Date: 2005-05-08
From: Damascus, Virginia

To: Lost Mountain Shelter
Miles today: 15.8
Weather: clear sky

I took my time getting out of town today. I woke up a little late for what I¢ve been doing lately which is about 7:00 or 7:30. Got packed up and started walking out of town. I was supposed to eat with Vern, but I couldn¢t find out where he was. I went to the restaurant called The Old Barn and sat down there and ate breakfast with Doc, who I had talked to earlier. We had a good conversation. He ended up being an interesting guy. He¢s a psychiatrist. He was Bob Peoples' drinking buddy in college. He found out two years ago, 39 years later, that they were both involved with the ATC heavily. He was there to ride the Virginia Creeper Trail on a bicycle. That trail is 17 miles almost downhill. He was waiting to get shuttled to White Top to begin his ride. This morning I decided to break one of the rules. I walked out of town on the Virginia Creeper Trail. The Creeper Trail and the AT run parallel to each other for about 12 miles. I took the opportunity to walk on fairly flat surface for a couple of reasons. Number one was to shake down my new pack. I had stopped numerous times to adjust and to unpack and repack to try to get the feel of how best it was going to work out for me. I actually spent a lot of time doing that. The problem is that I broke the stay in the middle of it. I had to replace it with one of the stays that I had. Luckily, at that time Doc happened to be rolling down the Virginia Creeper Trail. I had given him ten bucks and asked him to go talk to Jeff at Mt. Rogers Outfitters and see if he could ship me back the original aluminum stay that I had taken out of the pack to the Relax Inn which is my next stop in the next few days. The second reason was the new shoes that I had needed to be broken in badly. They were extremely tight and I had to keep stopping and adjusting them as well. I sweat in them a little bit and got them to stretch out. They were quite a bit uncomfortable for a while. The third reason is that the Virginia Creeper Trail is an extremely scenic walk to take; way more scenic than the AT on that section. And in fact I did manage to stop about six miles out of town at the Virginia Creeper Trail Caf©. I did have a big vanilla ice cream; a couple Pepsis; and some chicken strips. I fully enjoyed that. This was a casual walk today out of town, after taking a zero day off. Very enjoyable. I also was walking out of town with a ton of food, with the intention of going to the first shelter. I probably walked out of town with twelve pounds of food. Normally, for five days I would walk out with six pounds. I was extremely heavy. Also, I wanted to test the capacity of the pack in terms of the weight. When I got to the shelter I pulled out a can of pulled pork which ended up not being good, but a big can and some flour tortillas and four fruit cups and split them with OC1. He and I sat there until about 7:30 at night by ourselves in the shelter. People had walked in and out and decided to keep going after leaving Damascus. I knew that people would be walking in. He was thinking that we were going to be in the shelter alone. But right at 7:30, once again, it was just like the tour bus pulled in. By dark, we had another tent city going on of at least 30 people. It turned out to be really fun. We all collected a bunch of wood and had a nice big roaring fire going on; and just a good bunch of people to hang out with. We probably stayed up too late til about 11:00. Before going to bed I found this stupid cowboy book that was in the shelter. Canyon O¢Grady, I guess. I decided I would blow some time reading it. I stayed up later and read a couple chapters at night as well. So that¢s it for Monday, May 8th.