Both Tinker and I woke at 5 to beat the rain. Somehow Tinker left 15 minutes before me. I think it’s a combination of many people not eating anything until they’ve done some walking, and maybe keeping his food in his tent, which, considering the reports of bears parking themselves outside occupied shelters all night or tearing improperly hung food bags to shreds, is a surprisingly common practice.
In any event we beat the rain by several hours. It rained on and off from about 11 to dusk, with occasional heavy periods of a minute or two, but overall not at all bad.
The trail covered pastures and meadows, edges of rivers, and at the end of the day a long section along the top of a ridge, including some pretty technical stuff on exposed rock, which was made more complicated by the rain making the rocks wet and somewhat slippery.
At lunch I stopped at a shelter to eat without getting rained on, and ran into Chrissy (now “Two Esses”) whom I’d met at the first hostel at Mountain Crossing / Neal’s Gap. She told me she got hammered by the cold and at one point was walking through 18 inches of snow. The younger woman she was hiking with, whom I also met at the hostel, gave up her hike and went home. Two Esses was traveling now with Lone Star, a 60 or 70 year old man from Texas.
I headed on after lunch but the two of them soon passed me as I stopped to get water at a stream. I didn’t catch up to them. My pace was quite a bit slower today because of the tendinitis in my left shin from yesterday. I feel like it’s slightly better than yesterday and noticed that if I try to land my left heel on something slightly higher than what the toe lands on, it stretches the tendon and makes it feel better. But it probably slowed me down by 20%.
I’d planned today to be a long day. Given the injury it was really too long. I didn’t get to camp until 7:30 p.m. after hitting the trail at 6:30 a.m.. Two Esses and Lone Star were at the shelter and we talked briefly before they returned to their tents. The shelter was packed to the gills with younger people. I managed to cook dinner, get my food in a tree, set up camp and get water within 30 minutes but by the time I was ready to eat it was twilight and the folks in the shelter (in front of which I was sitting at the picnic table) were all in their sleeping bags either reading on their phones or asleep.
When I took off my shoes and socks in my tent just now, I discovered the skin on the underside of my toes is white and puffy. I’m hoping it’s just from having had wet feet all day and not something worse like blisters that will make walking even harder tomorrow. Hopefully they will dry out overnight.
Several whippoorwills have been singing madly for the last hour and flying around so their songs keep coming from different places. Now I think I hear an owl too. Which reminds me, last night we heard a pack of coyotes howling for a minute or two.
I’m going to check my planned mileage for Thursday and Friday and see if there’s room to cut back tomorrow. I need to give my leg some relief rather than aggravate it.
That’s definitely an owl. The whippoorwills are quiet.
Mile 666.0 to mile 688.6 = 22.6 miles
One of the pastures the trail passed through
A massive oak, probably 300 years old. About 2.3 m in diameter
A ridge south of the one I hikedcon much of the afternoon
Another great view
I remembered something interesting from our 2019 McCafee Knob hike. We met a woman named Cherokee Rose. She told us that we should visit Cascade Falls if we had the chance. I didn’t know at the time that her name was a trail name. I only learned about trail names through your posts.