Date: 2016-07-13
From: Pearisburg, VA

To: Rice Field Shelter
Miles today: 10.0
Weather: few clouds

I got up and stuffed everything into my backpack in preparation for heading out. Before I put on my dry hiking shoes I examined my feet. It was amazing how much better they looked and felt with one day off from the trail. Of course they spent a good part of that time soaking in an oil pan filed with water and Epsom salt. I left the pan in the room and checked to make sure that was the only thing I left. Well, I also left two bags of microwave popcorn. I had treated myself to some popcorn and it was only sold as a three-pack, so I left the two I popped bags for housekeeping. Chives might have taken the to eat unpopped popcorn for lunch along with his uncooked Ramen, but neither sounded appetizing to me.I did plan to eat breakfast before hiking back to the trail. I had two choices; Dairy Queen or Hardee's. Somehow, a,though they did have a breakfast menu, Dairy Queen didn't feel like a breakfast spot to me. Maybe I didn't trust myself to order a breakfast that did not include ice cream in some form. So I opted for Hardee's. In Pearisburg, Hardee's is the hangout for retired men. There must have been 16 men eating breakfast, drinking coffee, and catching up on local news. There were no women, and at 62, I was easily the youngest patron in the restaurant by about ten years. The big topic of discussion was the drowning that had taken place at a local waterfall called the Cascades. The volume of water coming over the falls was greatly increased by all of the rain. People often swam in the pool below the falls, but the increased volume of water created a dangerous current that pulled a boy under. The boy's father went down to save him and lost his own life in the process. The son survived. After breakfast I had to hike about a mile down the road to the trailhead. I am not one to asked directions, but sometimes it is easy to overlook where the trail goes into the woods from a road, and a young man was pulling into a small commercial parking lot as I walked past. He got out of his car about 15 feet from where I was walking on the road so I asked if he knew where the AT headed. Roth near here. He pointed to a stop sign about half a block away. "It is directly across the road from that stop sign." I didn't see a trailhead at all, but I walked to the stop sign and went directly across the road. There was a blue bandana tied to a low hanging tree branch. I looked beyond the branch and buried in the tall grass was a small wooden bridge over the ditch. I went over the bridge and sure enough, there was a trail going up the hill. It was in terrible shape and in drastic need of trail maintenance. I never would have even notice the trail if he hadn't pointed it out. The trail was overgrown with tall grass and briars, both wet with morning dew. After about 20 minutes of scratching my way threw, I decided this couldn't be the trail, and I hadn't seen any white blazes, so I decided to turn around and head back to the road. Just when I turned around, I saw a white blaze on a tree near the trail. I guess it was just in bad need of trail maintenance, so I kept going. Then I remembered reading an article about this section of the trail being re routed in 2014 to get more of it off of private land. In fact my trail book from 2014 said the description of the trail in this area and distances might not be accurate because the trail was moving. I knew immediately that I was hiking on the old trail. I turned around and fought my way through the briars back to the road.   I turned right at the road, hiked for another half mile along the road, and there was a clearly marked trail head with a well-maintained trail. That is why I will probably. It ask directions again for a while. It was nice to be back in the woods again, but after going up and over a small hill, the trail came out to a major highway and a bridge over the New River. It did not look like it does in West Virginia where it is fast moving with white water rapids. It was broad and slow and brown. The bridge was a major road with a walking lane marked off on one side. On the far side of the bridge was a large factory spewing smoke and steam into the morning air. I had learned earlier that it was a factory that made cigarette filters. I had no idea that there were factories just for cigarette filters. And it was huge, with a huge parking lot full of cars. After hiking last the factory, the trail went up and over another small hill. Then the trail crossed a very strange looking stream. The water was somewhere between silver and. milky white. There were signs posted saying that it was not potable water. I remembered reading in the trail book that filtering this water would not remove the toxins that were in it. I am glad they put the signs up, but it seemed glaringly obvious that the water was not safe to drink. I also remembered reading in the description of the new section of trail that this stream was coming from a landfill. I was surprised that EPA regulations allowed this kind of pollution from a land fill. I also thought that this stream is flowing somewhere and at some point these toxins are flowing into the New River. After that, other than multiple power line crossings, the trail became more scenic. About mid morning I saw another hiker coming up from behind me, also hiking North. I slowed down so he would catch up, although the truth is he probably would have caught up anyway. His name was Jeremy, he had just started the trail at Bland, VA, and he is a math teacher from Ohio. We hiked together the rest of the day. I asked him if he had a new trail map because mine was from 2014 and this section of the trail was not accurately described in the book. He said his was from 2013 and now he understood why nothing seemed to be fitting the descriptions from the book since he started this morning. So we hiked on together just following the white blazes. Not long after that, we were hiking parallel to a ridge and we saw a descent sized bear up hill from us. He stopped and turned his head to watch us. He didn't run away, which made us boy a bit nervous. I should ha e taken a picture, but I was focusing more on maintaining a steady pace and moving forward. This was my second bear sighting this trip. I had seen one the day before Pearisburg. I had crossed a powering, where the forest is cleared in a straight line going up and down the mountains. Then I came to another line of cleared forest. I decided it must be a gas ,one, because there were no power lines. As I walked into the clearing, a small bear took off down the hill. When I got to the part of the trail where the bear had been, I saw why he had Ben there - black raspberries. I had been seeing a lot of black berries on the trail, which are a nice treat, but these were black raspberries, which are much sweeter and much tastier. The bear had excellent taste in wild fruit, and he had left some for me, so I stopped and had a snack. This time the bear did not. I've on, so we did.Eventually we came to Rice Field Shelter. The caretaker back at Woods Hole Hostel had told me I had to stay at that shelter. It was a shelter with a view, which is fairly unusual for a shelter. The problem was it was only noon. I didn't usually stop for the day at noon, but Jeremy had checked the weather and there was a storm coming soon and it was 12 miles to the next shelter. There was another hiker already eating lunch at the shelter. She was an English teacher from New York City, and, of course, her trail name was Walden. She decided to try to head to the next shelter. Soon after Walden left, Elisa and Kolby showed up. I though they would be much further up the trail, but they also took a day off in Pearisburg. They decided to hike on about another mile and a half to a campsite. About 29 minutes after they left, the rain started and it rained hard. I am sure they didn't have time to get to the campsite and set up their hammocks set up before the rain. I decided to call it a day and spend some time reading my mystery and writing my journal. The shelter was situated at the edge of the forest facing an open file at the top of a mountain so the views were great. In the center of the field was a sign that showed it was the state line between Virginia and West Virginia. That meant, while instill had hundreds of miles to hike in Virginia, tomorrow, for a short time, I would be hiking in a new state on the AT - West Virginia. At dusk a doe and her phone came up the mountain into the clearing from the West Virginia side. They were unaware of our presence, although we were only about 20 yards away. We watched the for quite a while until they wandered over the mountain down the Virginia side. That was our evening entertainment so we crawled into our sleeping bags and went to sleep at about 9:00.