Date: 2017-09-29
From: Dismal Falls

To: Helveys Mill shelter
Miles today: 18.3
Weather: few clouds

I'd been chatting to the random nobo hiker for about 10 minutes when I stopped, paused and said: "Are you... Sail Away?"She looked suitably shocked. Which is to say, she was indeed Sail Away, but had no idea how I could possibly have known who she was.Scout and I had been told about her months earlier when we visited Dick Anderson, the guy who'd had the original idea for the International Appalachian Trail, which continued north from Mt Katahdin into Canada and then, eventually, across the north Atlantic and down to Morocco.(Keen readers of this journal will also remember that I didn't have much beta before that meeting in a Portland, ME, nursing home and managed to exemplify my capacity for faux pas by asking Dick what his connection to the IAT was.)Sail -- as she said she was known for short -- was aiming to be the first person to hike all 20,000 miles of the IAT. Dick had heard she expected it to take five years but Sail said was now expecting it to be seven years. Not least because she barely had enough money to complete this year's hike, which she expected to be as far as she could get before winter stopped her. It was her reference to having started in Alabama rather than Georgia that made me realise who she was.I'm known for chatting to almost every hiker I encounter, which probably explains why this, the shortest of the triple crown of US hiking, was taking me longer than either the PCT or the CDT. And it has to be acknowledged that some of the reactions I get -- particularly by the short-distance hikers who still possess that uniquely American paranoia about stranger danger -- have been less than ideal. But it also leads to encounters such as this one. I'd been hoping to cross paths with Sail Away for months but assumed we must have passed without meeting somewhere in New England. It turned out I'd been too generous in predicting her daily mileage because, like me, she preferred a more relaxed hiking schedule that allowed her to smell all the roses -- metaphorical and literal -- en route. We might even have missed each other that morning, since Sriracha, Sweetblood and I took a short cut along a road to Trent's Grocery rather than taking the AT, which did an even more pointless than usual PUD up and over a hill before descending to VA Route 606. Dirt, who has vowed to hike every foot of the AT, and 2am, who does that but also eschews slackpacking, were Team KRT's purist offshoot and took the real AT.We all met up again at Trent's grocery, a gas station and general store that seemed to be like a modernised version of a Norman Rockwell painting, with good ole boys in bib coveralls sitting around literally talking about things like shooting squirrels. The grocery had enough hiking-type food for a reasonable resupply and also offered BLTs for breakfast, along with coffee. In keeping with the increasingly unreliable water supplies, I also bought a bottle of sweet tea to increase my carrying capacity by a litre.That proved to be a good call and most of the day was dry or featured dodgy sources. There was apparently water somewhere a long way down a creek at Jenny Knob shelter but otherwise the only water I saw on trail was a couple of skanky pools that had enough slime in them to suggest they were leftover from the last rain rather than flowing from some hidden spring beneath.The hiking along the ridgelines, using trail or old logging roads, was so deficient in landmarks that afternoon that I ended up turning on my GPS feature on my phone -- usually turned off to extend battery life -- to confirm that I was where I thought I was. And I was, but that came at the cost of finding I also had five bars of service, which led me to waste the next half hour sending a series of texts to various far-flung friends.This meant I was the last one to rock up into camp at Helveys Mill shelter, where there was a good source of water reached by a very steep 0.2 mile trail straight down a hill. I was not particularly looking forward to this but was resigned to it, only to find out that when Dirt, Sweetblood and 2am had gone down, they'd hauled up enough water for me as well."You guys," I said, with genuine emotion, "are epic and awesome."The shelter log book made many references to mice and rats so it was an easy decision to camp in a beautiful cleared area a minute's walk away, where there's plenty of room for a fire and we even found some artists had been painting mushrooms and slogans on random trees.Life is good.AT fact of the day: After a long spell of warm weather, the night's are just getting the first hint of a chill. I usually sleep uncovered but midway through the night have to drag my opened sleeping bag onto me as a kind of quilt. It's only a 40degF bag but I'm yet to zip it up on this entire hike so far. That day must be drawing ever closer.