Date: 2003-06-04
From: Loft Mountain Campgrounds

To: Bearface Mountain Shelter
Miles today: 27.0

I¢m recording this as I sit in the privy at Bearface Mountain shelter because I decided to stay at the shelter and well, I don¢t want to sit there and record with a bunch of people so ...double duty. I¢m going to the bathroom. This morning started out basically like yesterday ended. Pretty heavy rains at about 5 o¢clock in the morning. Which I basically had to stay awake through. I didn¢t want to get out of the hammock which was a terrible mess. I finally rolled out of it at about 5:40. It was daylight pretty well. I had also brought an ultralite nylon tarp that I had made a makeshift tent out of last night to keep the water off from the hammock. Which really didn¢t matter because once again I slept in a cloud and once again everything got soaking wet including my sleeping bag. But I curled everything up, ate some cereal and finally got rolling about 7:30 at fairly high speed. I ended up hitting the first shelter, which was Pine Hut Shelter, at about quarter to 10 or something like that. There was one English guy there. The guy who had left all the stuff at the shelter before. His name was Rufus, I found out later. Turns out that he had left all the stuff on purpose because his pack weighed too much. He had just found this out when he was carrying it. He was thru hiking. He¢d flown in from Heathrow Airport in England the 29th of May and was going back the 29th of June. So anyway, I read the trail register there and saw that Lemming and Serge (whose trail name is Ultreya) had slept there the night before. I figured I would be catching up to them at some point today. It was surprisingly not raining (not raining significantly) but the fog and whatever it was..the cloud¢¦I keep saying cloud because it was so thick that it was thicker than normal fog¢¦was there pretty well keeping everything good and damp¢¦kept fogging up my glasses and stuff. At one point I got out onto Skyline Drive, which the AT crosses many, many times, in this section and couldn¢t find my way. Couldn¢t find the trail on the other side of the road. Finally got just got angry and walked north on the Skyline Drive knowing that in another mile and a half or so the AT would cross again¢¦and that¢s what I did. Found the crossing again and got back on the trail. So, I hiked like crazy. I hauled it with intention of making trying to make it to Lewis Mountain Campground. Which was a good 26 mile hike. Knowing that the camp store was also gonna close there at 5:30, I really had to book it. Ended up making it there at 5 o¢clock and somehow passed everybody. Probably when they were eating lunch in one of the shelters but I didn¢t even stop to eat. I just ate candy bars all day and kept walking and managed to get to the camp store. Grabbed 2 cheeseburgers¢¦ate 2 cheeseburgers. Got way too much food because tomorrow all I have to do is hike like ten more miles to re-supply but in the meantime I got another 4-5 lbs. worth of food which is way more than I need. While I was sitting there¢¦Lemming and Tucson and an older man ( I can¢t remember his trail name ) hauled up. They re-supplied too. We all ended up walking to the next shelter which is Bearfence Mountain shelter. Here we are. That was Wednesday, June 4th. Somewhere over 26 or 27 miles.