Date: 2017-10-03
From: Reed Creek

To: Partnership shelter
Miles today: 18.4
Weather: clear sky

How do you pick between today's highlights? We hit the three-quarter mark on the trail. We met Sriracha's parents and grandmother and had lunch with them at a Mexican restaurant. Our packs are now laden with granny's homemade fudge. Tonight's shelter is not only ridiculously luxurious (showers!) but also one of only a few on the trail where you can order pizza to be delivered -- and we did.Against that competition, it says something that my personal highlight for the day was Long John Silver's response to the list of 19th Century school punishments displayed at Lindamood Schoolhouse.The original 24 punishments were amusing enough: boys and girls caught playing together would receive four lashes. Drinking "spiritous liquors" at school merited eight lashes but playing cards earned you 10. Building swings and climbing trees was similarly proscribed.Long John Silver penned his response at Chatfield shelter, the next one south after we left the one-room 1894 schoolhouse. Clearly he'd had some hiking time to come up with 20 trail sins, which included: Neglecting to bear bag (one lash), Yellow blazing (two lashes), bitching about the White Mountains (four lashes), Enjoying Connecticut (five lashes) and -- worst of all -- asking if I'm going the whole way (10 lashes).Overall, it was quite an eventful day. That was good because it was also a pretty dreary day in terms of the actual hiking terrain, in which we cruised out miles through yet more of the long green tunnel.After our two-day cold spell, temperatures this morning were back to normal and that made it easier to get going. But with the prospect of town food only a few hours away in Atkins, there was never any doubt that we'd have a powerful incentive to hike.Just as we were about to get underway, a couple who were clearly thru-hiking -- let's just say that there's a look that people get after more than a thousand miles which is immediately recognisable to those who have done the same -- came barrelling through on trail and steadfastly ignored the cheery greeting that Sweetblood and others made to them. Ah well, they're hiking their own hike. Just as we'd reached camp the previous evening we'd passed a big sign supposedly signifying the trail's three-quarter mark (although in true nobocentric fashion, it was marked solely as the "one quarter" mark). Like all such permanent signs, it was now in the wrong place because of the southern half of the trail being lengthened by namby pamby initiatives such as switchbacks.The current three-quarters mark was a few miles into today's hike but I could see from Guthook that it was at a point -- where the trail rejoined the ridgetop after traversing around a knoll -- that might not be obvious on the ground. But after keeping a close eye on the interaction between the trail and the terrain, I was pretty confident I found the right spot then spent a little while turning some sticks into a "3/4" sign beside the trail.From there, the trail took me past the site of a former shelter which seemed to have burned down -- the steps up to it still existed, along with the stumps on which it sat but, Ozymandias style, nothing else remained. Now it was a campsite rather than a shelter.That in turn took us into a series of agricultural fields and eventually into Atkins, an interstate services town which we reached via an underpass that deprived us of the juvenile satisfaction of mooning the passing traffic.In keeping with the tramily's southern origins -- Dirt was from Damascus, less than a week away, while Sriracha and Sweetblood were both from North Carolina -- we're getting into the zone of serious familial trail magic. Today it was Sriracha's parents and grandmother, who insisted on paying for our lunch at the Mexican restaurant, El Burrito Loco, connected to a gas station.It says something about hiking vs non-hiking metabolisms that we inhaled the hiker special -- the mountain man burrito -- while Sriracha's family struggled to eat more than half.But it was also nice to see an example of family support in action, especially when my own is so far away. Although there was a tense moment when Sriracha casually announced our intended finish date is November 11, a week later than his mother, a nurse, had arranged to take time off so she can be present...Lunch fuelled the rest of the afternoon, as we headed to Lindamood Schoolhouse, where AT hikers are welcome to stay overnight, and then up to Chatfield shelter, where Long John Silver's wit kept us amused for the rest of the miles to Partnership shelter. This was a very popular place, and for good reason. Besides being an awesome two-level shelter with showers and water taps, there was also pizza delivery. It helped explain why everyone nearby had converged on this place, making 19 of us in total. Besides Team KRT, there was also Three Goldilocks and the Bear, a flip flopper called Idaho Bones, several section hikers and Pinkman, a sobo thru-hiker who'd been living here for four days while recovering from a staph infection.The others had gone to a Walmart and returned with a slab of beers, which we consumed around the fire while waiting for our pizza order -- 11 family-size pizzas for 19 of us -- to arrive.This has been a good day. Life is good.AT fact of the day: In stark contrast to today's many highlights was a definite lowlight. I received a message from a friend in New Zealand that her father, Norman Hardie, had gone into palliative care. Norman was a remarkable man -- just one of innumerable accomplishments was he made the first ascent of Kangchenjunga, the world's third highest peak, while on the four-person reconnaissance trip in 1955. The full-scale ascent team being assembled for the following year was the same crew that had made the first ascent of Everest two years earlier and Norman and the others knew they were unlikely to be in summit parties then so he and his friends on the reconnaissance "gave it a good nudge" and all four reached the summit. My favourite memories of him are of walking alongside him in New Zealand's southern alps -- a pace that lent him to tell tales of his younger years -- and each night in the hut, when he created hot toddies that remain my gold standard for such drinks. While walking today, I was also in touch with my old newspaper in New Zealand to set up Norman's obituary so that despite the depleted newsroom sizes of modern journalism, it would be done properly by someone who knew something about mountaineering. Combined with also trying to arrange to hike with Three Gallon and Cucumber Boy in the Grayson Highlands, I had a lot of metaphorical balls in the air today...