Date: 2003-06-05
From: Bear Face Mountain Shelter

To: Pinnacles Picnic Campground
Miles today: 19.0

I didn¢t sleep really well last night. I got a couple of hours here and there. I¢m not used to sleeping in shelters. I really never got sleep in the shelters very well. I also changed to a therma-rest ultra light. Of course, it¢s a lot harder and I kept trying to make a point of sleeping on my side so I wouldn¢t snore. Whenever I sleep on my side it seems like my knee starts to hurt these days. So, I didn¢t want to get up this morning but everyone else started moving around. A couple of early risers in the shelter. Including Ultreya and some other people. A Canadian couple, this guy I¢d seen before ( I can¢t remember his name ), I¢d run into him across the trail maybe a month ago and he was out hiking with his daughter now who had come in to hike for a week. But I finally crawled out of my nice, warm blanket around 6:30 and went ahead and started packing up. I waited until the last minute to eat then threw some of my Italian meat on a bagel and swallowed that and a couple of pills and had a couple of cigarettes. By that time¢¦Ultreya and the guy with his daughter had already left about 15 minutes ahead of me and I managed to catch up to them at some point. Pretty quickly actually. The daughter isn¢t used to hiking and she¢s really holding the guy up and Ultreya is very steady, but not a real fast pace kind of guy. So, I caught him pretty quickly. I¢m trying to make it into the next campground here, which is called Big Meadows campground. They have a wayside there that¢s gonna serve breakfast there and I¢m hoping to get there by 10:30 and fill up on eggs and bacon and hash browns and coffee and all that good stuff before I keep moving on. I might even get in there and do my laundry and take a shower. The walk out of Bear Face Mountain hut....other than one little hill going up hill is a real nice little walk. It¢s just very much like I said earlier, a walk through the park. A walk through a city park even..and it¢s beautiful this morning. The sun actually did come out with blue skies. The fog and the clouds lifted away sometime last night. I guess when it rained. I didn¢t even hear it rain last night so I must have slept better than I thought. But it did rain. Everything was wet in there. There were puddles this morning. Some of my joints are a little worn out this morning too. My ankles are especially sore and my right knee. That¢s because I just did 54 miles in 48 hours worth of walking. A little crazy since I said I was gonna go slow to start with. But I guess it¢s just my nature. Anyway, the walk is beautiful. The sun¢s out. There¢s a nice cool breeze and it¢s not too hot and not too cold. About 55 degrees. Which is a little on the cool side to be standing outside with shorts but it¢s perfect if you¢re moving and hiking because you don¢t even sweat. Passed a couple of deer first thing this morning. The deer are everywhere. I stopped taking pictures of them there are so many. I don¢t want to waste my film taking pictures of deer. But they¢re not afraid of you here. In fact, the two I saw this morning. I encountered them right up on the trail and they just sat there and looked at me for a minute. I just kept walking along the trail and they just skirted off to the side as I walked within 15 feet of them and then they just went back to eating. As a matter of fact, last night at the shelter there were two very insistent deer who hung around for a couple of hours. The kept trying to get close to the shelter. Lemming kept trying to get up close to them because he wanted me to take a picture of him with the deer. He got within about 10 feet of them and they scooted off. I also passed two guys hiking along the trail here going in the opposite direction, with no pack. One guy just had a water bottle and the other guy didn¢t have anything. So, I¢m assuming that there¢s a place real close by to walk to. It is still Thursday, June 5th at 5:40 PM. I pulled into Skyland here in Shenandoah National Park at 3:30. I actually walked into the stables themselves and asked for directions to the dining room. I got some pretty distasteful looks from the waiter and waitresses there. There was a nice dining room. Really nice looks and everything¢¦however the food was no where as good looking as the dining room itself. So, they had no reason to be looking with any kind of disdain because their food just wasn¢t all that. I did have a swiss cheeseburger though and some onion petals. The onion petals were not great. The cheeseburger was good. I had a Coors Light and a couple of their house special drink. I¢ve already forgotten the name of it. It had something to do with running moonshine or something like that. But, I blew some time, wasted some time there. I sat for 2 hours, made some phone calls to Kelly and Jan and Mark trying to make arrangements for all kinds of things. There was a message on the phone from Bob wondering where I was. So, I called him up too and filled him in on what¢s been going on. Then, I got back on the trail a few minutes ago which was really interesting because the trail leading directly out of Skyland here is a well grated road. It¢s got little pebbles. I call it a road because it¢s 6 feet wide. It¢s very nice to walk on for about a mile. It's well marked..it says AT on it¢¦it¢s the kind of little trail that the overweight tourist, whom I passed walking on it, would walk along and think ¢ Oh, you know I could do the AT¢ and getting suckered into it. It had little 4x4 posts with little white stenciled numbers on it that marked 1/10 of a mile. At the 9/10 of a mile mark the path continued straight but the AT marks took a real sharp right and became real quickly the trail that I know. All the sharp, jagged rocks on the steep, narrow, nasty top that I¢ve become used to. In the meantime, it is a quarter to 6 or so, and I¢ve actually got daylight until about 9 o¢clock and I¢ve been walking 7 days close to that. But today I think I¢d like to stop a little short. Maybe like an hour, maybe 2 hours, definitely stop by 7 o¢clock and have enough time to set up my tent in the daylight and just get real comfortable without having to rush or having to turn my flashlight on to set up. So, I looked at the map and four miles north of here there is a place called the Pinnacles Picnic Ground, which I talked to the bartender or the waiter or whatever he was about and he said that it¢s a nice place. A little covered Pavilion. So, I¢m gonna walk over there. It¢s right on the trail and I'm going to see if maybe there¢s nobody hanging out that close to dark and instead of having to go through the whole set up procedure to set up the hammock and all that stuff, if no one¢s around, I¢m just gonna sneak the sleeping pad under one of the picnic tables, under the pavilion there and try to sack out for the night. Cheat a little bit. I know you¢re not supposed to do it but regardless we¢ve got about 16 miles here today so far and probably 19. So let¢s just go ahead and call it official at 19 miles from Bearfence Mountain Shelter to Pinnacles Picnic area today. OOH and there¢s a bear. A tiny bear and the mother bear better sure better not be around here. God that scared me. I was really hoping that was not a baby bear because he was really small. He couldn¢t have weighed 30 pounds and the worst thing in the world is to come across a bear, a baby bear, on the trail because the mother¢s around somewhere close. That scared me to death. I didn¢t see him, but the bear was crossing the AT path just as I was walking by and the first I thought was ¢Oh my god, the mother is close by and I don¢t want to get between the mother and the baby bear and then get ripped into shreds¢ and then I walked right by and there was another couple coming in and I told them to hang out probably another 10 minutes to make sure they didn¢t get into the problem that I was hoping that I didn¢t get into. That makes the third bear that I¢ve come across and incidentally the second bear today. As I walked down to the last shelter, I took a slack pack to write in the register and there was a bear off to the side of the trail and he followed me down to the shelter and I had to take one my sticks and beat the metal grip stop on the edge there. I also saw, yet again, another deer coming out of the Skyland Diner there and was totally unexcited to meet them. The tourist walking in front of me were walking in that direction and they told me ¢ Oh, Oh there¢s deer in front, up ahead¢ and you know, at this point, I don¢t know how many deer I¢ve seen today. Over a dozen. It¢s gotten to the point where, you know, seeing deer on the trail is about as exciting as seeing a cow in Texas. At any rate, I¢m signing off for the night. I¢m standing on this really beautiful, magnificent overlook here. I¢m gonna take some pictures and put this thing away.