Date: 2017-10-02
From: Chestnut Knob shelter

To: Reed Creek
Miles today: 17.3
Weather: clear sky

The way hikers have started to deck themselves out in fluorescent colours for hunting season provides a gentle hint that -- let me phrase this delicately -- Americans' enthusiastic application of their second amendment rights is not always matched by their ability to exercise them safely.My last couple of weeks on the PCT was in hunting season but I was grateful that the first of those weeks was for bow hunters only. Possibly because it's much more difficult -- you need to be within 30m of an elk before firing -- they tended to be almost exclusively comprised of people who had opposable thumbs and the ability to form complex sentences. The contrast to rifle hunters was exemplified the following week when we met one beer-bellied bubba-style hunter who was standing beside the trail with a can of Bud in his hand. When we asked how the hunting was going, he replied: "Hell, I haven't even got to camp yet."Today, the constant baying of dogs throughout the morning removed any chance of pretending it wasn't hunting season. Once we reached Lynn Camp Creek, we encountered half a dozen hunting dogs wearing heavy radio-tracking collars, while in the woods to our south, there were clearly many more dogs barking furiously but not apparently moving.We were told later that the dogs had treed a bear. We never saw the hunters, who would have seen from their radio-tracking systems that the dogs had stopped in one place and would be making their way to it, with the bear unaware that by taking refuge up a tree, it was actually sealing its fate.As hunting goes, this was barely more sporting than the bear hunters of Matagammon hunting camp back on the IAT in Maine, who spend a month stocking a cache in the woods with doughnuts to entice bears to it and then courageously wait in a hide a safe distance away and use high-powered rifles to shoot any unfortunate bruin that appears for its daily feed.Hopefully this treed bear would be underage and thus be allowed, begrudgingly, to live. I didn't think this was very likely, but sometimes it's better to harbour a deluded hope than to dwell too long on an unpleasant reality.That morning, we'd woken in our enclosed stone hut and were inestimably grateful to find (a) it was still much warmer than the ambient temperatures outside, and (b) our prediction that the middle-aged and portly section hiker would snore like a D12 bulldozer was happily unfounded.Outside, there was a particularly beautiful view down into the fog-shrouded Burke Garden but it was also a cold-ass day and I headed off rugged up in my fleece and wooly hat, only able to ditch these after hiking for half an hour.Once I'd warmed up, so had the day. The cold blast of the past 48 hours seems to have passed and we went back to the sweaty business-as-usual as we slogged up and down hills via the continuingly excellent Piedmont Appalachian Trail Club trails.We stopped for lunch at Knot Maul Branch shelter, which was remarkably primarily for having a tiny barely-four-person picnic table that was presumably salvaged after a tree smashed into the full size ones we're more familiar with."Is this a table for ants?" Sriracha exclaimed, in his best Zoolander voice, only to find that the register wit, Cauldron, had made the exact same comment as he came through a couple of weeks earlier. Great minds thinking alike? Or fools never differing? We opted for the former.At the top of the climb following that, we had to negotiate an enormous blowdown. Given Hurricane Irma was just one of several storms that had devastated the southern AT, it was remarkable that this was the only bad blowdown we'd encountered. The presence of fresh sawdust besides clearly recent blowdowns before and after this one showed both the diligence of local trail maintainers and also how much tougher the trail would be without their efforts. As the trail crossed VA Route 40, I noticed a black van beside the road and found Hot Mess, another sobo and different to the Hot Mess Express who was still in the thrall of the Yellow Deli religious community up in Vermont. It turned out this Hot Mess had injured herself a while back and was now doing support for her partner, Bog Angel, and another sobo called Milkshake.She was kind enough to offer me some water, which proved to be a propitious offer. The trail from there began to traverse a series of fields, making the next water sources were very rural and bovine in nature. I could have filled up but was able not to have to, although I was completely out of water when I finally rocked up into camp.As I reached Reed Creek, I found a message from Three Goldilocks and the Bear at a trail junction, asking us to join them in their camp. I also found 2am, who'd wandered around for 20 minutes trying to find the campsite without luck. He eventually concluded that it was further down the trail and then, to save Dirt and Sriracha from going through similarly pointless searching, I waited for them at the junction to let them know.Soon we were all united once more at the campsite, which was about five minutes further down the trail. A fire was going and we were soon cooking and catching up with each others' movements. Having been doing effectively identical pace to them since Vermont, there was talk about all of us finishing together -- an appealing prospect.Life is good.AT fact of the day: Our predecessors at last night's shelter were clearly fans of one of my favourite movies of all time, The Shawshank Redemption. On a beam on ceiling, one person had written "Brooks was here" and next to it, in a different hand, someone else had penned: "So was Red." We hope he eventually found Andy.