Date: 2022-09-11
From: Cove Mountain Shelter Mile 755.3

To: Fullhardt Knob Shelter Mile 735.3
Miles today: 20.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Coach and I woke up to dense fog this morning. With the fog and the tree cover in the woods, dawn does not arrive until almost sunrise and it doesn¢t get really light out until much past sunrise. This means that you have to pack up using your headlight, which makes things take a little bit longer in the morning. The fog also means that everything is just a little bit damp. It would stay foggy for much of the day, and there would be scattered showers throughout the day as well. None of the showers were very heavy, just enough to get me slightly damp and make you start to think about putting on the rain gear.Shortly after we started I could hear the hunting dogs parking not far off the trail. I saw two of the hunting dogs coming down the trail, but as soon as they saw me, they darted off the trail towards the barking. However today I did not see the hunters themselves, but I did see the trucks parked at one trail head.Most of the morning we spent crisscrossing the Blue Ridge Parkway. Crossing the road felt quite dangerous as you really couldn¢t see very far in the fog. Fortunately there wasn¢t much traffic on the road. One bonus of the Blue Ridge Parkway is that many of the overlooks have a trashcan so you can get rid of your trash so you don¢t have to keep accumulating trash for the entire stretch. it¢s not necessarily the weight of the trash but all the wrappers don¢t pack down very well and so it¢s somewhat bulky by the end of a four-day resupply.Coach got to the shelter before me again today, although we did leapfrog each other a couple times in the morning. Tonight we¢re sharing camp with a Section Hiker but it¢s just us in the shelter. I really haven¢t seen many people on the trails compared to up north. There have been one or two small groups of weekend and section hikers going northbound that we pass. We hear there¢s about a half dozen southbound hikers in the general area. The shelter has the last remaining cistern water system on the Appalachian Trail. It collects rain water from the shelter roof and the system probably filters out the large particles before storing the water in an underground cistern. With the rain we¢ve had recently I figured that the cistern probably has water, but we decided to carry up water for dinner and a little to drink in the morning since we¢re going into Daleville tomorrow. A lot of the comments about the water have been that it¢s brown or yellow. When we got there I let the water flow and it seemed reasonably clear to me, probably because of all the recent rain.The sun finally came out after we got to the shelter and I hung up a clothesline. With the trees around the shelter we really only got a couple of minutes of sun and it didn¢t really get things dry at all. There is also still some thin fog blowing through even despite the sunshine so it¢s not clear things would dry even in the waining sun.Tomorrow I nero into Daleville where I¢ll be meeting Orchid. Looks like Coach will be joining us at the hostel. Coach is in his early 70¢s and is already a triple crowner having done the AT, PCT and CDT over 10 years ago. This year he started with the Pinhoti Trail to the Benton MacKaye to the Appalachian Trail where he went north for a couple of hundred miles before flipping up. He¢s currently heading south so he doesn¢t have to go all the way to Springer Mt. Steps 37300Weather Forecast: 80/68 with afternoon rain