Date: 2013-05-22
From: Route 211 parking lot

To: Front Royal parking lot
Miles today: 27.7

(In which I compress the planned two days' section into one long slackpack with a short yellow-blaze)The night is pretty quiet, with only an occasional car passing by on Skyline Drive or Route 211. By the early morning hours, there is no traffic at all. I wake up at around 0600 and start sluggish preparations. I have set my mind on attempting to slackpack the entire section from Luray to Front Royal. The top of my sleeping bag is wet from condensation overnight, and this gives me extra inspiration to slackpack instead of compressing my sleeping bag and forcing the moisture further into the bag. It will be easiest for me to start out by hitchhiking up to the Front Royal trailhead on US Route 522. I don't know how quickly I will cover this section, so I would rather reach my truck at night instead of reaching the Front Royal trailhead and being faced with the very low odds of hitchhiking back to my truck in the dark.I clear out my pack and reconfigure it in a new manner, for slackpacking with the potential of overnighting. It is supposed to be a hot day and a warm night, so I leave my damp sleeping bag out of my pack, just taking the liner and my base layers in case I have to spend the night. I pack my hammock, in case I do find myself sleeping outside. There is a chance of rain this afternoon and that will slow me down. In the crowded Shenandoah National Park, the shelters I have stayed at have been surrounded by many tents and weekenders. I mostly empty my food bag, just leaving in some protein bars and other cold food. My camera comes with me too, this time with my Tamron 24-70mm lens. I curl up my sleeping pad inside the pack, around everything else. By keeping the sleeping pad inside, I have a full but lightweight pack and don't have the sleeping pad coiled up awkwardly atop a half-empty pack.My plan is to hitchhike west down Route 211 into Luray, then north up Route 340 to Front Royal, then southeast down Route 522 to the Front Royal trailhead. It becomes clear that there is a better option once I position myself on the roadside. A single car passes me heading west, while many more cars pass me eastbound. Some of those are going into the park but many more are continuing east. I confirm on the map that this is a viable direction to hitch in - Route 211 intersects Route 522, so I can shorten my hitchhiking by a leg and use the prevailing traffic direction instead of hoping on anybody else heading west. It still takes me a while to get a ride - the further north I go, the more difficult hitchhiking seems to become.A work truck stops to offer me a ride after a half hour. They get me pretty far - they said they were taking Route 211, but I had not noticed how far that route ran coincident with Route 522. They drop me off at the intersection and I move to a gravel parking lot on the corner to get a ride up 522. In short order I have my ride - a young mining engineer whose friend thru-hiked in 2011. He drops me off at the trailhead and I am ready to start hiking at 0730, earlier than usual in spite of having just hitchhiked an appreciable distance. I am starting out north of Shenandoah and walking back through the park to Luray, and then I will be done with Skyline Drive. I have considered starting further back and walking the parts where I blue-blazed along the road, but decided that I couldn't jump farther back than I already am without quickly losing interest.The walk south starts out pretty tame, passing between a fenced-off area and back yards. One of the houses I pass behind apparently belongs to a past hiker, as a bench and water cooler are placed next to the Trail. A handwritten note invites thru-hikers to camp in their front yard. While I am stopped here to retrieve my trekking poles from my pack, another hiker out approaches from the south. I expect to be in amongst completely unfamiliar hikers now that I have taken so many consecutive days off, as I have no good way of knowing about the hikers that far behind me. Mr. Froto is one of those hikers. He continues north and I continue south. I cross a low ridge and descend to the nearby next road. Three more hikers are crossing the road as I do - a man of my age with the trail name Ocean Spray and two young women, all of them thru-hikers unknown to me.After this road crossing the climb into Shenandoah begins. It is a mild climb and very early in the day, but it is already hot and very humid and I am sweating heavily. There is a spring 0.1 mile north of the shelter I am approaching, but the distance seems greater as I switchback up the mountainside. It turns out the distance is actually greater - there is another side trail leading to the same spring further uphill and Tom Floyd Shelter is shortly afterward. The shelter has emptied out by now, and I have it to myself. I check the register and confirm that many of the folks I had been hiking around have long since passed through this area. Some folks I haven't seen in a while, folks that have certainly taken far fewer zero days than I, are about two weeks ahead of me! I will be surprised if I see these folks again. I am also surprised to see a few familiar hikers have checked in here only a day or two prior to my return to the Trail.After checking the register and photographing the last few pages and letting the sweat dry on me, I continue moving south. The air feels somewhat dryer than it did while I was moving uphill, and feels pretty good as I reach the end of the climb at a rock outcrop and a stand of pines. The air feels dry and smells of dried pine needles, and I take a quick break here to dry off again before starting a fairly flat walk into the park. The boundary seems to be near the top of the climb, and shortly afterward is a side trail to a hostel. If I had been coming into this area later in the day, I would have considered a detour to check out the hostel. As it stands, I have most of my day ahead of me and can't justify the one-mile side trip.After a couple miles of easy terrain I reach Skyline Drive. There is nothing of note between here and the next Skyline Drive crossing, and south down the road I can see where the road curves along the mountainside and leaves an open patch of sky. Curious as ever, I detour along the road and am immediately rewarded. Low, flat clouds or perhaps fog blanket the low lands to the east of the ridge. The mountain disappears abruptly into these clouds like a beach into the ocean. Off in the distance a small island - some ridge of perhaps 2000 feet elevation - juts lonely out of the clouds. I take photos using every composition that comes to mind within the 24-70mm range of focal lengths and move along. Soon the Trail touches the road again and I jump back on.I was expecting to pass many northbound hikers, but I am surprised to overtake two older gentlemen walking southbound. They are only hiking the Shenandoah section. One of them remarks that they remembered this being an easy hike when they did it years ago, so this is where they came back to. This stands in contrast to the many older folks on the Trail, out here to accomplish a tough goal instead of looking for an easy one. I don't see them on my way up North Marshall Mountain when I stop for the view up top, nor when I stop again on South Marshall Mountain. The views from these peaks look to the west, and either the low clouds had not been present on that side of the ridge or they had burned off already. I forget to take out my camera before starting off downhill, but am presented with another unmarked one shortly. I round a bend and a large chunk of rock juts from the ground where the Trail switches back.A rough side trail follows the edge of the rock to bring me up the back and to the top. I get my shots and continue southbound. The next viewpoints are Skyline Drive overlooks, and with the low clouds gone the views are much less interesting. Although I am slackpacking and have plenty of food back in my truck, I am looking forward to a stop at the wayside en route. There is a cabin nearby which must currently be rented, as I smell wood smoke before I come across its side trail. It is not tempting to pop into such places, as I know I will not find thru-hikers there and anyone else will be less interested to see a hiker show up at their (presumably expensive) rented cabin. Downhill at the Elkwallow Wayside I do find some hikers, though. Two of the picnic tables here are under the shade, with two hikers occupying one table and a lone hiker occupying the other table.I get a fountain drink and sit with the lone hiker, Cleveland. He was a March 17th start and is on the Trail between jobs and homes. He has moved from Cleveland to South Carolina and is taking the opportunity to walk the Appalachian Trail, a dream of twenty years. He is feasting on the wayside's overpriced fares, which I have done on my past wayside visits but not on this one. It is tempting to pick up cold food or even ice cream or something hot and greasy, but I exercise some self-control and only get refills of Mountain Dew. Even with four refills, it is overpriced. I don't think I can put more soda in me though, both for stomach capacity and for the caffeine and sugar imploring me to start moving. I head south as Cleveland heads out northbound.I am moving quickly but my knee is complaining. This is the first time this has happened in my almost three months out here, so I take it gently and move over to Skyline Drive at the next crossing. It is still complaining when a car pulls up next to me. The driver is a New Yorker heading home after a trip down south which included some day hikes in the Shenandoah. She is aware of thru-hikers and has some extra food that she would like to give me. That food includes fresh fruit, and although I have much food in my truck I am thrilled about fruit. We wind up talking for a while, her sitting in her car parked on the road. There are many common points to speak on, so this conversation goes on longer than other conversations I've had with drivers that are actively driving.I know this will look like me hitchhiking to any park ranger that may happen down the road - it is supposedly illegal on Skyline Drive and I don't want to see how a ranger may respond if they happen across this. I could just break off the conversation and keep on moving south, or I can take the more reasonable route and turn it into actual hitchhiking. I suggest it will be easier to keep up the conversation if she is willing to drive me a couple miles down the road to where my truck is parked, and she obliges. There are many common points to speak on - amongst other topics, she lives in western New York near where my parents just bought a house, and is heading back north from an event in North Carolina as I am.I arrive back at my truck before 1900, say goodbye, and think about what I will do next. I was at the Wayside only a few hours ago and have plenty of energy left over from the soda. In spite of walking all day I am not tired enough to just sleep here, so I drive up to Front Royal to get staged for tomorrow's hiking. Sadly, the pizza place in the 2012 Awol is closed. There is an Italian place in town, so I get a chicken parmegian pizza there. I was hoping to run across any other hikers in town, but that doesn't happen. The idea I had was to offer them a ride to the trailhead first thing in the morning in exchange for sleeping on their floor. With a hostel only a few miles south of town, I imagine most folks heading north are stopping for the night at the hostel and going into town from there, if they are going into town at all.When I leave the restaurant with my pizza it is pouring out, so I sit out the rain at the restaurant and eat half of the pizza. Sleeping in the back of my truck will not be an option, I don't feel like driving to the hostel seven miles away, and I certainly don't want to pay for a single room again if I have my truck available to sleep in. The remaining options are to sleep in my truck parked somewhere in town, or to sleep in my truck at the trailhead I plan to start at tomorrow. I am picturing a nice short day for tomorrow, just moving from Route 55 south to Route 522. Both of those roads go through Front Royal, so it seems like it will be simplest to just hitch out of town, walk the section, and hitch back in from the other side without having to move my truck.It is difficult to sleep inside my truck without having the cab full of things, but I find a couple potential ways to pull it off after plenty of squirming around and seeing what is least uncomfortable. I use an ibuprofen PM to help me get to sleep in the uncomfortable environment, and am pleased to find that in the day's heat they have almost but not entirely melted together like my other ibuprofen had. I manage to break apart the clump of almost-molten pills so they are all still usable. At some point in the night, I think I might get some sleep.Peace,