Date: 2008-06-12
From: Crawfish Valley

To: Ridgeline Campsite
Miles today: 20.7

Woke up around six, it didn't really rain too bad last night. I packed up quickly and was on the trail around 7. I'm shooting for Jenkins Shelter today, which is about 26 miles away and will be my biggest day so far. I should catch everyone at this shelter and it will set me up for an 11 mile day into Bland the next day so that I can get off these shin splints. My shin isn't really hurting too bad this morning, but I can feel it coming. I met some SOBOs who were an older couple that had stayed in the shelter with Cornelius and Dr. Z the night before. I later found out that these people had driven Cornelius crazy with their nonstop talking. They even tried to explain to Cornelius how to cook Ramen Noodles. When I arrived at the river that Triforce and I had planned on camping at yesterday, I found a note from Triforce saying that there was nowhere to camp, so they were moving on to the next shelter. I'm glad that I stopped last night, since there would be no telling when I would've arrived at that shelter. I stopped at the shelter for lunch, and get off of my leg. It's starting to hurt, but its not as bad as my left leg was several weeks ago. I still have the last big climb until New Hampshire coming up today also. I didn't move as fast as I usually do, but I was still doing pretty well for my leg getting increasingly worse. It's extremely hot today, and I ran out of water on the uphill. The book says that there is a spring-fed pond near the top of the mountain. Visions of a rocky oasis with a flowing creek ran through my mind, but what I found was quite the opposite. I filtered a bit of water anyways, and it wasn't too great. I continued up the trail and saw a bear off to my left, but it ran off before I could even pull out my camera. I see the shelter at the summit, so that means only 10 miles left to the next shelter. However, I walk by and to my suprise see Cornelius and Dr. Z sitting inside. I stopped with them, and thankfully we decided to go about halfway to the shelter and camp tonight. I stopped and rested my leg, which made it feel much better. I called S.F. Alman to get a weather update, and see about my dad calling me a shuttle to Roanoke (where I catch my flight back to MS for my cousin's wedding). I talked to David, who gave me a very official weather report. We left the shelter around 4:30 and moved down the ridgeline. There is only one water source before getting up on the ridge, and it was even worse than the pond. I had to fill up all of my water containers, which made for an extra 6 or 7 pounds. We went on for another hour and a half and found a relatively flat area to camp up on the ridge. It gave us a good breeze, and made it much nicer in this hot weather. Cornelius was really anxious to build a fire since it wasn't so hot, so Dr. Z and I started cooking while supervising Cornelius. Since it was so windy, he had a great idea of building a windscreen to block the fire. It did its job very well, but the problem was that the windscreen was made of wood, and he built the first almost on top of the windscreen. Needless to say, Dr. Z and I were able to move the fire and put out the windscreen after it caught on fire. It was a rather nice fire once we moved it out of danger. Cornelius also found a grub which he wanted to eat so that he could be like Les Strauss of Survivorman (much more manly than Bear Grylls). Cornelius wanted to cook he grub since he had never eaten one and then find another one to eat raw. However, Dr. Z would not let him put the grub anywhere near the cooking pots that they shared, so the grub escaped from Cornelius' iron stomach. The fire was really nice and we sat around it for a couple hours eating candy, then I finally got into my hammock and fell asleep.