Date: 2017-11-08
From: Tray Mountain shelter

To: Low Gap shelter
Miles today: 15.4
Weather: overcast clouds

I tend to use my camera as a kind of diary, mostly taking pictures of natural beauty and tramily shenanigans but also some images that serve solely to remind me of matters of note on the trail even if I know that to anyone else the conditions will render the resulting photo as an unintelligible mess of pixels. I'm not sure what it says about today's damp hike along cloud-misted ridgelines that for the first time since leaving the Canadian border nearly five and a half months ago, I didn't take a single photo. (The photo accompanying today's entry is one I borrowed from earlier, although such is the unchanging nature of recent hiking in the long, green and misty tunnel, even I couldn't have told the difference.)I didn't even realise this until the next day but in its own way, it showed what kind of day today was: a trudge in the rain rather than a highlight of walking from Maine to Georgia. Every thru-hike has days like this. On the PCT, nothing could compare to the southern Californian deserts and then the Sierra, which is why lots of hikers consider large tracts of Section O in northern California as a drag. The CDT had a few uninspiring days following jeep trails through rolling forested hills in Montana between sections on the actual divide but that's as bad as it got. I'd expected New Mexico to be mostly boring jeep trails and skanky water sources but its reputation turned out to be wildly overblown and for me, and most of those in my tramily, it turned out to be my favourite state. We'd heard plenty of stories about the AT of how the nobos have to walk through day after day of rain in the southern states, with a predictable result on the disillusionment and drop-out rate. Tadpole, one of my PCT companions, had hiked the AT in the superwet year of 2003, when they had 24 days in a row of rain. Afterwards, it was deemed to be a point of pride to have been in the Class of 2003, even if I suspect most of them didn't enjoy it much at the time -- definitely "type two" fun.But I don't think we've had more than a dozen days of rain on the entire AT this year, let alone two dozen. It was yet more proof that going sobo seems to get all the tough stuff out of the way early on.Just like on my mobile phone's memory card, not much of today stayed with me either. It didn't even rain that much, although it felt like it was about to for most of the day. Instead I trudged up hill and down hill, had lunch with Sweetblood at Blue Mountain shelter and finally squelched my way to Deep Gap shelter an hour or so before dark. (No night hiking = win!)I arrived to find some kind of minor drama going on, with a local hiking group having lost one of their members and who was carrying the tent for his wife. While obviously their main concern was for the missing hiker, we also assured the wife that we'd make room for her so she'd have somewhere dry to sleep.The group was camping nearby and after a couple of hours, the missing husband turned out to have blithely walked past the turnoff to the shelter and did a bonus 10 miles -- five miles out and then five miles back -- to end the drama in a happy manner.I'm tempted to blame the rain on Packaged Meat's hubris-inviting decision to send home his tent a couple of weeks back. Once again, he had no option but to sleep in the shelter, which in turn meant some of the others in Team KRT had no option but to camp as the threat of rain turned to reality around dusk.There were also a few section hikers around, including a couple of older guys who looked at us thru-hikers as if we were zoo animals, and a forest ranger from Alabama who is section-hiking the AT a week at a time and was the source of funniest deadpan life observations I'd heard in years.Life is good.AT fact of the day: We're aiming to camp tomorrow, because the mileage suits our schedule to finish in three days, and the last night on trail will be at a church's covered picnic area where we've been told some 2017 nobos are organising trail magic for us sobos. It seems likely tonight will be our last night in an AT shelter.