Date: 2007-03-25
From: Elkwallow Gap

To: Hogwallow Gap
Miles today: 9.7

Sunday, March 25, 2007Happy Birthday, Joni!Elkwallow Gap to Hogwallow Gap, 9.7 milesGoodbye for now to Pipesmoke and Mrs Smoke. My gain getting to know you better this past week! You two are super. Have fun hiking in Grayson Highlands!   Start 11 AM from the parking lot at mile 20.8 on Skyline Drive. Amoeba, Sweet Sixteen and Sweet Sixteen's youngest son Brian. Clear blue day, temps in 60¢s. Brian will be backpacking back to Bears Den, arriving Tuesday night. While Brian is backpacking, Sweet Sixteen has use of his car, which means we can set his car and my car at each end of our day hikes and hike together instead of key-swapping.Love arrival of the day when parents get use of their kids cars!Hello to Sam from Brunswick Maine.Hello to Lin and Roger who I met last year at Bears Den and Blackburn. For a picture see March 28, 2006 AT journal. This year they¢re hiking with John, south to Turks Gap. WOW!!! Sweet to meet up a second or third time with people on the trail.Sweet Sixteen and I catch up with each other. I haven¢t seen her since March 2006, when we hiked together for a couple of days in the Smokies. It is so good to see her again and be hiking together again.When she was hiking the AT in 2005, Sweet Sixteen met Redwing and Hopeful, who are now managing Blackburn Trail Center.  She'll try to get to Blackburn to see them again, and meet baby Lydia (Hikelet).2 people with heavy packs perhaps thruhiking. A couple originally from California, now living in Baltimore, out for a weekend loop hike.At the Gravel Springs shelter we read the register:10-28-06 In for the night. Big day tomorrow. Try to get to resort. Marta, Five-Leafed Clover, with picture of a five-leafed clover. SOBO.11-1-06 I saw my fifth bear since leaving Front Royal. Snapshot. SOBO.11-23-06 Happy Thanksgiving. We made it to the hut 2 minutes after the rain started. We were able to save half the picnic table. It rained all night and it¢s all frozen now. The forest is crumbling around us. We are showered in ice and limbs. It¢s a winter wonderland. Watching 60 foot trees break in half is quite a sight. Good thing we only have 6 miles to the car to end our 60-mile section. The Horse Brothers.Hello to Shep! Her trailname just means she¢s shepping along! She¢s putting a little sign after her register entries, a sign which is Japanese meaning ¢Live for Today¢. She¢s hiking with Blueskies, who right now is about 20 minutes behind Shep.Sweet Sixteen has great stories. Here¢s her story for today: I have a bird story that¢s almost mythical. But it happened! And it was the most magical thing I¢ve seen.It happened when our kids were young, maybe 5 and 7 years old. We were out sailing. We would go on these sailing trips, my husband Mark and me and the boys.And one of the places we visited was an island in Lake Michigan. Off the coast of it, there¢s a wreck of the Morisan, a lake freighter that wrecked many many years ago, I think about the turn of the 20th century. You can see the rusting hulk. Every year as we would sail we would see that it was buried more and more. This looked like it would be about the last year that it would be possible to go out onto it. And we did. We took our dinghy and we came up to the Morisan and climbed on its slanted metal deck. It was difficult to do that.As we did it, we noticed that there were probably about 100 herring gulls, which are common to Lake Michigan, and as we approached they all rose into the air and then settled in a circle around us, maybe some 50 to 100 feet off.As we climbed the deck we could see there was a big round boiler-shaped structure a couple feet in diameter and it was about 5 feet deep. Some water had seeped in at the bottom. Very low in the water was a seagull. It had obviously been there for a long time. It was in a very very decrepit state. There was no way for it to get out because it had no distance in which to fly. So it was caught there.Well the boys were very distressed to see this, as were we. Mark fashioned a stick that he could lower and that gull, almost as if it knew what we were doing, bit onto it and held tight out as Mark lifted it out. As the gull slid down the deck and actually hit the water all those other gulls rose up and they circled us as if they really knew that we had saved this gull. Thank you, thank you, their actions said.My dad once experienced a similar communication between bird and human when he rescued a robin caught in a berry net. We meet more hikers. It¢s still the weekend.Hello to a bearded man from Winchester VA out biking on Skyline Drive. Hello to a woman out hiking Mt Marshall, up and down.3 times today I practice falling down!Hello to 3-year old Sierra and her dad.Hello to a couple who are out for a 4-5 mile walk. He¢s got extensive Asian-theme tattoos, koi, peonies, Tibetan skull, etc, in many colors including reds, oranges and turquoises as well as the more usual tattoo colors. He lets me photo the tattoos on his arm.4:15PM out at the car at Elkwallow, we meet a mom and dad, 2 daughters and a son who have 3 pet birds with them, a Quaker parrot named Paco, a sun conure named Milo and a cockatiel named Bob. Bob might be a girl, we¢ll know if he/she lays an egg, says the dad.Beautiful day, beautiful weather, beautiful company, it¢s great to be back on the AT.Back at Bears Den, Queen Diva makes her special pizza for us, what a treat! Thank you, Lori.