Date: 2014-06-24
From: stealth camp - Shenandoah River

To: Falls Creek (past Mason Dixon line)
Miles today: 50.0

Our campsite was like camping on a peaceful beach. Which also means sand. That got everywhere. With less than 6 hours of light sleeping I was pumped on getting started. Cowboy camping on the river bank was too nice not to enjoy though so there were a few moments waking up in the middle of the night when I had to sit up and look at all the stars and moonlight. What a majestic view of the river! It was fantastic. Unfortunately for Voodoo, I woke up at 2am to see her tarp tent had collapsed on her. What used to be a shadow of a tent next to mine was reduced to a messy pile of failure. Her set up doesn't hold up well in sand or snow because it is all tension based. I chuckled to myself and went back to sleep until my watch alarm started beeping an hour later. Voodoo gets creeped out easily so I started moaning "voooooodoooooooooooo" repeatedly until she stirred. At that point I turned on my headlamp like a spotlight to help her out because it must of been like waking up in the trunk of a car with her tarp flat on her face. She groped around blindly for a second and sat up in complete confusion at which I couldn't help but laugh at. "You ready for this, Voodoo?" Her body language through the collapsed tarp indicated something along the lines of "ugh, okay." - we were good to go! Leaving our stuff at the beach campsite, we grabbed our headlamps and platypus to backtrack to the WV/VA border. We had to tag that sign post to officially begin the challenge. Harper's Ferry was deserted and the trail was loaded with fireflies. Felt like we were in Avatar yet we were really regretting the fact that we should have stealth camped up the mountain to save ourselves 6 redundant miles on this already massive day ahead of us. By the time we made it back to camp after tagging the post and jogging the rest of the way back (we got honked at over the bridge because Voodoo was running in front of me flailing her arms around and I was right behind her like I was chasing her - probably did not look good), it was already 6am. The bright side is that while brushing my teeth and simultaneously taking a piss, I spotted a peculiar object half buried in the sand. It was a firework the size of a baseball! Our 4 state challenge celebration token. I doubted it would surmount to anything beyond a dud but I tucked it into my pack anyway.The sun was up, we had breakfast, and we were good to go. We trudged through the long miles talking about everything and anything. Or smelling people we passed along the way. Some day hikers smelled like pi±a colada. The lotioned ones were who we could smell about a half mile away if we were downwind. Some backpackers smelled like dr bronners, some sectioners smelled like handsoap, and some even had a scent of perfume. We were openly creepy about the people we passed who smelled good. Of course this was all in between conversations that went deeper and deeper down the rabbit role. Besides blatantly smelling some people, I'm sure we freaked people out with out of context mid conversations regarding cults, crazy relationships, suicide, life goals, and general nonsense we both thought was interesting. Like Stoned Ape Theory or sensory deprivation. Next thing I know, I realized this is the longest time I have ever spent right next to someone for over 40 hours straight. It was like we've been leashed together with a 10 foot rope, even while stepping off trail to piss or while setting up tents. By the time this is over, we would have been traveling side by side together for over 80hours. Naturally we had long pornographic conversations about food, went way too into depth over poop stories, picked each other's brains about drugs, and dipped our toes into philosophical pools of stagnating thoughts waiting to get rained on or splashed about. Not the typical kind of things you get to indulge in with others in normal life. Before we knew it, we caught up to Frankenstein having dinner at a shelter 10 miles short of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was 7pm and we gladly joined in. We were feeling relatively good but we sure needed to refuel on desperately needed calories. We took on the challenge having oatmeal for breakfast, 5 larabars each to snack on throughout the day, a bagel with hummus, sharp cheese, and bell peppers for lunch, and unfortunately were unable to get pizza delivered to us for second lunch. We did stop for a midday shower though! That was sweet. After our last meal for the day it was past 8pm and time for the last push. It. Was. Time. To. RAGE! We cruised towards our finish line and we noticeably got less chatty as we had to focus more on the increasing amounts of rocks/boulders. Obviously we were getting very close to Pennsylvania. Every step required precise foot placement - talk about making the last stretch difficult! After 3 hours of night hiking we knew we basically made it. Too tired to care about anything, we gave a half hearted wooooo and recalled how Baltimore Jack said we are retarded. We sat on a park bench overlooking town below us and laughed about how right he is. We were in no mood to drink our celebratory shots of vodka though. But then I remembered the firework. Voodoo played Dueling Banjos off her phone as we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line and than we set off the firework. It was actually quite impressive for such a little thing.50 miles in under 21 hours. Aw yeah!