Date: 2017-05-11
From: Thomas Knob Shelter

To: Hurricane Mt Shelter
Miles today: 16.1
Weather: overcast clouds

We woke up to swirling mists outside the door of the shelter. Just as we headed out the ponies returned to say good morning (and probably try to steal some breakfast).For the first couple miles we hiked through the fog, which was being blown around by the high winds. The trail was rocky and led through the barren looking landscape of the highlands, the grasslands dotted with only a few small bushes and rocky outcrops. We passed through the Fat Man's Squeeze (a short rock tunnel) that required a bit of maneuvering to navigate and continued to hike through the clouds.We started to descend, passing through the bottom of the clouds as Grayson Highlands State Park came into view. We entered the park, spotting another herd of wild ponies grazing in the distance. Just a little way into the park we hit another landmark, 500mi! Makin progress!I climbed up a rocky outcrop to take in the sights and was almost blown off of it by the high winds. The ridge we were hiking on was surrounded by a bowl, Mount Rodgers and the highlands we had just traversed behind, a wooded valley below and surrounded by more highland peaks in the distance.We descended into the forest and came upon the shelter, where I had elevensies and the others, including Jewels and ShortStep, had a snack. A slackpacker rolled up to the shelter and said "I'm grateful". We waited expectantly for him to finish his statement, but after a few moments he asked us to tell him our names in return... he has a confusing trail name. We headed out again and ended up taking a wrong turn (or rather, not taking a turn) and hiking on. Navigating the AT is pretty easy, white blazes mark the trail, but it's been traveled by so many people by this time in the year that the trail is blatantly obvious. The only spot you sometimes have to watch out for is intersections with other trails, but other than that I pretty much run on autopilot. I was in the lead at this point, and  after a few minutes my subconscious raised the alarm and I realized we hadn't seen a blaze in a couple minutes. We didn't see any back blazes either, so we turned back until we found the last blaze we had passed. We had followed a well defined forest road and missed a tiny turnoff into a rhotodendron thicket where we should've gone. The trail club which maintains this section only uses double blazes (which indicates the trail is about to do something squirrelly, but not what) instead of knock over blazes (a double blaze tilted to indicate what direction the trail goes), which would've been helpful here. Anyways, no big deal, the whole misadventure only cost about 10min and we were back on trail. We walked along a ridge and had a great view of Rogers and the highlands in the, now beautiful, weather. We hiked down into The Scales, an area where farmers used to weigh the caddle the grazed the highlands, and found TRAIL MAGIC from two guys who lived in the area and were giving hikers water (on a normally dry section of trail).Not too long after we left Grayson Highlands State Park (which is actually only 3mi of trail) and started descending back down into the lowlands. We walked across and underground river that we could hear gurgling underneath the rocks and moss and then cruised for the rest of the afternoon. We reached Hurricane Mt shelter at about 4pm and had dinner and were finishing the Fellowship of the Ring when a couple more  people rolled in. Tattoo caught us again, and by the end of the evening we ended up with a full shelter, since rain is expected tonight.Though the rain had already started, the sun still colored the western sky as it set and lights appeared throughout the valley, probably surrounding I-81 which is to our Northwest.