Date: 2011-05-16
From: Johns Hollow Shelter

To: Budget Inn, Buena Vista, VA
Miles today: 20.7

(In which I have misadventures with bugs and my headlamp)Zipped up in my sleeping bag with my headnet covering my face, I try without success to sleep. I toss and turn from back to side to other side, but between the stuffiness of the headnet and zipped bag, the itchiness of my bug bites and the periodic new bites (real or imagined I'm not quite sure), I never once lose consciousness. Eventually I switch strategies, remove my headnet and take my arms out of my bag. I feel cooler and free-er, but within seconds the fleas return. I can't see them in the dim moonlight, but I can feel them biting my arms.Finally I give up on sleep, sit up, put my socks and shoes on and gather everything I have in the shelter into a loose pile. I carry the pile away from the shelter toward my bear bag, so that I can pack up without waking the others. The moonlight is just bright enough that I don't quite need my headlamp, so I forgo it in the shelter to make an even stealthier exit.When I reach my bear bag, I carefully set each of my items down. When I set my tent down, I realize that the ground I thought was flat is actually tilted and I watch my tent roll downhill to splash in a creek. My sleeping bag stuffsack, which I have used to store my miscellaneous gear while the bag is unstuffed, starts rolling downhill next. It just misses the creek, getting caught at the base of the gully by two rocks.As carefully as I can I climb down the gully. I retrieve the tent first, trying to shake off as much of the water as possible. Next I grab the sleeping bag stuffsack, and make my way slowly back uphill. When I return to the pile of the rest of my gear, I remember that my headlamp was near the top of the open stuffsack. I methodically check the contents of the sack and my heart sinks when I confirm that the headlamp is no longer in it.Remember my headlight contingency plans, I display a bright image on my camera (whose display tells me it is now 1:30am). The image itself looks dazzlingly bright to my night-adjusted eyes, but the pool of light it casts on the ground is dismayingly weak. I first search the ground around my pile, then use the camera to search the gully, slowly sweeping it over the piles of dead leaves on the steeply sloped ground. In order to cast sufficiently bright light I have to hold the camera close to the ground, and this shrinks the size of its pool of light to a tiny area.Having no luck in the gully, I retrace my steps back to the shelter, sweeping the camera from side to side and periodically stopping to press the play button again when the image times out and returns to blackness. This search too is unsuccessful and I return to the gully for a second try.The night is going poorly, and I worry that my judgement is impaired by disorientation and lack of sleep. To compensate for this, I try to think each scenario through carefully and from multiple points of view.Scenario 1: Wake shelter occupant, borrow headlamp and use to search for own headlamp. Getting out of the rest of mess becomes easier with own headlamp.Scenario 2: Stay put, wait for morning. 2a: Return to a sleepless bug infested night in the shelter (very undesirable). 2b: Attempt to find tent site and set up tent without headlamp (also undesirable).Scenario 3: Night hike out without the headlamp. Maybe possible with the moonlight, but the riskiest of the options; requires further evaluation before action.I decide to go for scenario 1 and walk back to the shelter. "Hey Buffalo", I whisper. At first I think that he's still sleeping, but several moments later he sits up. "Can I borrow your headlamp? I dropped mine." He hands me his light, and when I can't figure out how to change the setting from dim red mode, takes it back and switches it to bright white. I use the light to check my path, my pile of gear and the gully. After several minutes of searching, I finally find the headlamp lying among the leaves and breathe a large sigh of relief.I return Buffalo's headlamp, tell him that I'm hiking out because I can't sleep, and then head on the trail. My headlamp is significantly dimmer than Buffalo's, I realize, and following the trail is a tricky challenge requiring my full attention. Sound helps, as footsteps on the hard packed AT sound soft and muffled, while footsteps to either side are louder, with crunching leaves and snapping twigs.Hiking uphill I feel a wave of hunger-induced nausea, and realize that if I'm going to be awake and hiking, I will need to eat. There is no easy place to do this nearby (I think of gear rolling down the hill again) so I hike through the nausea. The moon, it turns out, is nearly full and actually very bright, but is almost always hidden behind the tree canopy. It casts small, bright patterns of light on the ground, showing me just how dim my headlamp is, and the contrast in brightness adds another dimension of challenge to the route finding.When I find a flat space with a nice rock to sit on I stop for a snack, which leaves me feeling less woozy. I continue the climb up to a viewpoint where I can look out on the lights in the valley and off on the horizon. When I stop to appreciate the view my tiredness finally catches up with me and I set up my tent on the gravel-like rocks at the edge of the cliff. Inside my tent I fall asleep almost immediately and don't wake up for another three hours, when the sun is about to rise. When I wake I am still a bit tired but feel much better than I did before I went to sleep.* * *The day is not quite as long and tiring as I expect, but is still harder than most. I consider hiking a short day, but the lure of town dangles within reach, food and bugless beds. Mayo, Tom and Mehap are back in Glasgow, and German Shepard, Buffalo and most of the other hikers at the last shelter already stopped there. I skipped Glasgow to finish my honorary marathon, but plan to hitch to Buena Vista instead, twenty or so miles further along the trail.The afternoon hike runs along Brown Mountain Creek, one of the longest and most scenic creeks along the trail. On the opposite bank I can see the remains of an old Appalachian village, and signs provide historical notes on the area. The character of the area is different from any of the trail so far, and it's nice to realize that the trail can still surprise me.When I reach the road I meet Bud Heavy, a hiker ahead of me who was hiking the section from Buena Vista to Waynesboro southbound with his friend Kyle. We're all going in to Buena Vista, so we space ourselves along the road for maximum visibility and try to hitch. After twenty minutes of no luck, it begins to pour. We put on our rain gear and glumly consider our odds of getting a hitch in the rain when a pickup truck that had passed a few minutes earlier returns to pick us up.Riding in the back of a pickup truck in the rain is a new experience, exciting and not entirely unpleasant. I quickly learn to face backward and keep my hood up, and as rain at 45 miles per hour feels a lot less gentle than it did standing still. The ride down from the mountain takes us out of the rain, and as the wind dries us as quickly as the rain soaked us, it's hard not to feel like we're in a wash and dry cycle of a clothes washer.We split a room -- three real beds means no one has to sleep on the floor -- and then switch our attention to food. A couple of hours later and we're sitting around in towels and stuffing ourselves with Domino's (the second town meal of the evening) while our clothes finish drying. On days like this I marvel at the contrasts of the trail. From sleepless and bugbitten in the woods to freshly showered with as much cheesy bread, cinnamon stix and soda as I can consume, I wonder what new adventures are still to come.