Date: 2006-06-25
From: Not that long ago: Virginia

To: Waynesboro, PA
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

      We did it! We completed the 4-state challenge. We camped right before the Virginia/West Virginia border with LongKnife. He had heard us talking about doing the 4-state challenge and wanted to join us in our attempt. That night Gear slept outside the tent because he wanted to try cowboy camping. Right as I began to drift off to sleep, he came hurtling inside the tent. Two seconds later it started to pour. I don¢t know how he did it, but none of his stuff got wet. Unfortunately, our tent did get wet. So when we woke up at 4 o¢clock in the morning, Dad had a soaking wet tent to pack up and carry these 44 miles to PA. From Virginia to West Virginia to Maryland and finally into Pennsylvania, that¢s the nature of the challenge.       We packed up and set off into the dark, foggy, wet morning at 4:30. Our headlamps could barely pierce the fog. I was the web-walker because my light was the brightest. We had barely started hiking when we heard a loud crunching sound. At first we thought that it was a deer running through the forest, but the sound got louder. For a moment we thought that it was a moose, but there aren¢t anything that big in Virginia. The sound got bigger and bigger: crunching, cracking, crashing. It must be a tree falling over! We stared into the ambiguous darkness, straining, shining our headlamps, trying to see if we needed to make a quick getaway. At any moment we expected to see a mass of leaves and wood come hurtling into the beam of our lights, but then the crashing sounds stopped. Not wanting to wait around for the domino effect, we continued on.      5:00 AM is the best time to hike through Harper¢s Ferry. We saw no one as we came out of the woods; it was a ghost town. All the old buildings added to the eerie effect, making it seem as if we had just stepped into the pages of a history book. We filled up our water jugs at a faucet and then headed across the bridge to the C&O canal towpath. The Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet at the foot of Harper¢s Ferry and the towpath follows along the bank of the combined rivers.       After we waited to for LongKnife to catch up a couple times, he told us not to wait for him. We stopped at the Ed Garvy Shelter to wait for LongKnife and LoneWolf was there. We hadn¢t seen him since Damascus.       We completed the 4-state challenge in 28 hours. We didn¢t just rush through it, though. We stopped at Gathland State Park, under the pavilion, to drink some soda, washed up at the Dahlgren Back Pack Campground, stopped to pick some blackberries, got a little trail magic and chatted with a women who lived right beside the trail, ate lunch under a pavilion at Washington Monument State Park, talked to some HAM radio enthusiasts and they let us send a message home to Mom and Ally, we went up the spiral steps to the top of the monument and took pictures, walked around in the museum, and slept for about 9 hours. We did all that and 44 miles in only 28 hours. What a day.       The very end of the 4-state challenge is the hardest because the trail goes over tons of rocks and boulders. At a few places we had to use our hands and feet to get down over them. We decided to sleep during the 4-state challenge because people had told us about the rocks at the end and we didn¢t want to go over the wet, slippery rocks in the dark. We didn¢t want to risk injuring ourselves and not being able to complete our thru-hike just because we wanted to do the 4-state challenge in 24 hours.       For all those who are wondering, yes we did get our picture taken at the ATC headquarters in Harper¢s Ferry. Mom and Ally met us at Rt. 16 in PA and drove us back down after we completed the challenge.