Date: 2018-06-20
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

Wed Day 129 6/20I was up early and went up to the Lookout cabin to get the food bags that were hung there. View and Ulysses were sleeping inside. I climbed up the ladder to check out the view before sunrise. It was spectacular again. There was a nice red/orange sunrise developing. Went back told Ibex that the sun rise was going to be spectacular. So we packed up quickly. We took breakfast back up top on the rooftop deck. We got up just in time as the sunrise started to peak out over the mountain range. I got some good photos of the sunrise in action. So we had breakfast watching the sun rise. We got another late start probably around 5:30 a.m. As we were hiking, we passed Joe Kool and Dom stealthing by the trail. After 2 miles we had to stop and hike 1/4 Mile into a shelter to get some water. Normally we wouldn't hike a half a mile in to get water. However we didn't have any water to start the day. As we were hiking into the shelter Charlie Horse was hiking out. Charlie Horse starts even earlier than I do. He had stopped into the shelter for breakfast. He said it wasn't much of a shelter. He was a hundred percent right. It didn't even have a table to sit at. There was a small water source. I drank a liter and a half of water, ate 2 bars and headed back out. Passed Ulysses on the way out of the shelter. He needed to get water as well. Ulysses is such a nice guy, from Eastern New Hampshire. He told us how crowded the trails and shelters get on the weekends. Up here everybody heads into the woods on the weekends. We went through some beautiful total Hemlock Forest, where the only thing on the ground is hemlock needles. It's a very open understudy and you can see quite a distance. We also were surprised by the open fields that we ended up walking through. Maryland and Pennsylvania are known for their open fields. These are some beautiful fields loaded with wildflowers. It was really picturesque.Joe Kool and Domatello had passed us earlier. We came across them a couple times today. Sometimes they hike a little faster but they take a lot of breaks. One of times they passed us was just before a hill. We had some steep furious climbs today. At the top of one of the climbs we passed again. We hiked down to a road crossing and we came across some Trail Magic. So we stopped. Joe Kool & Domatello caught up to us. I've been calling Domatello Ginger for the last month or so. It turns out Dom's mother has been reading my blog. So she asked Domatello if he knew of a Lotus on the trail. I met Domatello back before Harpers Ferry before the halfway point. Dom had hiked in with Joe Kool at 10 p.m. after doing a Dirty 30. So we've been crossing paths the last eight hundred miles. Funny thing is that Dom calls his sister a Ginger. He doesn't think he's a Ginger but he really is. Now here is his sister saying Lotus calls you Ginger on the trail. So we all had a good laugh and a good time. The trail is such an emotional challenge. It's very helpful to have these emotional connections with people. It's something that the author of Appalachian Trials spoke of entirely during his book. There's lots of physical challenges but the bottom line is can you emotionally handle the entire Trail with all of its isolation, physical challenges, and weather challenges. So to see some of the same people for 800 miles is a great support. Everybody is working through their challenges as they are presented.We passed through a beautiful Lodgepole Pine Forest. It seems to stand out cuz I'm not familiar with them being on the East Coast. We also walked along some very high stone walls. Some of them were as high as I am tall. I did get a picture of that. The stonewalls, they were cool.We completed our mileage for the day and came to our last water source. After gathering our water and filtering our water, we are eating and drinking. We are discussing how much further we might hike in looking for a stealth spot. Joe Kool and Dom happened along. We must have crossed pathes 3 or 4 times today. Being so close to water in the morning is nice. If you carry 2 liters of water, that's another 4.4 lbs. At the end of the day that's a whole lot of weight. If you don't center the water in your backpack it throws you all out of whack and you are imbalanced. We ended up just walking up the gully and stealth camping and not going anywhere. It turned out to be a very dark night.