Date: 2017-10-07
From: Taylor Valley, Damascus

To: Damascus
Miles today: 18.4

Dirt has walked home.That wouldn't usually be a matter of note, but when her walk started in Maine and involved around 1700 miles of far-from-easy trail to your home town in southern Virginia, it's an achievement that has a somewhat higher gravitas.It helped that the final lap of this epic was an easy one: slackpacking on the Virginia Creeper rail trail to downtown Damascus.This isn't strictly the AT, which mostly avoids the cruisy rail trail -- all downhill at an average grade of -1%! -- and instead, in classic AT fashion, heads into the hills for a series of PUDs that are so egregiously pointless that I'd dubbed them SPUDs: Seriously Pointless Ups and Downs.We had a few miles of hiking before reaching the rail trail but it was all downhill and on fast trail, with the only impediments to forward progress being the necessity of stopping to take in the increasingly impressive fall colours of the forests we were hiking through.After swapping Grayson's rock between us for nearly 400 miles, we left it with a note in the first shelter, asking whoever took it on to continue alerting him to its progress as it made its way towards Springer. I mentioned it on the Sobo AT fb page and several people volunteered to keep it heading southwards.Everything changed when we hit the rail trail. Being a Saturday with nice weather near the peak of fall colours conspired to see what seemed like most of the population of Virginia biking along the trail. The AT followed the rail trail across a massive timber viaduct then headed back into the woods for the first of several SPUDs.Our resident purists are Dirt and 2am, but she'd done the section from the Grayson Highlands to Damascus as a shake-down hike before heading to Maine and didn't feel the need to do it again. But Sriracha was feeling the need for purity and followed 2am on the AT while the rest of us wandered along the rail trail. We agreed to meet for lunch where the two paths intersected again. Near the rendezvous site we encountered a donation-based sausage sizzle being run as a fundraiser by Dirt's church and we lingered there for a while, including meeting Dirt's younger brothers Elijah and Harper and their dog Rosie, who were going to hike the rest of the way with us.After sharing the path with a gazillion cyclists, we opted to take the AT after lunch so we'd get some peace and quiet. Mostly this paralleled the rail trail via a less easy path on the side of the hill but eventually we crossed another road and then the trail headed up and over the final SPUD between us and Damascus, four miles away. We opted for purity and took the AT.Soon we reached the Damascus town sign and then we immediately went to the ice cream shop, where we found Happy Feet and OK in situ. Dirt's mother had left a car in town for her and we walked to that then headed back for another night of a huge meal, cocktails and cold beers.Life is very good.AT fact of the day: The proximity of the AT to the rail trail prompted some unwitting wild life encounters. Clearly most cyclists didn't know the most famous trail in the US was next to the Virginia Creeper trail and one had the misfortune to head what seemed to be an appropriate distance into the woods to attend to a call of nature, only to unwitting choose a site literally two feet from the AT. Elijah was in front at the time and stopped so the mystery cyclist wouldn't realise her mistake. As he said later: "I saw a bare!" "A bear?" others asked. "Yeh, a bare ass!"