There’s Your Problem
So it’s Thursday evening, 7:30, and I'm at Mountain Crossings at Neel Gap, which is sort of a major milestone for a lot of people. It marks the first 40 miles they’ve hiked, if you include the approach trail.
Today wasn’t a crazy day. I woke up early to try to get to Mountain Crossings on the early side, so I could spend the afternoon having a pizza on the back deck (which I ended up doing). I wanted to go ahead and leave, but it was still dark, so I got everything ready in my tent and just sort of lay there quietly and comfortably there until it was light enough to get up and hit the trail.
One thing I'd been nervous about was hiking up Blood Mountain, because everyone says it's so treacherous and steep and whatnot. And it really wasn't that bad! So maybe it's all just sort of expectation versus reality. You can't psych yourself out on these trips, or else you're going to be in big trouble. I'm getting better about that. It's just like, it's neither up nor down — it just is. So I had a pretty good day. Much faster than I expected.
When I came off the mountain over to Mountain Crossings, I walked up onto the porch and saw this guy with a long, white beard who looked like he’d been in the mountains for years. He says, “Hey, do you need help with your pack?”
And I say, “No, no. I think I'm fine.”
He goes, “No, no. Do you need help with your pack?”
And I’m like, “No, I think I'm fine.”
And then he's like, “I need to help you with your pack.” And he basically accosts me. He’s pulling on straps and telling me to unhook things and yanking on the frame of my backpack, changing its shape and making it wider and narrower.
At one point, he says, “This pack is all wrong for you! Whoever sold you this pack did you a disservice. They don’t know what they’re doing. Who sold you this?”
I say, “I bought it online. I picked it out myself.”
He goes, “Well, there’s your problem.”
Eventually, after a lot of struggles and yanking and him yelling at me for having the wrong size pack, the dust clears, and he asks me, “How’s that feel?”
I do a little shimmy. “It actually feels great!” It really did feel way better, so I'm very thankful to him for his enthusiastic (if aggressive) adjustments.
I tried to book a spot in a cabin that’s about a quarter mile from Mountain Crossings, but they were all sold out, so I decided to stay in the bunk house here. It's just a single room with five bunk beds, so ten beds. It’s half full tonight, which is fine, and they’re all nice guys. Tomorrow, it's supposed to rain, and it's going to be a long day, but at least I’ll have slept in a real bed tonight.
When you're walking through the woods, you’re just hearing the trees swaying in the breeze and the birds and all that stuff. And I’m not listening to music, but random songs keep popping into my head. Today was a song from the old claymation TV show “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” that goes, “Put one foot in front of the other,” which isn’t surprising, given what I was doing. But there are some other, stranger songs, like the “Cuckoo Yodel.” [Wife note: This is one of our favorites from Oktoberfest.]
And then, as I was climbing up Blood Mountain, Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop” was in my head. You know, “Packing my bags for the bloody mountain.” So it's sort of strange.
On the way down Blood Mountain, I bumped into a couple of hikers who thought they’d lost their way. So I almost got a trail name, because I was able to see a white blaze where they didn't, and they wanted to call me Vision, which is pretty funny, because I can literally be looking straight at something and still not see it. [Wife note: Can confirm.] So I had to dissuade them from pursuing that name for me unless it was going to be ironic.
