Date: 2017-06-06
From: Front Royal

To: Dick's Dome Shelter
Miles today: 19.0
Weather: overcast clouds

I managed to wake up pretty late this morning due to my handy-dandy earplugs. We had 2 snorers last night, also not an issue. I didn't hear it, but apparently one of those people complained to the hostel owner, Mike, that the room was too loud last night. He probably didn't appreciate the irony...Mike gave a bunch of hikers a ride into town, Lookout among them (to get cash to pay for the night), so I got the morning to chill and catch up on the world. Did a bit of journaling, some surfing, some YouTube watching... It was nice.They returned and we slowly got packed up, finally getting out the door at 1040, the last hikers to leave. It seems like returning along a trail is always faster than the first time you hiked it, but the 0.5 back to trail still seemed pretty long. We finally hit the trail at 11am, our latest start yet, and finished Shenendoah National Park, the whole 0.2mi that remained.In total, I saw 5 bear, heard 2 more bear, saw a bobcat, lots of deer, a couple rabbits, a family of ferrets, and a thunder chicken (grouse) while in the park. I don't know that it's because Shenendoah has so much more wildlife than the rest of the trail, so much as the wildlife here just isn't afraid of humans since there's no hunting and the park is so heavily used.Anyways, we headed down past a wayside (no, not like the roadside waysides in the park, a shelter... Pet peeve of mine: it would be nice if names were standardized to conform with expectations so that they were actually useful) and continued hiking in the morning sunshine and cool temperatures. We hiked past the street we had taken into town last night, past the US government zoological park, and then headed uphill.We stopped at Denton Shelter, unique in that it had a spring-fed solar shower, a deck, chairs, and horseshoes pits. We took a break there for about an hour and I napped for most of it, enjoying the afternoon. It's pretty easy to tell that we're near a major city by the amount of air traffic overhead... In this case we're on Dulles' flight path because it  seemsems like there's a plane flying overhead every couple minutes.Continuing on I began to hear the sounds of the highway, faint at first and then growing to drown out the sounds of nature as I approached and passed under I66. I've driven this highway many times, to all my Virginia hiking trips in fact, so I always find it exciting to know exactly where I am on trail, such as at a landmark like this.Of course climbing down to the highway meant that I would have up climb back up away from it, and as expected a decent uphill ensued. Partway up I heard something romping around in the woods, perhaps a bear, but I never got a look at it. The hike from there seemed to stretch on a bit... the sun starting to set and cast shadows through the trees which seemed to make time accelerate and the miles from today started to add up in my feet and knees. I was glad to reach the shelter when we finally pulled in at around 6pm. Despite how late we started and the break we took, we still had plenty of time in the day to do the miles we need to.There were actually 2 shelters here, a small old building which looked like it could probably only hold the 4 hikers AWOL listed, and a just-finished shelter with 2 levels, a covered porch, 2nd floor windows, and a firepit out front. This shelter will be much appreciated by hikers, especially since this spot only has one tent site. The shelter was so new that the ladders and scaffolding used to construct it were still chained to a tree right out front (though that might be slightly unnecessary... I don't know any hiker who is going to pack out scaffolding). With only one tent site, we opted for the shelter... Hopefully this shelter is so new that the mice haven't discovered it yet. Lookout packed wine from town, a box of white zifendel, which he shared and made an excellent after dinner drink. Bodybag, Yukon, Stickshift, and a couple other hikers had built a fire which we all hung out around as dusk closed in. Not too long after though I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore and headed to bed amongst the lightning bugs in glowing in the forest.