Today was much warmer than yesterday but not uncomfortably hot. I was up by 6 but must have been very inefficient because I hit the trail at 8. Around 11:15 I was at the third wayside, where I didn’t order anything. Instead I sat on the outdoor patio and charged my battery pack while I ate an early lunch consisting of eight hamburger buns, four ounces / 112g of cheese (sliced onto six of the buns, with mayonnaise from the last wayside), two tbsp / 30 ml of peanut butter (spread on the last two buns) and half a bar of 90% cocoa chocolate.
I’m looking forward to moving on from Shenandoah National Park. The trail is relatively easy and there are nice views but it doesn’t feel at all like wilderness when you’re almost always within a few hundred meters of the Skyline. Since it was a weekend there was a lot of car noise (and less, but worse, motorcycle noise) and you have to cross one paved road or another every half hour or so.
In the afternoon I met Bear Bait, who is doing a section hike. He got his name from an episode on the Pacific Crest Trail where a black bear grabbed and ran off with his backpack. Another hiker chased the bear and retrieved the backpack. Bear Bait showed me the tears in the mesh picket on the backpack from the bear’s claws.
It rained a bit from 4 to 5, and a lot of day hikers were rushing down from lookouts as the rain took hold. I just put on my rain gear and walked cheerfully along. I got to the shelter around 6 mostly dry other than damp shoes from the wet grass leaning in from the sides of the trail. You can be very careful and navigate around a mile of it, and then ten feet of it that you can’t avoid can give you soakers.
There was a nice fire burning at the shelter when I arrived. Josef and Slingshot were there along with someone named Uncle Science (taught math and science, and his niece called him that because she couldn’t remember his actual name) and two section hikers. The shelter is pretty full, including at least two people on the upper level, even though the only way to get up or down involves being at one end of the upper level. That means one of the two will have to climb over the other. But the upper level hikers are young so don’t have to get up four times a night to pee.
After we’d all eaten, a group of young women walked past the shelter towards some tentsites down the hill, then Bear Bait stopped here briefly and showed off his scarred pack. It’s interesting how at some shelters tge tents are so far from the shelter and so there’s almost no socializing between shelter dwellers and tenters. One of the two Capps (the husband) came up from the tent area and recognized me. He had dropped his wife off in Roanoke, then took the Floridian to Harper’s Ferry and is section hiking south for as long as he can.
Mile 927.4 to mile 946.5 = 19.1 miles
