Date: 2012-05-14
From: Campbell Shelter 

To: Daleville, VA
Miles today: 15.4
Weather: light rain

Last night it poured all night long and into the morning. We decided to wait for it to stop raining before we left the shelter. Once it stopped, I called the Howard Johnson Hotel in Daleville VA to reserve a room for the Medicine Man, Big Sky, Cowtail and I; we started hiking at 10:00am. It was really foggy out so the trees were dripping on us all morning but not enough to make us wet. I decided to go ahead of everyone because I wanted to make sure that we got to the hotel in time before our reservation was up at 5:00pm. The trail continued following the ridge line so it was once again rocky and had a few rock scrambles so I could not go as fast as I wanted because everything was wet and slippery. There was one big climb to do today up to Tinker Cliffs and once I finally got to the top it was still foggy so there we no views. Tinker Cliffs is like McAfee Knob and had huge boulders everywhere and the trail followed along the edge of the cliff for about a quarter mile then went down over the side. It started to rain once I got down off of Tinker Cliffs so I picked up my pace trying to get to the next shelter before it started to rain harder. I got to the shelter at around 2:00pm and got there just in time because it really started to rain hard just as I was getting there. I was only there for about 15 minutes before one by one everyone else caught up and dove inside the shelter. We all ate our lunches and I checked the radar on my phone to see how long it was going to rain. It looked like it was only going to rain for another 45 minutes so we just waited it out and sure enough 40 minutes later it stopped so we continued on down the trail. Soon the fog lifted enough so we could see down into the valleys on both sides of the mountain. On one side we could see a huge manmade lake and on the other we could see Daleville and Interstate 81 so we knew we were close to town. Big Sky and I got ahead of everyone else and soon we were heading down off the mountain into town. The further down we got we kept hearing a noise and we figured it was just one of the power lines we had to go under but soon we passed all of them and the noise kept getting louder. Soon i realized it was cicadas making the noise ¢ and soon they were everywhere. They were in the trees, on the ground, flying around and landing on us...Big Sky did not like it at all. We got to the road at 4:15pm and got our room. Soon after Cowtail and Medicine Man showed and we went to go eat at Wendy's once they were done in the room. While we were walking around town we ran into Catfish, Steelehead, Fatherman, DK, Big E, Chef, Tickle Monster, Weather Man, Dances with Flys, Wild Turkey, Feathers, Trash Bag, Codger, Heading and Tag Along. They were all staying in town trying to miss the rain because there were a lot of bad storms coming our way. We then went to the outfitters for a while, then to the grocery store and then to the goodwill store to find a goofy outfit for Catfish to wear when he goes back to Trail Days in Damascus. We were all tired and all headed into our rooms at around 11:00pm which is very late for us hikers...night all!