Date: 2008-04-21
From: Brown Mountain Creek Shelter VA 

To: Sky Rock Campsite VA
Miles today: 18.6

Day 64 ¢ Monday April 21 ¢ Sky Rock Campsite VA ¢ Miles Today: 18.6 Total Miles: 812.0We started early again. Little did Brakeman know that Grasshopper reset the alarm clock for the last 2 mornings for 5:20 a.m. so that we could get an earlier start and therefore arrive to camp earlier.   He now knows and says that this is the way things happen around here. Despite the earlier alarm, it took us quite a bit of time to get going. It rained most of the evening and I believe most of the night. We packed everything we could inside the comforts of the dry tent, sat there for a while in our full rain gear enjoying our last moments of dryness and then headed out in the rain again. It was just 44 degrees.Actually, it just sprinkled for a little bit as we headed out. We continued to walk along the river. There was another informative sign today informing us that this riverbed area used to be where freed slaves lived. They were sharecroppers. If they owned their team, they only had to pay 1/4 of their corn crop to the landowners. If they did not own their team, they had to pay 1/2 of their crop to the landowners. If they wanted their corn ground, they had to pay 1/8 of their crop.   Mighty expensive payments in order for these freed slaves just to survive! A sign that we passed yesterday talked about a man remembering the ashcakes that his mom used to make on the hearth. She would brush the ashes off the ashcakes with her broom made out of corn. He recalls them being the sweetest things he had ever tasted. Not sure what flavor they were. Hopefully they did not have too much ash flavor given their name of ashcakes!Once we finished walking along the riverbed, we started our big ascent of 2600'. Luckily it was not raining at that point in time so we removed the rain gear and enjoyed our morning hike up the steep mountain without sweating. However, by the time we got to the top of the mountain, it was quite windy, quite foggy and it had started to rain. We lived in our rain gear for the rest of the day. Due to the fog and rain, we had no views today. The only picture we took today was at Hog Camp Gap where we found a couple swings hanging from a big old tree. We took turns swinging on the swings with our backpacks on and in the mist. But other than that, we had a pretty uneventful day. We were going to cook mashed potatoes for breakfast at Cow Camp Gap Shelter and restock on water, but our guidebook didn't tell us it was a half-mile off the trail. Obviously we did not detour to the shelter just for breakfast and water! We¢ll just eat them for lunch instead. Our meals are getting all rearranged due to the rainy weather! We ate the lunch allocated to today, yesterday, because of all the rainy weather, so today when we ducked into Seeley-Woodworth Shelter at 2:00 to cook up our lunch and dinner we had 2 envelopes of mashed potatoes. We almost had no mashed potatoes as Brakeman knocked over the stove while cooking. We lost just a little bit of food and fuel as it spilled onto the shelter floor and started a fire!   Luckily we were able to put the fire out immediately. It got our heart racing, though! At the shelter were 4 ladies who were very ill prepared for the trip. One was already complaining about being extremely cold, dangerously cold she said as she hopped into her sleeping bag, which had no fluff to it. Another member of the party suggested she put on some more clothes, to which she remarked that she had on all of her clothes! It looked like she had a single layer of pants and top! Not a good sign.   Another lady sitting there had no rain gear and no gloves. Not quite sure how these middle-aged ladies are going to make it. Very foolish and a potentially dangerous situation. After eating, we headed up the trail and ran into a south-bounder, who is a former PCT and AT thru-hiker! His trail name is Jackalope, not to be confused with female Jackalope on TrailJournals.com whose journals we¢ve read. He knows the female Jackalope and told us a story of almost getting beat up by her boyfriend over a misunderstanding. Not sure if we really want to know all the details of the 2 Jackalopes affairs! But I digress. He told us that he was headed to the Seeley-Woodworth Shelter to cook dinner. We mentioned the 4 frightfully unprepared ladies who stopped there for the night. He had already heard about them!   He promptly decided to bypass the shelter so as to not get involved with the ladies issues. News travels quite quickly on the trail and everyone is having the same impression about how ill prepared they were. We talked about the rainy weather with Jackalope. He recalls having just 3 days of rain on the entire 2650 mile PCT trail!   Gosh, wish we were there instead of the AT!! But then of course, he did mention that the PCT has more snow. OK, we¢ll just stay on the AT for now.It never got warm today. When we woke this morning, it was 44 degrees. It stayed in the 40s a good part of today, with the top reading of about 50 degrees. It was quite cold with a damp wind. Camp tonight is Spy Rock at mile marker 812 ¢ Woo Hoo ¢ just realized we passed over 800 miles today!Spy Rock is just a camping area with no shelter and no water source. A hard rain arrived 30 seconds after we set up our tent. We made a quick dive in our tent, dried off our gear, dried off the inside of the tent (it was packed wet) and then finally dove into our sleeping bags. Once we were warm and dry, it was time to think about dinner.   We did not have a chance to hang our food bag due to the rain, so we had it with us, for now, in the tent.   Knowing that we had already eaten our dinner earlier in the day, we dug into the food bag to see what else we could find. We struck gold!   Oreos!   We were supposed to have some after each dinner this week, but we had forgotten about them! Brakeman then dug even deeper into the food bag and found cashews and peanut M&Ms gorp from the Trail Angel in the red pickup truck. WOW!   Cashews are Brakeman's favorite nut so he really enjoyed them. We ate half of the gorp, saving the rest for tomorrow, which is another long day. And to top off our nutritious meal this evening, we had a Chewy Granola bar and half a Snickers bar each. So our evening meal consisted of a half of a Snickers bar, one Chewy Granola bar, a little bit of cashews and M&Ms gorp, and 4 double stuffed Oreos each. Life can't get better than this. It¢s 6:30 and still about 50 degrees. Don't think there is anything else to report. We couldn't see anything today because of the fog and the rain. We were pretty much heads down for a good bit of the day. The weather report, which we are hearing from the other hikers, is for 48 hours of rain so we are anticipating another day like this tomorrow. It really wasn't a horrible hiking day. There were some dry spells, there were some light rain spells and there wasn't anything terribly heavy although we did walk in wet socks all day long. Goodnight from Spy Rock.