Date: 2014-05-19
From: Hightop Hut

To: Bearfence Hut
Miles today: 12.3
Weather: clear sky

Day 5: Another beautiful hiking day. It started out cool (45 degrees) but warmed into the mid-60's. Even the Virginians we passed on the trail are commenting about what nice weather they are having...Like it's unusual!!We hit the trail at 7:35am. We're doing better getting out earlier. Within 0.1 miles of the hut we passed the 900 mile-mark, only 1270 miles to go!! We stepped onto a ledge outcropping early into our hike and were joined by Divinci and Purple Blaze. They were still expressing dissapointment about not getting a chance to "aqua blaze".As I have explained in earlier posts the AT is marked by a 2 inch by 6 inch white "blaze" on trees. Side trails to water, towns, shelters, etc. are marked by a similar blaze on trees but it is painted blue. So if you are hiking these trails you are "white blazing" or "blue blazing". From these terms, other euphemisms have been developed: if you walk the road or ride a car around a section of the AT you are "yellow blazing" (presumably because of the yellow line on the road). If you raft or kayak a river around a section of the AT you are "aqua blazing".It turns out along this SNP section of the AT, it is possible to raft the Shenandoah River in the valley below the full length of the SNP. We have met several people who were planning on doing this, but were thwarted by last Thursday's deluge. Apparently the Shenandoah River rose to near flood stage and all rafting activity was cancelled. In fact we heard that where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac River at Harper's Ferry, WV that the town was flooded. We hope it's not too bad, since that is our planned stop in about 10 days.As we continued up the trail, we leap frogged the father and son that we had camped with. They are on the same schedule of huts as we are, so we have camped with them for the last 2 nights. It turns out their trailnames are "Bearded Dragon" (father) and "What Time is It" (son).It was an unusual day in that we only crossed Skyline Drive once today. But we paralleled it a lot, so the sound of cars and motorcycles was never far away.Once again we took advatage of the services along Skyline Drive and stopped at the Lewis Mountain Campground Store for dinner. We arrived at 4pm and had sandwiches, milk and cheese for dinner. Spider even accompanied the meal with a beer. Ofcourse we had to finish it with ice cream for dessert. We also picked up some things for breakfast. ET can't hardly wait to eat her blueberry muffin tomorrow. That sure is different from our standard fare of Tang and oatmeal.We only had 0.9 miles fropm thereto our destination hut and we arrived at 4:50pm. Only Bearded Dragon and What Time is It were there, but several other hikers came in after our arrival. One of them is called Knucklehead.The attached picture is of last night's hut, Hightop Hut .Alll the huts in the SNP so far have been of this same design: 3-sided with a front overhang that has a gutter. Inside is a raised platform that will sleep about 6 people and a loft that will sleep about 4 more. There is a picnic table and fire pit in front of the shelter...all the comforts of home! Generally, they are much nicer than other AT shelters outside of the park.No animal sightings...not even any bear scat!