Date: 2017-09-24
From: Sinking Creek camsite

To: Bailey Gap shelter
Miles today: 18.0
Weather: scattered clouds

Sobos are people too! While the nobocentric nature of the trail is understandable, with about five times as many being GAME (going Georgia to Maine) rather than MEGA (Maine to Georgia), there are times when this gets too much.Today was such a day.A brand new hut register had been left at Laurel Creek shelter, which we reached early into today's hike, and the first page listed the mileage, elevation and the next shelter. The first and the third of these were for nobos, so we quickly added "Nobo" between "next" and "shelter" then added an extra line noting that the next sobo equivalent was War Spur shelter at (sobo) mile 1522.4.It's a start -- sometimes you have to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.This event was a small diversion from what for more than half of us had been a restless night because of the sub-standard campsite. Dirt had offered me one of the last sites in the main camp when we'd arrived together the previous evening but I demurred, preferring to be further away at a flatter spot right on the side trail. Based on the way her tent had slid down the slope from that site until it was literally wrapped around the tree beside which she'd camped, my option seemed remarkably prescient, even if it was primarily motivated by ensuring the others were outside the aural envelope of my snoring.As we headed on through a mix of farm fields and short stretches of woods, we headed back up to the latest ridgeline after a short stop to adjust the nobocentricism of the Laurel Creek shelter register.The 1000ft climb out of the shelter was steep and surprisingly overgrown, unlike most of the well-maintained sections of trail we'd been on, but at least 2am and Dirt were ahead, taking on the spider-eating duties for the rest of us.I managed to do my share of arachnid ingestion later on when I unwittingly continued on when the others all took a side trail to a lookout. I remember thinking how quickly the spiders had rebuilt their webs and then, just before getting to War Spur shelter, encountered a truly enormous black rat snake sunning itself on the trail and wondered why it'd come back to the trail so quickly after presumably being disturbed by Dirt and 2am going by.The more obvious conclusion -- that I was the first to come through -- only sunk in when I arrived at the shelter to find it empty.Cauldron, a sobo ahead of us, was still amusing us with his register entries: "The War Spur shelter was built as a memorial to the Nobo-Sobo war of '61. The war of nobo aggression is what sobos call it. Sobos were simply stating that they had done the hardest part of the trail first, while nobos were claiming all trails were created equally. Peace was finally reached when both sides agreed the real problem was 'can't make up their mind which direction' flip-floppers."PS: I'm so sure Blood Mountain is as hard as the Bigelows."There was one more big hill to come and then a long traverse along the ridgeline to the shelter that was our intended destination.Another aspect of the trail's nobocentricism was that the water assessments by the guides -- AWOL and the Guthook app -- tended to be geared around typical conditions when nobos came through this way in Spring, a much wetter time of year than the fall.It left us guessing which ones would be reliable for us, and having to be conservative by carrying spare litres as a Plan B. This hill showed just how difficult that process was, thanks to the complex and hidden hydrological factors of the Appalachians. Part of the way up the big climb from the shelter, we crossed a source described as reliable but which was bone dry.But then the next source, described as unreliable and located much higher and next to the summit, was flowing gently into a pool. There must be some kind of aquifer at work, I thought to myself as I made a mental note to alert the other sobos about this via our water-report message group.I'd been hiking with Simpleton on this section but he was not feeling enthused, having accidentally missed a trail turning as the AT crossed fields early on today and ended up walking a bonus half mile before realising his mistake and having to do another bonus half mile back again. So when he saw a sign showing a trail to VA Route 613 that was 1.5 miles, compared to 2.5 miles on the AT, he opted to take it as a shortcut. "It goes to the road," I remember saying, "but it might not be at same place as the AT." But it wasn't marked at all on Guthook, so I didn't really know.About an hour later, I reached the VA Route 613 and found a map on a sign that showed the two routes -- and that the shortcut Simpleton had taken did indeed take him to VA Route 613 but at a place two miles road walk from here, giving him three bonus miles for the day.From there, we had a few miles along the ridgeline to the shelter but instead of being good trail on the crest of the ridge, as the AT has tended to do for the past few weeks, it stayed off on one side. Maybe there was a public access issue that explained this but the trail undulated along the side of the ridge, often becoming as rocky as anything in Pennsylvania, before finally levelling off a little just before the shelter.A few section hikers were already in situ and we attended to the chores of getting water from the spring down the hill. I'd hoped to fill up at one of the reported springs on section of trail since VA Route 613 but none were flowing. In truth the descent and reascent was not too bad, and the way the water flowed directly from a pile of talus meant I didn't bother treating it.Soon we had the circle of culinary friendship going, with the usual telling of tall tales and the last bit of the whiskey we'd been carrying since Roanoke.Life is good.AT fact of the day: We'd camped last night with a flip-flopper called Idaho Bones, with whom we'd been crossing paths since McAfee Knob. He was an unusual and interesting character and one of the reasons why he said he like to hike with us was because our presence might break his habit of not leaving camp before midday. He was still packing up when we left and we haven't seen him since...