Date: 2017-09-30
From: Helveys Mill shelter

To: VA Route 623
Miles today: 18.0
Weather: overcast clouds

A polar blast that blew through in the second half of today has given us what I suspect is a taste of what's to come on our hike. Sweating through the middle of the day has been far more of an issue than concerns about hypothermia, but we all knew that colder weather would eventually transpire. It's part of the reason why we reluctantly motivated ourselves to escape the vortex of Woods Hole.But it has been fascinating to see how quickly it went to the other extreme. For the first time since leaving the Canadian border four months ago, I had to zip up my sleeping bag tonight. But even after doing that, I was still on the cold side of comfortable in a 40degF bag.The only good side of this was it is likely to mean the difficulties of the long distances between water -- and today, our aqua beta from Young Scout alerted us to a 16-mile stretch without any place to top up -- are not going to be as onerous because lower temperatures will mean we will need less water.The previous evening, I'd been telling 2am about the katabatic effect -- the way cold air flows downhill at night -- to explain why it's usually warmer to sleep higher on a ridge than lower down in a valley. But I could also tell he didn't quite believe me, putting more faith into the more understandable but oversimplistic theory that temperature is a direct reflection of altitude.However the first hour of hiking today provided a powerful lesson about the katabatic effect. It was mildly chilly at our campsite on the crest of the ridge but as we dropped down into the valley, the temperature dropped dramatically in the final 20m to the valley floor.This brought us to a road which led over an Interstate -- an AT tradition is to moon the traffic on every Interstate, and for the first time I decided to join this less-than-esteemed club -- and then half a mile after this, we reached a diner right on the trail, named the Brushy Mountain Outpost. This had only opened in June but such is the power of food and the nature of trail gossip, we'd known of its existence for nearly as long. I was the first to arrive and was soon sating my carb and cholesterol cravings in the form of biscuits, gravy, eggs, bacon and coffee. Even better was that the person at the next table was Mongo, who ran the nearby Lickskillet hostel. He'd started as a nobo a few years ago but only got as far as here before getting off trail. He ended up working at a hostel in the area and then last year he'd bought a 1911 church for $15,000 and turned it into a donation-based hostel.As I chatted to him about the 16-mile waterless stretch we had coming up, he said he was heading to a road crossing, VA Route 623, later that day to drop a section hiker off. This is where we were intending to camp.A little light bulb went off in my head: "Is there any chance you could drop some water for us there?" He was willing to pay for this himself -- it shows what kind of person he is -- but instead I insisted on giving him $10 so he could buy 10 gallons -- enough for us and for quite a few of the hikers behind us. Deal!One of the AT catchphrases is "10 by 10", meaning doing 10 miles before 10am, usually as a way to avoid the worst of the heat in the midAtlantics. Thanks to the effect of the diner, by the time we managed to escape this latest cholesterol vortex, we'd done 2.2 miles by 11.15am, which is not quite the same.We were fortunate that the next section of the trail is maintained by the Piedmont Appalachian Trail Club, which had created some of the nicest trail we'd encountered yet. Mostly it contoured around hills rather than going straight up and down the other side in a pointless display of wasted energy. Thanks to the quality of the trail, the rest of the day went pretty easily despite a solid 1700ft climb up to the ridgeline after the last water source. I was very grateful not to be doing this with four litres of water in my pack and also not to be doing this on a stinking hot day.We knew Dirt's extended family was aiming to do a trailside cookout for us tomorrow where we were camping tonight, meaning we'll have an on-trail nero tomorrow. Normally this would be a good thing but such was the polar chill that had descended that we couldn't even stay warm enough even while sitting around the fire and so we all ended up retreating into our tents early, where we tried -- with various degrees of success -- to stay on the comfortable side of cold.But tomorrow we're going to be lavished with southern hospitality. WIN!Life is good.AT fact of the day: Last night, I used Vitamin I -- as the anti-inflammatory ibruprofen is known in the hiking world -- for the first time since, I think, Vermont and certainly not since I left New England. I was happy to have reduced my use of Vitamin I from a worrying 800mg a day in the wilds of Maine down to nothing through reducing my mileage and taking better care of myself. Today my right knee felt fine and hopefully this was just a one-off rather than the sign of the long-term affects of hiking.