Date: 2015-09-16
From: Shady Valley, TN

To: Abingdon Gap Shelter
Miles today: 11.3
Weather: light rain

I'm back on the trail for a couple of days, enjoying cooler weather and the company of a wonderful hiking partner--St. Mike himself, joining me in the hike to Damascus. We drove into Damascus yesterday and spent the night at the hostel associated with Mount Rogers Outfitter. We met several other section hikers there, each going out for their various sections, and had a nice night (although not a good night's sleep, I must say, since there was--surprise!--no mattress on the wooden bunk in our room. We rolled out our pads to sleep on and it wasn't very comfortable.) In the morning we left the Jeep at MRO and took a shuttle back to the point I hobbled off the trail drenched in sweat and with a swollen, painful ankle last spring, a pretty spot near Shady Valley, Tennessee.We adjusted our packs and off we went, rather unsure if our fitness levels--poor, in my case, and not bad, although not trail-fit in St. Mike's--would prove adequate for our proposed two-day, twenty mile hike. But I'm an incurable optimist. "Look at the elevation profile," I would say, holding out the guidebook. "The worst of the mountains are behind us! It's a nearly flat line! It will be an easy stroll, like a walk in the park."A couple of hours later, dripping with sweat, hearts pounding and lungs near to bursting, we pulled the guide pages from my pockets for a closer look. "Oh. I guess there are a few hills, after all. Well, mountains, really."   It wasn't Smokeys level of mountains, so it didn't look so imposing in the guidebook, but we did gain 700 feet of elevation in the first three miles, and for the rest of the day we faced small sections of uphill and downhill terrain that I know would have been very easy for me back when I had my trail legs, but now....not so much. Still, it was beautiful, and I felt great being back on the trail again. It is so peaceful, so quiet, so lovely, and I enjoy being totally unplugged. We took our time, knowing better than to push ourselves too hard, taking frequent sit-down, packs-off, snack breaks. So many, in fact, that we were really pushing it at the end of the day to make it to the shelter in time. We saw a bear on the way, well Mike saw it, a cub hustling down a tree at our approach on the trail. He called "Bear!" and pointed, but I didn't see it, I only heard the crashing of the underbrush as it ran away from us. We (fortunately) did not see Mama Bear.We got to the shelter just before dark, with just enough time to start a fire, eat supper, and hang our hammocks. No one came along to share the shelter with us, so we hung both hammocks actually inside the shelter, from the rafters, instead of from trees. We didn't need tarps that way, and with the recent reminder of the presence of bears, we somehow felt better about it. I was never afraid of bears during my actual hike, considering them like large raccoons, and believing that if I did everything right (keeping my food hung up safely and out of my hammock) they would not bother me. But over the winter there was an unprovoked bear attack on a sleeping hiker in a hammock in the Smokeys, and that, together with my unfamiliarity with sleeping outdoors, made the three walls of the shelter somehow feel more secure. We were zipped into our hammocks by just after dark, somewhere around eight o'clock, and Mike was snoring within 30 seconds. I, as usual, need a little more time, a Sudoku puzzle, and a couple of chapters of my book to fall asleep. Maybe a Benadryl and an ibuprofen would help too.