Date: 2004-06-22
From: Pine Grove Shelter

To: Alec Kennedy Shelter
Miles today: 15.5
Weather: light rain

Hobbes generously made pancakes for all four who stayed at the hostel last night. They were enormous and filling, two were all I could eat.On the way out of the park I stopped at the phone by the lake and found Gaiter Woman there. I had thought her well ahead of me but she got sick. She was having a friend come pick her up so she can rest and get well. Hobbes arrived and the three of us chatted a bit. She asked if we have news of Slowpoke, who had gotten lost in the Nantahala wilderness. He had gotten hurt north of Erwin and Gaiter Woman had helped get him to the hospital and has not heard news of him since.It started raining a bit as Hobbes and I headed up the Trail. He is a physician's assistant from Iowa. When we got to the halfway Post we paused to take each other's picture. It has not been the real halfway point for several years because of route changes but the tradition endures anyway.I stopped at the Green Mountain General Store for lunch, buying a sub and orange juice, plus a can of chili as a treat for tonight.I keep saying the Trail is full of surprises. Today's surprise awaited me atop aptly named Rocky Ridge. It looked harmless enough on the map. But at the summit there seem to be all the reject statues from Easter Island, or a castle crudely built by orcs. My feet were sore, but I still enjoyed following the white blazes as they led up, over, around and through the huge fantastically shaped masses of stone. Then they led into a rock alleyway ending in a vertical face reaching up as high as my chin. I couldn't manage to climb that high onto the shelf.Weeeeee!!! Trail Riddles! I studied the problem, then backed up and started climbing the moist slippery moss-covered rock forming the left wall of the alley, intending to bypass the shelf. But only a narrow tongue led there, in between the drop into the alley and an alarmingly deep chasm between two massive stones. I backed up and tried again. The other side had an inviting stair-shaped crack up to a ledge that led to the shelf. But the ledge was on an overhanging rock face, I would probably fall right off. Finally I took off my pack, hefted it up to the shelf, then scrambled up using what I could remember of rock climbing chimneying techniques I'd read of. The stoney labyrinth went on for hundreds of yards. Later Hobbes told me he had felt like a mouse in a laboratory maze. Finally it relented into foot-friendly leaf-mold covered smooth trail.Not long after the sky darkened so much it was hard to make out the blazes in the forest gloom. The wind started gusting and thunder rumbled ominously. Not wanting to get caught high up in the rocks in a thundertorm, I started down the path as fast as I could go. The first dark cloud pased and an eerie light came through the trees. It began raining hard, but all I cared about was making it to the shelter or at least off the high ground before getting overtaken by lightning or tree-downing winds. It MIGHT not get that bad, but the severe storm at Harpers Ferry was too fresh in my mind for me to feel complacent. A fresh rumbling of thunder behind me emphasized the need to hurry.It is funny how adrenaline works. Not long before, I had been thinking how sore my feet felt and whether I should take a rest day soon. Now I was trotting down the trail like an antelope, the pain in my feet forgotten.As if to mock me, just after I reached the shelter, the sun came out.