Date: 2017-10-23
From: Little Laurel shelter

To: Little Laurel shelter
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Throughout the day, a series of cold and sodden hikers dropped in to the shelter, looked wistfully at us sitting around dry and comfortable in our sleeping bags and then headed back out into the maelstrom before the lack of exertion meant they cooled down so much they started shivering.The first of these were Boss, Sweets and Bangles, followed later by Morocco Mole and then Halfway, the latter of whom announced we were "the only sensible people I've met all day". All of them were heading to a hostel about three trail miles ahead.Just how bad was the weather? Heavy rain combined with gale-force winds to make life truly miserable for those outside -- it was one of those days when it's utterly impossible to stay dry, no matter what one's gear. We had a hint of this when the occasional gust sent rain all the way in to the point where it hit the back wall of the shelter, which would have to be 13ft/4m under the eave of the shelter. Seriously, it was that bad. Just to stay dry, I had to get out my bivy bag and put my sleeping bag inside that. The others brought out their tent flies and sheltered under those.But notwithstanding the occasional blast of rain hitting the back wall, we were pretty chipper. It helped, of course, that we had plenty of examples from the other sobos of what it'd be like to be out there with them in the storm. I've always been a fan of on-trail zeros and have proselytised them to everyone who was prepared to listen -- and probably quite a few who weren't.On the PCT, Three Gallon and I had festered at Thousand Island Lake in the Sierra, thanks to still feeling knackered from crossing from Kennedy Meadows to VVR in one epic-12 day stretch in a very big snow year and because, as part of being traumatised by weight loss from that section, we'd unwittingly headed out from Mammoth Lakes with four days of food for the nominally two-day stretch to Tuolumne. On the CDT, we'd added an extra day of food to our packs for our seven-day crossing of the Wind River Range in Wyoming so we could fester at Cirque of the Towers. Admittedly this was a bit of a bunk since our arrival coincided with a blast of cold wintery air that sent us huddling into our sleeping bags instead of using the spare time to explore the cirque and swim in the alpine lakes.But the key factor compared to doing a zero day in town is that there was NOTHING to do, even if we wanted to. In town, we'd have gone to a series of restaurants, done our laundry, resupplied for the next leg and utilised WiFi to catch up with communications with the outside world.An on-trail zero here avoided all that, except that being the AT, we had five bars of mobile phone coverage so we spent the time catching up with episodes of The New Girl, streamed on someone's smartphone, as well as less tech-dependent diversions such as a convoluted drinking game based on the whiskey I'd carried from Erwin.The rain eased off and was replaced with blue skies by 3pm, at which point Sriracha, Sweetblood and Dirt -- succumbing to a sense of cabin fever -- opted to hike on. Happy Feet, OK and I opted to stay, which is how I ended up being introduced to the anarchic, left-field and downright weird fun that is Rick and Morty, a cartoon series that truly defied description. The rain returned later on but we were still warm and comfortable in the shelter and very happy with our decision.Life is good.AT fact of the day: As if we didn't need validation for our shelter zero, Morocco Mule provided it when he explained how his phone, wrapped in a plastic bag inside a dry bag, had got soaked during his hike from Jerry's Cabin to our shelter. The weather really was that bad.