Date: 2004-06-20
From: Harpers Ferry (Comfort Inn)

To: Dahlgren Back Pack Campground
Miles today: 17.3
Weather: clear sky

Our guest journalist has returned to the piney woods of Maine, so you're stuck with me again! Our time together visiting the Nathes in Waynesboro, then hiking 24 miles north from there on the AT, was a much-needed break. The pace went from my allegro moderato to a largo, allowing time to relax and look around, not just grind out the miles. Some impressions of these days: 1) Wildflowers full of butterflies of every description in the wayside stops along the Skyline Drive. Wish my camera did better on closeups.2) A whole new mix of thru- and section-hikers for the both of us to meet.3) Down in the shelter where we slept the second night out, and its chorus of wakening noises: Yawns, crinkling of bags and mattresses as people stretched, thumps on walls and floor as people sit up, stomachs growling and intestinal toots as guts wake up, ears flapping. Wait...ears flapping?. Oh yeah, that was the Jersey couple's Jack Russell terrier announcing he was ready to come down from their upper bunk...4) Harpers Ferry, a village of old brick and fieldstone buildings, teetering on the edge of sheer dropoffs, with steep streets and no place to park. Like San Francisco to an extreme. Walks around town were as challenging as stretches of the trail, and our feet were sore. 5) The odd mix of visitors to Harpers Ferry besides us odd hikers: An Irish step-dance gathering, a novelists' workshop, and an armwrestling tournament (scary-looking contestants!)6) Returning to the ATC office to see who'd checked in since my first visit there on the 15th. It was like a high school class yearbook, with all sorts of familiar faces. So getting back on the trail will seem like old times.7) the Virginia blues are gone, gone, gone. Thank you Gloria. Sure hope your Norridgewock blues have eased up as well. We said our farewells early and I was on the trail by 7:15 AM. It took me first over the Potomac River on a railroad trestle, then along an old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath, then up South Mountain, really a long, long ridge. View from cliffs over Potomac, leaving Harpers Ferry Listened to a great bluegrass gospel program, it being Sunday in the south, with an emphasis on Dads, it being Fathers' Day (e.g. "My Daddy's Making Payments on a Mansion in Heaven") The trail led through several gaps where major actions toook place in the weeks before the Battle of Antietam in 1862. The signs made for fascinating reading and were well worth stopping for. Often while hiking the long ridges in Virginia I'd wonder how Jackson's and Longstreet's Confederate troops could stand their long marches of 20-25 miles a day, in lousy footwear, carrying their gear and weapons. How much better they would have felt in NB 806 Trail Runners with Superfeet inserts! I also recall an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach as I hiked across a sunlit pasture in high grass toward a dark treeline. What was waiting there 160 years earlier for an advancing line of troops?Memorial to Civil War correspondents In a few days I'll be within 14 miles of Gettysburg. Hope to get over for a lookaround.I met Lyndsey (now Luna), Krispy Kritter (retired fireman), Papa Bear, and Southernman on the trail, and ended up hiking to this tentsite with Southernman. Salt Lick and Poojah Blue came in later. It's a wonderful clear, dry. cool day for once, like the best Maine can offer. Tomorrow the same old humid sticky stuff returns. Today was a gift to hikers, except for the rocky trail which really beat up our feet. Nothing that some massage, rest and Vitamin I can't fix. Full of the usual hiker dinner fare. End of Fathers' Day. My Dad died three years ago. He loved a good yarn, including our son's account of his thru-hike back in 2000, and he'd have liked this one as well. This one's for you, Dad. G'nite! Now or Never