Date: 2017-09-22
From: Catawba

To: Trout Creek
Miles today: 9.5

As soon as Dirt casually announced that Roanoke had a farmers market, we knew the day was going to involve a leisurely start. We were more than OK with this. For a start, I'm always an enthusiastic supporter of indolence and we knew it'd also give Dirt and her grandfather time to catch up by heading to the market on their own.And from the reports of the trail ahead, it seemed like we were going to more than make up for an early slothfulness by climbing to the Dragon's Tooth in the afternoon.Our first mission this morning was to make an appropriately stodgy and cholesterol-laden breakfast of the kind the US does so well, after which the rest of us sat around in various depths of cholesterol coma. Once Dirt returned and then we were driven back to the road crossing around 12.30pm, such were our raging metabolisms that we immediately stopped for lunch. Team KRT is definitely an army that marches on its stomach.We were eased into the day's endeavours by a short wander through farmland and then along a gently graded old road through a forest beside a gently burbling stream, which eventually led us to the road where Four Pines hostel was a short distance one way and the Home Place a few miles the other. Then, suitably warmed up, the real work began. At first it was just steep trail but then it started going through a series of short sections of steep but easy rock of a kind I hadn't seen since New England. Just as these were beginning to get a little tiresome, we reached the top of the ridge and hiked the side trail to Dragon's Tooth, an isolated crag made up of the same tilted rock strata we'd just ascended.Simpleton and Jameson were there, having not been able to come back to the house the previous night because of Stacie's cats. They'd stayed in a hotel then hiked on to here today to wait for us and although he was too polite to say anything, it was clear he'd been waiting there for a while. After the others scaled the tooth, we kicked on along the undulating and rocky ridge that curved in a long U-shape. There was a shelter at the far end of this but it was half a mile off trail and the water was reportedly iffy, so we opted to continue instead to Trout Stream in the hope of finding campsites there. This confidence was rewarded when we found a great campsite just far enough off a small gravel road to be secure. Dirt had been hankering for a campfire so we made one nearby. If I'd been on my own, I'd probably have gone straight to bed and cooked from my sleeping bag but it was nice to have a convivial evening around the fire instead. Whiskey had been carried from Roanoke and the fireside tales were augmented by whiskey and peach drink mix that through a combination of imagination and wishful thinking, decided was the hiker trash equivalent of whiskey sours...Life is good.AT fact of the day: Today we finally met someone I'd been steeling myself to seeing for more than a week: tighty-whitey man. http://www.trailjournals.com/journal/photos/20825/1148959 (That's Scout's photo, on a warmer day. For us, he had thankfully donned a shirt) It turned out his name is Omega and he was sort of thru-hiking, although it was tough to get much information out of him because his manner made Eeyore sound delusionally happy. A few minutes earlier, he'd encountered Sweetblood, a preternaturally happy person who tried to break through his funk by saying something about how even if he was having a bad day, he was still alive and out here so had reason to celebrate. "It's better than being dead," she quipped. "I suppose so," he said, clearly unsure! For me, he was asking about getting to the Home Place and I told him how long it'd taken us to climb up from the road. He was trying to get to the Home Place before it shut at 7pm but I heard days later he didn't manage to do the couple of miles to the road until 9pm...