known to man. When I was trying to set up my tent last night, I could only get a couple of stakes in, so I had to use rocks to hold parts of my tent down instead. The tent platforms, or the tent areas, are also super rocky and not very level. Add to that the high temperatures and very limited space, and it just wasn't a great night. But I dealt with it. I slept on top of my sleeping pad, no blanket or sleeping bag or anything like that, because it was just too darn hot.

I ended up waking up at around 5:30. I got my stuff together and immediately started sweating, which is always a good time and a sign that the day’s going to be a lot of fun. I hit the trail probably by about 6:40. I wanted to start getting some miles under me before the day got much warmer.

Just a quick aside here. There’s a thing on the AT called the “four state challenge,” where hikers try to hit Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania within a 24-hour period. So, usually, they’ll start out in Virginia — or right at the Virginia/West Virginia state line — hike through West Virginia, which is only a couple of miles, hike through all of Maryland, which I think is about 38 miles, and then step foot in Pennsylvania. So, within 24 hours, they’ll cover about 45 miles, give or take, and touch four different states.

I’ve always thought the four-state challenge was reasonably feasible — not necessarily for people like me, but feasible in a general sense, because Maryland makes up most of it, and it’s a reasonably easy state to hike. I can now say with absolute confidence and honesty, though, that Maryland is not easy. Or at least, it’s not been easy for me. And maybe it's a function of the weather or my expectations or whatnot, but it's been pretty hilly. And not just that — it’s very rocky in Maryland.

So my hat's off to any hikers who are completing the four-state challenge, because not only are they dealing with a lot of miles to cover in 24 hours, but they're also dealing with a lot of climbs and a lot of rocks, which tend to slow your hiking down considerably. So good for them. Obviously, I’m not part of that crowd.

When I left camp this morning, I was already sweating, and my right foot was bothering me a little bit. I think it might be some mild plantar fasciitis. I seem to have all the symptoms of it. But once my foot gets stretched out, after I’ve been hiking a while, it seems to go away. Except when I'm hiking over a lot of rocks, that is, which happened to be the case this morning.

The hiking was pretty terrible for the first four or five miles. It just was really slowgoing for me because of the rocks and the high humidity and the temperature. I saw Sings with the Pines on the trail again, and we kept leapfrogging each other the entire day. At about mile 7, I got a chance to stop and refill my water. It was midmorning, and I think I’d already taken down a good three liters of water, which is a pretty hefty amount.

After that, the trail crossed the highway, and I started making my way up Raven Rocks. I’ll send S. a picture I captured from the Far Out app that shows how steep it is. But, I mean, I just hadn’t been expecting that. As a climb, it wasn't all that long — maybe two-thirds or three-quarters of a mile — but it was straight up. It was probably the steepest climb I’ve seen since early on in Virginia, just over the Tennessee line. And it was particularly challenging, given that the air temperature was 93 degrees with a “real feel” of 99.

At that point, I was more than a bit salty — not just from sweating so much but also with regard to my attitude about hiking. The miles were going very, very slow. And interestingly, on the other side of Raven Rocks, I bumped into Sings with the Pines again, and he remarked that we probably only had about a mile to go to get to Pen Mar Park, which is right on the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

That's an area where hikers tend to spend a little time just taking a break and cooling off and such. There are some campsites not too far from there, too. But anyway, he said that the park was only about a mile away, when in fact, it was still 3.5 miles away. So I think he was sort of joking about how slowly the miles were going. It just wasn’t particularly friendly terrain for doing easy miles.

Eventually, though, I did make it to Pen Mar Park, and I’d completed a little over 14 miles at that point. I was just exhausted. I’d been texting the Zero Day Stay hostel in Pen Mar since the morning, hoping to stay there tonight, but I never got an answer. They say on their site not to call, because the phone service is so bad, so S. had tried emailing them for me. But she hadn’t gotten a response, either. Finally, she checked their Facebook page and saw that they were booked up for two weeks by some corporate group.

At that point, I was just really hot, and my legs didn't want to move any further. So, I was just sitting on a bench in the shade, thinking about finding a tent spot once I could muster the energy to get up again. S. kept encouraging me to go to a hotel in Waynesboro, but I was so tired and beat down that the thought of trying to work out a ride was too much. I saw on Far Out that I could probably get an Uber for $20, but the effort felt overwhelming.

But if any of you know S., you know she doesn’t give up easily, so she booked me a room at the Days Inn and found me the number of a local shuttle driver named Soggy, who said he’d be willing to take me from the park to the hotel. So here I am. In the end, it was good, but I will be very honest and say that, you know, days like today are ones that ultimately push some people off the trail.

It was stupidly hot. It was rocky and slow. My foot was really hurting me. I slept poorly the night before because it’d been so warm. And at times like that, you're just like, You know what? This is not enjoyable at all. It’s easy to look back on it all with a bit of a different mind-set, now that I’m sitting in a nice air conditioned hotel room, but I’ll be completely frank and say that I’m not looking forward to tomorrow. Although the temperature is supposed to be slightly lower, the thunderstorms are supposed to start rolling in, and those aren’t particularly fun, either.

Anyway, I actually ended up getting a ride here from Soggy's mom, because Soggy was on his way to a concert. She was picking up another hiker from the park, too, but I never got his name, because the whole ride in, he was fighting with his phone, trying to get one of the last two rooms that were still available at the Days Inn. Sings with the Pines wanted to get a ride with us into town so he could go to Walmart, but he didn't have any cash on him.

So he kind of wandered off to try to figure something out, but then he never came back. Soggy's mom said she was willing to work with him, and the other hiker and I said we’d pay for his shuttle if he came back, but I guess he ultimately decided not to ride into town with us, because we never saw him again. So, good luck to you, Sings with the Pines. I hope everything worked out in the end.

I cleaned myself up at the hotel, downed a Gatorade and an LMNT with ice in the room, and then had a nice meal at Rough Edges Brewing in Waynesboro — a Boobs and Brains pilsner, brewed by the women who work at the brewery, and the dinner special, which was a fried Mortadella sandwich.

So, in the end, I enjoyed my evening, and the air conditioning is doing its best to fight the weather quite valiantly. It might not be all that cool in here, but it’s undoubtedly way better than what I’d be experiencing out on the trail. Now I’m just hoping that the thunderstorms they’re forecasting for tomorrow don’t show up at any inopportune times. I arranged to have Soggy, or his mom, bring me and the other hiker back to the trail at 7:30 tomorrow morning, after the free breakfast here at the Days Inn. We'll see how that goes.

Definitely a tough day on the trail. I hope I don't encounter too many more like this one in the future.