Date: 2016-05-11
From: Clark's Ferry Shelter 

To: Rausch Gap Shelter
Miles today: 24.5
Weather: broken clouds

I managed to be up earlier than anyone else after one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a long time. I think I need to start blowing up my mattress more, I slept quite a bit better despite the crowded shelter. Nothing came of the crazy man who set fire to Peter's Mountain shelter, though I did have a small freak out when I could see my own breath this morning and thought it was smoke rising from the floor of the shelter. I packed up and was out by 7:45. The hiking was pretty darn easy all day, a lot of flat ground, small climbs, and rocks that were not so bad. I stopped in at Peter's Mountain with Frost to look at the damage. The arsonist seems to have lit the trail register on fire and used that to burn up a sort of curtain that hangs across the porch of the double-decker shelter. The curtain was charred to bits all over the shelter and ground, and the picnic table inside was covered in ash. Fortunately, none of the living space beyond that seems to be affected in the slightest. Good on Blues for saving the place. The trail's constant changing between ups and downs and rocks and no rocks held my attention well, and I had a fun day hiking. I stopped for lunch at Clark's Mountain Road with Compost, a Nobo whom we've just met after he took a week off from the trail. Unfortunately, the ball of my right foot started to get incredibly sore as the day went on. I tried to be ginger with it and make sure that I was placing it only in good spots, but I can only do so much; about ten times today, I managed to step on little rocks in EXACTLY the wrong place and was put in some serious pain for minutes at a time. I gave it a nice massage at the end of the day, but I've got to be careful with it, maybe even get some thicker insoles. I made it down to Rausch Gap Shelter just past 5 and met Rigby and Roller, two flip-flopping women whose notes I've seen in the trail registers. The shelter itself is pretty amazing. Rebuilt in 2012, it has a stone foundation with a towering wooden canopy (surprisingly can only fit 6 people though), as well as perhaps the best shelter water source on the whole trail: a large piped spring that pops out of a stone wall they've built and dumps into a metal trough, literally fifteen feet from the shelter itself. Amazing. Blues was also here, and was about to lay down for a nap after his restless night last night. As everybody showed up over the next half hour, he recounted the story of what happened last night. As he approached the shelter, he heard a man shouting expletives and threats, and slowed down because he was worried he'd run into something bad. The shouting stopped and he passed a man heading south who told him "I'm sorry you had to hear all that," and moved on. Blues approached the shelter and was very weirded out by what he thought were multiple fires lit outside the shelter, but when he saw smoke billowing out, he dropped his pack and went running towards the shelter, looking to see if anybody was trapped or hurt inside. When he found no one in the shelter, he beat the fire out with a broom that was laying around, and fortunately had about two liters of liquid in his pack (including one Powerade) that he managed the put the fire out with. He called the police, and apparently hung out with his knife out - he didn't know whether the man would come back, or whether the actual arsonist was still around. The police showed up hours later in the complete darkness and really couldn't do much. So Blues spent the night in the smoky shelter, and left a note in the shelter for the next folks telling them a little of what happened (explaining the giant piles of ash). We cooked dinner, Blues headed out after his nap and we had a very hilarious evening with lots of laughter before getting in our sleeping bags all at around 8:30. In other news, Magic, Puzzles and Spidey caught a ride down to Trail Days in Damascus, a giant festival centered around hikers and the AT. It never really became a possibility that I would go - I'm about to get off anyway in a week and all the advice I've gotten says to go the year AFTER you hike - but it's funny to think that so many hikers are just going to be down there in Damascus. Tomorrow I'll have a shorter day to the famous 501 shelter, where we can order pizza like at Partnership, then it's a longer one down into Port Clinton/Hamburg, where I'll find a place to stay in town I bet.