Date: 2018-08-21
From: Maupin Field shelter

To: Porters Field campsite 
Miles today: 19.2

Woke up to everything wet with pools of water under my tent. Guess I wasn¢t camped on as flat of a surface as I thought. UGH. It rained all morning and most of the afternoon. Apparently, this is one of the wettest summers on record for Virginia. Virginia started to show its harder side today. Had to hike up The Priest Mt, a good 4,000-footer with a nearly 5 mile ascent. No rock climbing or scrambles though, so I shouldn¢t complain. It was just a slow and steady long ass climb. I ran out of water halfway up though like a dumbass, so it made the whole ordeal a lot more painful. On days where water is literally falling from the sky and you and everything you have is soaking wet, it¢s easy to forget to actually drink the water. At the top of The Priest Mt is The Priest Shelter. This shelter is a traditional stop for all thruhikers. The log book/register at the shelter is treated as ¢the priest¢ and every thruhiker must visit ¢the priest¢ and confess thy sins. Usually all the confessions have something to do with breaking Leave No Trace principles (LNT, the hiker code of ethics). Reading through that book was hilariously. People had confessed to some absolutely absurd stuff. Every entry began with ¢Forgive me father, for I have sinned...¢ and then delved into their terrible act. One girl confessed that even though she had sought out to thruhike the AT to better herself and her mind, all she thought about day to day was beer, food, and sex. Lol Another confessed to peeing down her leg while hiking through a thunderstorm. One guy confessed that after shitting his shorts, instead of packing out the shorts, he buried them. Haha! Definitely not LNT. A lot of people confessed to murdering lots of insects or the occasional ¢blue-blazing¢ (side trail shortcuts), etc. I¢ll tell you my confession, but it needs some context... I hate public restrooms. I avoid them to the extreme. I can go all day at Disneyworld or a music festival and never touch a bathroom. Port-A-Potties are even worse and I absolutely refuse no matter the emergency. So, that being said, every shelter along the AT has a privy/outhouse near it. And within the thirteen hundred miles I¢ve hiked, passing literally hundreds of privies, I have yet to use a single one. Lol So help me god, I will dig a hole every day till the day I die!Staying at a big secluded campsite just a mile short of the next shelter. I originally planned to hike to that shelter, but with the bad weather I knew at least one person would be there and I just wanted to be by myself tonight. Also, it stopped raining for a bit, so I wanted to give my tent and stuff as much time to air dry as possible. I managed to get my ¢sleeping clothes¢ wet the other day (don¢t ask), which from my prospective is like the worst thing you can do. So I have no dry clothes to change into. Therefore, I decided that since I¢m the only one at this campsite tonight, I¢d just spend the evening air drying. So I did. I walked around camp completely naked until nightfall. LolEventually, I took my tent out of the trees and set everything up. Everything is still very wet, but not soaked. So, it kinda helped. The one thing I managed to keep dry is my sleeping bag, thank god. It¢s definitely gonna storm some more tonight though. The wind is literally whipping my tent from both sides right now. So much that I had to get out twice and re-stake it because the stakes were getting blown out of the ground! My tent has been through a lot of storms at this point and holds up decently. But when it¢s raining and the wind is blowing hard and you¢re whole tent lights up with every lightning strike, it¢s always completely terrifying. Lol Part of me thinks maybe I should have stayed at the shelter tonight. Yikes. Too late now!