Date: 2009-04-20
From: Abingdon Gap Shelter

To: Damascus, VA
Miles today: 10.0
Weather: scattered clouds

Virginia, here we are. We're hold up in the small town of Damascus, Virginia, letting the body heal, the mind rest and the stomach have as much pizza and beer as it can hold.The weather continues to be on and off. It'll be several days of sun followed by a week of rain. While the sunny days are often breathtaking, it's the rainy ones that tend to have the greatest effect on you. This is slow, tiny, thick rain. A thunderstorm rolls in, dumps the water and moves on. This stuff lasts days, comes whipping at you from constantly changing angles and makes the world so you can't see any further than twenty feet away from you. Imagine you're eating a bowl of cereal. You finish the flakes and look down into the remaining milk .... This is what it's like to hike in this kind of precipitation. We found a picture book in the hostel that showed various views from the Trail. In it was a gorgeous picture of Little Hump and Hump Mountain. It was magical in appearance: a small brown line of a trail creeping silently up a rich, textured green hillside. Large outcroppings of rocks rose up like monoliths. Trees dotted the scene and the sun shinned happily on the postcard worthy image. I turned to the last page on the book; an empty, white expanse of a page. "This is what it looked like when we came through."But Spring is obviously here. The trees are beginning to bud and small leaves are erupting from the skeletal trees. The vegetation until about a week ago has been a jumble of bare oaks, scattered slashes of birches and pine and many clusters of Rhododendron. One afternoon a lone cherry tree stood in full bloom on the outskirts of a small clearing; a bright point in the general brown of the scene. We're looking forward to a more colorful time of year.We've also hiked our highest mileage to date recently. About a week ago, we set out to do some night hiking. It was a massively full moon, shinning with an intensity you could read a book by. The ground was covered in snow, reflecting the light. It was as if the whole world were a black and white photograph. We hiked on into the night, finally camping around 2:00 am. Total for the day: 22 miles. We thought this would surely be one of our higher days. Well, the next morning we were awakened to the sound of thunder. We rushed to pack up, just finishing as the bottom tore open and the thunderstorms began. What were we to do in such an instance? Why, slack-pack of course. We hiked less than two miles to the nearest road, hitched into town and set up a slack-pack for the next day. (In case you are unaware, a slack-pack is when you leave your pack at a hostel and get shuttled up the trail and then walk, packless, to your pack.) The next day, we hit the trail ... and knocked out 33 miles! Our largest mileage to date.We're also curious if trail magic increases as the weather improves. Trail magic is the name for the random acts of kindness you find along the trail. For example: one warm afternoon we came upon a stream in the wilderness. Sitting in the stream were several cans of Mountain Dew, just waiting for a thirsty hiker to sit and enjoy. When we hitched into Gatlinburg, not only did the people give us candy, coffee, chicken salad and mints, they also slipped us $20 when they dropped us off. There have been random points of Bar-B-Q, candy bars, sodas and all manner of things. We've been given bunches of bananas by store owner and countless rides into town. Some friends even got a spagetthi dinner, wine and a bed for the night with a lovely couple in Elk Park. This we know ... after we're done, we will pay the trail magic forward in the future.Well, we're roughly a quarter of the way through. But the next quarter is all in the state of Virginia. There's lots of talk about the Virginia Blues and how tough the state can be. Also, they say that you can easily knock out 20 miles a day in most of the state. I guess we'll see.Ever onward.Plunger and Mr. Right