Date: 2017-09-20
From: Fullhardt Knob shelter

To: Lambert's Meadow shelter
Miles today: 14.4
Weather: mist

I don't need to know what Christmas morning is like in Sweetblood's home now because I've seen how she reacts to the prospect of breakfast at Bojangles.As this journal has often recorded, she and Sriracha are not normally morning people and regularly emerge from their tent long after the rest of the tramily have got out of theirs.And today? She was ready to go an hour before dawn. Before dawn!Sriracha was up too and his verdict was telling: "I can't even imagine what it'd be like if she was on crack."We set off just before 7am, just as the first rays of light were coming through the trees. This was deeply aberrant behaviour for Team KRT. Since we were on top of a mountain, the way was fast and downhill for nearly the whole way to Daleville, although in reality no uphill could have inhibited Sweetblood's determined pace.As it happened, we quickly discovered an extra incentive to move quickly: a jellowjacket ground nest right on the trail. Although I was -- inevitably -- near the back, I somehow managed to avoid getting stung by the aggravated swarm but nearly all the others were, suddenly finding their walking paces suddenly transformed to full-tilt running to get out of range of these angry wasps. Later on, we heard that 2am had it worst, since the first sting prompted him to drop his hiking pole, which rolled down the hill. While getting it, he was stung half a dozen more times before being able to run off.From the forest, the trail went into a more farmland environment and finally into the urban one of Daleville, on the edge of which was a shopping plaza featuring Bojangles. The familiar packs of Sweetblood and Sriracha could be seen sitting outside it.Soon I was sitting down next to Sweetblood and Sriracha, who coached me to order cajun chicken and biscuits, washed down with half a gallon of iced tea. I was particularly impressed that the menu board actually included "fixin's" -- what are known as sides elsewhere -- complete with the missing G. And it was good, although I'm not sure it quite lived up to the billing. Given the expectations raised over the past few days, I'm not sure anything could have.About 20 trail miles ahead is one of the most famous sights on the AT: McAfee's Knob, featuring a particularly photogenic cliff. But how to tackle the distance between here and there saw a fracturing of Team KRT after Bojangles. The others were aiming to hike to the knob and camp on top for the sunset and sunrise. Since it was from there fewer than 10 miles to where we were due to meet Dirt's grandfather, aunt and uncle, who were going to take us to their home in Roanoke overnight, we had the prospect of an on-trail nero on the knob. Unfortunately, Jameson, Simpleton Extraordinaire's dog, had been limping for the past couple of days and was favouring one paw before he even got going this morning, prompting Simpleton to find a vet to see how serious the problem is. As it happened, there was one across the road from Bojangles. While we were still at breakfast, Simpleton announced that he was going to have a short day and Uber up to a road crossing a few miles from McAfee's Knob and meet the others there, offering to bring up supplies of booze to make for a more convivial evening. Sweetblood found appeal in this prospect and decided to join him.The others opted to hike another 20 miles but that seemed too ambitious at my pedestrian pace, so I arranged to spend longer in Daleville and then just hike up to the next shelter, just under 10 miles away. I'd have two days of more even mileage and meet the others tomorrow as they enjoyed their nero on McAfee Knob. This also allowed me to hit up the outfitter in the shopping plaza (which turned out to be the best one since Monson), resupply at the supermarket, send home my trekking poles and bug headnet via a UPS, get another meal in town and then hike on once the heat of the day had dissipated. As I was eating a second town meal on a grassy verge, I spotted Footprint, Happy Feet, OK and Wizard at the Three Little Pigs barbecue restaurant. Half of Three Goldilocks and the Bear, Dr Bronner and Cricket, were also with them, doing 10-mile days so that the other half of the team, sisters Pumba and Professor Sprout, could catch up again after having to return home to North Carolina briefly for the funeral of a family friend. We headed out of town together but soon separated because of our different paces. Once I'd hauled up to the top of the mountain, the AT headed along the ridgeline as it made a grand U-shape towards McAfee Knob, about 15 miles away.Just as I got to the ridgeline, a short but heavy storm front rolled through but it was still so hot that I'd have been as wet with sweat if I'd donned my rain gear. Instead I was happy to shelter under the Walmart umbrella I'd been hauling for 500+ miles since Harpers Ferry, using the theory that rain on the AT so far had tended to be either short and heavy or in such modest drizzle that it wasn't worth putting a rain jacket on. In this instance, the rain ended after 10 minutes, although the trail resembled a creekbed for the next hour or so before soaking into the soil.A couple of hours after that, I rolled into Lambert's Meadow shelter, which was full of thru hikers and section hikers and who provided convivial company for the evening. The water source was the creek below, but even with the rainfall it was flowing so gently that I needed to borrow Dr Bronner's scoop -- a cut-down version of a SmartWater bottle, weighing only a few grams -- to get water from a shallow pool. Water is definitely becoming more of a problem, and I vowed when we headed to Roanoke in a few days, I'd create a scoop of my own.Life is good.AT fact of the day: In the last week, water had started to become more of an issue, particularly since the nobocentric Guthook app was no longer always accurate about whether a source used by nobos in the spring is still reliable for sobos in the fall. One of the nice parts of trail culture is we put out word asking those ahead to report on what the water sources were actually like -- which is how we learned that Fullhardt Knob shelter's tank was empty -- and have set up a message network comprised of hikers ahead of and behind us to provide on-the-ground reports. This is all more proof of Scout's observation that "this [thru hikers] is the community I've always wanted to be part of".