Date: 2004-06-01
From: Partnership Shelter

To: Crawfish Valley Campsite
Miles today: 17.8

In the morning there were tales of how Hummer had sat up in the middle of the night and hit his head hard on a roof beam. That was loud enough but then he had to go on and on about it till everyone upstairs was awake. Some of these folks had not experienced him yet and others had only heard. Now they knew. What a character.Partnership had to be close to its capacity of 16. It was a cool damp morning but I took a shower anyway just because it was there. That¢s not to say that it wasn't needed. To conserve water and propane, the shower is pushbutton operated. That means finding some way to keep the button pushed while lathering and rinsing. It was a bit of a challenge involving elbows and such. Somehow, even with the shower, my departure that morning was ahead of many. Around here the signage on the trail was a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of giving the distance to the next shelter, they indicated the distance to the next little mountain road. These signs were old and some seemed to refer to roads that were no longer in use. They were fun to see anyway even if a bit useless.Conveniently, Chatfield Shelter was 7 miles from Partnership Shelter. Seven miles just felt like a good distance to me. That distance is enough for me to feel justified in taking a lunch break. Three chunks of seven miles each adds up to about 20 miles for the day and that felt good too. Anyway, Chatfield was just across a nice little cascading brook. It sat just above the trail on the left. This was a fine spot for lunch part one.Now it was just another five miles to Atkins, Virginia. Yes, road-head fever was taking over. It was time for another resupply and ice cream. The camera was getting full too. The trail wound its way over hills and through rolling fields. It was in one of these fields that I encountered Turtle Don. He appeared to be considerably older than me. He was just standing in the middle of the trail which was less a trail and more of a single track path through the field here on the side of a hill. Yes, he was just standing gazing out across the valley of fields. There were cows grazing just beyond the railroad tracks and the trucks barreling along Interstate 81 in the distance. We talked for a bit. He said cheerfully and proudly that his name was Turtle Don because he was the slowest thru-hiker on the trail. He was waiting for a train to come by because he wanted to get a picture. Honestly, that sounded a bit crazy to me so I moved on. He said his wife should be waiting for him at the road and was probably wondering where he was. He asked me to let her know he was on his way.One switchback and a couple of hundred feet further on, the trail re-entered the woods. There was a bushy blow-down blocking the trail which begged the trail adopter in me to act. Just after clearing the tree a distant rumbling got my attention. My gosh, it was a train! Making a mad dash back up the trail I called to Turtle Don that a train was coming. I had to laugh at myself for doubting.This was amazing. How long had he waited. He had faith the train would come and here it was. It was picture perfect, though the rumbling had scared the cows off long before the train arrived. The train even had a caboose. OK, so maybe he wasn't crazy. I was just impatient.Before long the trail crossed the tracks and shortly it arrived on route US 11. Across the road was a gas station with a convenience store. Ah yes, a Klondike Bar, just in the nick of time. Now it was time to hitch into town for supplies. It wasn't a really busy road but there was some traffic. Just after finishing the Klondike Bar a big pickup truck stopped. The driver was big too. He was retired and lucky for me heading for WalMart. I'm not a big fan of WalMart but it was one of the few places that would be able to burn CDs for my photos. My ride was returning a battery he had purchased for his tractor that wasn't working.Digital Photos:This is the beginning of the multi-part digital photo saga that will play out over the next few months. It will not conclude till the return home. Pardon the suspense. So the unlikely thru-hiker strolls into the WalMart clad in stinky poly-pro t-shirt, skimpy shorts, dirty boots, gaiters and a backpack. He drops his pack on the floor beside the digital photo computer and peers at the screen for instructions. He pauses at the culture shock between this world and the one of an hour ago resolves itself. Touch this for that option. Touch that for this option. Insert SD card and touch here. OK that was simple. But, wait, isn't this the same question it started with. Maybe I did something wrong. Try it again. Uh oh, here it goes again. Mind you. It's clear I have been in the woods for nearly a month by now but I was really concentrating. After about 4 tries it was time to ask for help. A nice woman came around the counter and tried it. Then she called to the other woman ¢It's not taking SD cards again.¢ ¢You'll have to reboot it.¢ came the reply. Ah, it wasn't my ineptness due to excessive time in the wilderness. I was vindicated.She stayed there and guided me through the process which was much more involved and less intuitive than anticipated. It seemed there was an arbitrary limit to the number of photos the system would put on a CD that had nothing to do with actual file size or space required. The pricing scheme was per CD and per 100 photos. The other odd part was that the entire system is based on the idea that the customer wants prints. The CD option is sort of secondary. This means that from the start it only talks about prints. There is no hint it can make a CD until the last step when you select no prints, just CD. I just told the woman to put all the photos onto CDs and trusted she would make it happen. When the roughly 600 photos were loaded into the computer she sheepishly confided that this would take a while. It seemed that the CDs would actually be burned on another machine that was connected via a slow network connection. Having been a computer programmer & systems guy for some 17 years a while ago, that brought a chuckle.While the files transfered and the CDs processed, there was grocery shopping to do at the supermarket next door. The grocery shopping went well. The CDs were now ready. Some patio tables for sale in front of the market served as a staging area for the repackaging and repacking ordeal. A guy maybe about my age or a bit older stopped by and asked if I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He offered to give me a ride back to the trail but explained that he had some shopping to do first. That was fine with me. After packing I wanted to go to Radio Shack to get a new screen protector for my Palm handheld. He said he would swing by to pick me up.His name was Howard. As it turned out his daughter & son in law in California were planing to hike the AT. He wanted to pick my brain about the trail and get some advice for his kid. He was definitely concerned for her and wanted to get educated. He took me to a post office to mail my CDs home but it was closed. I left the CDs and $5 with him and he agreed to mail them for me. Just before we got back to the DQ, I saw Tall Tales and Crazy Legs walking down the road. Howard blew the horn but their expressions showed they had no idea who it was thanks to the tinted glass no doubt. They had talked about spending the night in town here and meeting up with Ole Man & Navigator. Howard was a great guy and dropped me at the Dairy Queen just up the road from the convenience store where my hitch to town had begun. He took my picture complete with pack and drove off as some other thru-hikers showed up. This Dairy Queen is actually right on the AT. The trail turns a corner here and passes through an underpass under I-81. It's doubtful that many thru-hikers miss the chance to stop here. There were six backpacks leaning up against the outside of the DQ. What a picture. The other hikers saw me taking a picture and they all came out and took the picture too. This included the 3 Amish guys, Phoenix and Morning Star. The cool thing is that our reflections are in the window. It was late by now and there were still miles to go before sleep but the chocolate covered cherries blizzard was wonderful.Across the Interstate the trail climbed gently through a field and into the woods. A young teenager with no pack greeted me as he bounded down the trail through the woods. We talked for a bit. He asked where the trail went. I told him it went to Maine. He was curious about the AT and me, a thru-hiker. He lived in Florida but loved spending his summers at a relatives farm here in the mountains. He thought he might like hiking. It was good to talk with a kid again.It wasn't too much longer before my arrival at the Davis Path Shelter. (Wow, that's the name of my adopted trail back home.) There was a fair sized crowd there including a dog. Oddly there was also a fair amount of discussion about how to treat the dog or what to feed it. Usually a dog on the trail is not a new pet and how it is fed or otherwise treated is largely up to its owner. As it turned out this was an exceptional situation. This bunch of guys had been hiking together for a while. They had a name in the journals which escapes me right now. Back in town they had been walking along the road when a vehicle stopped to dump this dog that they didn't want any more. What a horrible thing to do. These guys took it upon themselves to take this dog along with them on the trail and give it a home. They bought some food for it and hit the trail again. Amazing.It wasn't that late and there was no water here. It would be a 2 mile round trip back south to get water. That seemed silly. Granted the absence of water was well publicized and it could have been packed in for the last mile. Either this detail was simply forgotten or somewhere in that little head of mine something was saying don't stop yet. According to the shelter journal, Buick had been through earlier. The gang said he was planing to camp at Crawfish Valley. Two miles for water or three and a half north to camp. No contest. It was time to move on.That next three and a half miles did seem to go on for some time. The sky grew dark prematurely. The wind picked up and then the rains came. It didn't rain for long or hard but it was enough to get everything good and wet. It also could make a person a little grumpy about having to make camp and pitch a tent in the wet. It was close to dark and the trail seemed to have bottomed out in a ravine. The camp site was on Reed Creek and the trail was certainly near a creek now. The terrain looked pretty campable so I called out with a couple of foos thinking that Buick might be camped off the trail in the woods. Then the trail broke out into a small clearing where two tents were pitched. One was Buick and the other was Tarzan. They were just about done for the day. Tarzan climbed into his tent. Buick and I spoke for a bit during my dinner prep. He offered his bear string rig for me to share and went to sleep. After dinner, in the dark it was time to pitch the tent on a damp slope and get some sleep at the end of this 17.8 mile town day.