Date: 2008-04-25
From: Quality Inn Waynesboro VA

To: Unnamed Campsite VA
Miles today: 10.4

Day 68 ¢ Friday April 25 ¢ Unnamed Campsite VA ¢ Miles Today: 10.4 Total Miles: 860.9We had a leisurely morning in the motel with two trips to the continental breakfast! Our first sitting was at 6:30; our second sitting was at 8:00. Ah, life is good. Brakeman had probably over 1000 calories before we even left for the trail. He has lost a lot of body mass. He is very skinny all over; you can see the difference in his arms, legs and of course, his stomach. So this week, we really need to focus on making sure that he gets more calories. The care packages are setting us up beautifully for that goal. We probably have the volume of 8 days of food to eat in just 5 days. Lots of brownies, beef jerky, Cajun peanuts, oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies, and salty Chex trail mix. Hopefully each day he can find something that interests him and get some body mass back on him. Our Trail Angel, Bill, who picked us up at the trail yesterday, was also our Trail Angel today to take us back to the trail. As normal, he was about 10 minutes early but we were sitting on the steps at the motel ready for him. His wife joined us today as she has never participated in Trail Angel activities and wanted to see what it was all about and then afterwards they were to head out to lunch. He read Josh and Amanda's website FiveMillionSteps.com since we last spoke and said that Brakeman was mentioned in regard to informing Josh what a mountain lion sounds like.We hit the trail about 11:45. It was steaming hot already ¢ well intothe 80s. Hiding under our Arab baseball cap-bandana hat, we were sweating buckets. Due to the heat, we were keeping a close watch on our water supplies and the location of the next water source. Earlier in the morning, we left a voice mail message for Kristen at Gregory in regards to the $40 charge that we had to pay at the post office to pick up the loaner pack because it was sent Fed Ex rather than USPS. We had specifically told her that it needed to be sent via USPS as it was going to a Post Office. We mistakenly left the cell phone on when we headed back to the trail, and within a couple miles heard the phone ringing from the top of Brakeman¢s backpack. It was Kristen calling back! She said she had told the receptionist that it was to be sent regular mail but obviously was not sent per her directions. She¢ll get in touch with the post office and see what she can do for us. Hopefully the Gregory Company is going to do the right thing and reimburse us for the $40.We walked through a couple clearings today that had transmission towers from Clear Channel and Comcast. Apparently the National Park leases land to companies for their towers. We did not see too many wildflowers today but we are looking forward to getting the Appalachian Wildflower book that John is sending to us at Harpers Ferry. After reading our journal where we called the wildflowers by our technical names of ¢the purple ones¢, ¢the pink ones¢ and ¢the white ones¢, he took the initiative to get us a book, which will enable us to accurately identify them. So very nice of him to do that! Hope the book is small and lightweight!! We passed a flip-flop thru-hiker today from Britain. He has a stress fracture in his foot and just spent 7 days at Big Meadow Campground resting it. But then he started hiking again with three 20-mile days in a row! Not sure if that was smart! His legs were the size of tree trunks, solid muscle. Seems like he may have a military background as his name is The General and perhaps a mountain climbing background as well, as his health insurance is through a British Mountaineering Agency.We cooked dinner about 5:00 at a spring as we figured that might be our last water source for the day. We spent about an hour there and met a section hiker who is hiking all of the AT in Virginia. We spent a little extra time unfortunately talking to him, and we say unfortunately because we missed being able to get to camp and set up before the rain by about 15 minutes! We really booked the last 2 miles, as rain was imminent. We were looking for the old Sawmill Run Shelter site, which we figured would not be well marked. We were right. We never did find a sign or obvious trail for it. Perhaps we passed it as we were hiking faster than we thought and may have misjudged the distances. Level, clear spots for pitching a tent were hard to come by and the thunder and lightening in the distance reminded us that we did not have much more time if we wished to stay dry. The storm appeared to be 4-5 miles away. It¢s always a bummer to get totally wet on the first day out, so we hauled butt! It had just started to rain when we saw a small cleared area just off the trail and grabbed it for our campsite. It¢s amazing how fast one can move when they want to! Since dinner, we¢ve hiked over 2.2 miles, found a tent spot and pitched the tent in less than an hour. The threat of getting wet is a great motivator.Because of our heavy packs, the trails were a little bit harder than we had envisioned but they weren't really bad. The woods were not pretty at all but we learned from the section hiker at dinner that the next 13 miles, too, will be straggly woods and then it will become more pretty. Good news!We saw 1 deer and 1 snake today. Unfortunately, the other animals that we saw today, as well as the last couple days, were ticks. We both had ticks crawling up our legs today. We were able to get them removed before they embedded. Tick season is obviously here and thus the need for our daily tick checks. The hiker that we talked to at dinner mentioned that he had ticks in Maryland at Easter time! Seems like a very early start to the tick season.We¢re not really sure what mile marker we are at tonight. Perhaps 860.9. We¢re definitely past 860.3, which was a Blue Ridge Parkway crossing. It's 8:20 p.m. and it's been raining off and on since we got here at 6:30. During one of the lighter rains, we put on our rain jackets with just our underwear to go out and hang the food bags so that we did not get more of our clothes wet. I'm sure we set quite a fashion statement with our new looks! Luckily, no hiker came by when we were out there in skivvies, rain jackets and camp shoes. Tonight we had to use two bags to hang our stove and all of our food! That¢s the first time our one food bag was not enough. We used the tent bag to hold the extra food and stove. The food bag probably weighs about 25 pounds. We had a hard time hoisting it up into the tree using our bear rope. Grasshopper had to jump and push it up while Brakeman pulled on the rope. We got it as high as we could that way and then we poked the bottom of it with a stick to try to push it up even more. It's not quite 10' off the ground, which it should be for bear protection.   It¢s probably more like 9' but it's the best we can do given the weight of it. We did not have a lot of choice hanging trees either. Top priority tomorrow is to eat the brownies, as they are the heaviest item. Next priority is to eat as much of the bulky items as possible so that we can get the food to fit into one bag. This is the most volume of food that we've had on the entire trip but the goal is to get some meat on Brakeman, so this is what we need to be doing. It's 8:30 and getting dark. It's about 70 degrees. Because of the heat forecasted again for tomorrow, we are going to get an early start and enjoy the cool air before the scorching heat arrives. We have the alarm set for 5:00 and we hope to be on the trail before 6:00. We have 23 miles to hike. Late afternoon showers are forecasted for tomorrow as well.We have been warned by both hikers we passed today that water is very scarce between the huts and that we need to stock up at each hut because basically that's all there is. We carried 10 pounds of water from the spring to our campsite today and that's going to have to get us 9 miles up the trail tomorrow to the next hut, so we're in good shape at least until that point. Goodnight from Shenandoah! We finally made it!