Date: 2011-04-21
From: Jones Meadow

To: Hogback Ridge Shelter
Miles today: 19.3
Weather: overcast clouds

(In which I ponder the elusiveness and cleverness of bears)It rains on and off throughout the night but I stay dry and comfortable. The ground I set up my tent on slopes sideways and I wake up several times having slipped to to the edge of the tent, but scoot my pad and bag back to the center and go back to sleep.When I wake in the morning it is light out and has stopped raining and I feel like I have overslept. My Kindle tells me that it is only 7am, however, and I am glad to have survived the night without having acquired any hard-earned wisdom.I try again to post my previous night's journal entry from a summit in the morning, but am apparently still in the vast AT&T dead zone that included all of Hot Springs. I am amused to estimate that since starting the trail I have written approximately twenty-thousand words and read less than half of that. Since in a normal day on the internet I would read many thousands of words, this is a dramatic shift from content consumption to production. (When Curmudgeon learned the length of my daily journal entries he shook his head in wonder and horror. "You know," he helpfully advised, "you don't want to bore your readers." I laughed. "Man, screw them," I replied cheerfully.)* * *My knee is feeling quite a bit better, but having tried walking without the knee brace for the last few miles last night, I decide to keep it on for a while longer. I have been hiking relatively slowly, between two and two and a half miles per hour, but have been hiking relatively long days with few breaks. At times I long for the exhilaration of jogging, but Lemur, the young veteran of five fifty-mile ultramarathons, assures me that running with the additional weight of a pack is bad news for your knees, and as my knee recovers I don't even dare to hike quickly. I hear rumors that Lemur himself is hurting, although he is still ahead of me and moving, so he seems to be surviving.The last shelter I reach is full, but I decide stay anyway, tenting nearby for the bear cables, privy and company. After the swarm of hikers in Hot Springs, hiking on the trail seems like a solitary experience indeed, and I miss the social scene of the trail towns. I think about the Trail Days festival in May in Damascus, the biggest hiker get-together around, with thousands of hikers and former hikers attending. I look forward to it, but worry that it might be too crowded and rowdy for my tastes, and am unsure if I will stay for all three days.* * *I have yet to see a bear on the trip, but last night I dreamt that I saw a large black bear walking stately and aloof in the distance. I am disappointed when I wake and realize that this has not actually taken place. Of all of the hikers I've met who have had bear encounters on the trail, direct or indirect, nearly all have involved loss of food. Poorly hung or temporarily unguarded food bags are the most popular targets, and once the bear gets ahold of them, I've yet to hear reports of it giving anything back. There are rumors that even the bear cables are not safe, and that bears leaping from trees have snagged multiple food bags at once on the way down. YouTube is said to host videos of bears hauling up bear bags paw over paw and slicing open cars like they were tin cans to retrieve food.In some parts of the trail, bears have reportedly learned that they can lure hikers off the trail by stomping false dead-end paths, crudely blazed with a white, honey-based paste. By the time the hiker realizes anything is amiss, the trap is sprung and the hiker hears a loud rustling behind them. So, if you're out hiking the AT and see a questionable white blaze, be sure to lick it. If it tastes sweet, turn around verrrry slowly...