Date: 2003-06-17
From: Calf Mtn Shelter

To: Black Rock Hut
Miles today: 13.0
Weather: drizzle

Woke up to more rain. Not the usual morning mist which is often kind of mild, but a full rain storm that made it incredibly hard to get up. We were planning to hit the trail by 8:00, but the thought of packing up a soaking wet tent was pretty discouraging. We finally roused ourselves at 8:30 to see what was going on with everyone else -- not much, everyone was dragging because of the weather. We decided to move all of our stuff into the shelter to try to stay dry, including our tent with the fly still on it. Our plan didn't work as well as we hoped because the tent was already wet & dirty, and we wound up just shoving it in its bag and hoping we'd get shelter space that night.On a brighter note: When we left Waynesboro, we brought an extra spiral notebook with us, hoping that we'd come across a shelter with either no register or a nearly full one so we could leave our journal as the shelter register [for non-hikers: each shelter has a register where hikers sign in and leave messages for each other, and when the register is full, someone will send it to whomever left it, making a great souvenir]. Turns out that the shelter we were at had no register, so we were able to unload ours. Woo-hoo! It's the little things that keep us going . . .Then the day took a very sad turn. Sleepy Floyd decided he'd had enough, that with all the rain it just wasn't fun anymore, and he was going to hike south to Waynesboro and probably would get off the trail. No, no, NO! We tried to talk him out of it without putting too much pressure on him, but in the end he decided to go. We had a wonderful time hiking with him and were really sad to have him go -- we'll miss you, Sleepy Floyd! And we still hope you'll surprise us by popping up on the trail again.What with Sleepy Floyd leaving and the never-ending rain, we were pretty grim as we started hiking. We were also running late -- it was after 11:00am, so much for our plan to hike 20 miles! But we're always ready to amend our plans, so we decided we'd hike 13 miles to the next shelter and stay there, and hopefully we'd get shelter space.The rain let up a bit as we hiked, but it was still misty and, despite the fact that it was the middle of June, cold & windy. We booked on through to the shelter without really stopping, partly because there was nothing to see at the viewpoints and partly because it was gross out. As we got close to the shelter, the skies opened up again and it started to pour once more, and of course the shelter was full when we got there -- arg! That meant we'd have to pitch our wet, dirty tent and do it in the rain. We had to pitch it in a designated area because we were in the Shenandoah Nat'l Park and these parks have zillions of rules. The designated area was totally rocky, making it hard to stake the tent. With the rain pouring down, we were trying to get it all done quickly so the tent wouldn't get soaked. Moo got his part done, then 42 was trying to get her section done, and she must have pulled too hard because next thing she knew, Moo's part of the tent was unstaked and came flying over to her. She fell to the ground laughing with the rain falling on her. Then she and Moo rallied and staked the tent again -- turns out that we found better places to stake the tent, so good came of it.We went to the shelter to have dinner without getting drenched. Turns out that Loser was at the shelter and in the middle of our meal he whipped out his guitar and treated us to a mini-concert. Just the lift we needed.Went back to our tent and were in bed by 8:30pm.