- 6/12: Miles 972.1-994.1 (22.0 mi.)
- Total ascent: 4721’; descent: 4649’
- 6/13: Miles 994.1-1016.8 (22.7 mi.)
- Total ascent: 6358’; descent: 5974’
There’s nothing fun about night hiking, much less with a weak head lamp. If you merely stub your toe, you’re lucky. Chances are good you’ll slip or lose the trail, or get your feet wet in a puddle you didn’t see. Chances are even better you’ll be a hungry, loud nuisance to everyone when you finally do make it to camp.
We night-hiked to make our June 14 deadline to D.C. (which, by the way, we did). We got in at 11:30 p.m. the night of June 12, again having struggled to get a taxi out of Front Royal. We didn’t hit the trail until 8 a.m. the next day, as a result, and made poor time over “The Rollercoaster,” a notoriously hilly section of trail due, at least in part, to poor trail-building.
Because this 14-mile stretch is so rocky and steep, it’s never or nearly never brush-hogged, making for an unpleasant, itchy hike with few break spots. We treated it as such and powered through, aside from a brief period we spent under a rock ledge to avoid the worst of a rain storm.
Through these tough days, we developed a better dinner strategy for long days: Instead of cooking in camp, we pulled off the trail around 6 p.m. for a meal stop and then resumed hiking afterward. The first evening, we cooked right beside a spring to avoid carrying extra water. On June 13th, we ate snacks rather than haul out the cook set.
Snack dinners are OK once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to do them every day. A minority of hikers (a proportion that grows in the summer) eat trail mix and crackers all day every day, which may help them eat more regularly but would be unsatisfying and make counting calories more difficult.
The other topic I want to tackle in this post is the precipitous drop in the frequency at which we’ve been seeing other thru-hikers.
Although I’m willing to consider that we’ve simply been hiking strange hours, that hypothesis suggests we’d see more tents beside the trail than we have. We know of a couple that took three days off in Front Royal, and towns do always hold people up. The other possibility is that people are aqua-blazing or yellow-blazing rather than actually hiking this less scenic, less popular area.
Regardless, we saw just four hikers in almost 50 miles, which is a little too sparse even for my taste. It’s nice for numerous reasons–emergencies, trail maintenance, conversation–to have space but not to be totally alone out here. We’ll see whether the crowd returns come New England.
Difficult though it’s been, I have not discussed Harper’s Ferry or the train ride into D.C. I want to consolidate that material into a “DC Days” post in order to spend more time touring and with family. And, frankly, there wasn’t much to report other than the train being late or our stop by ATC headquarters. It wasn’t open yet–we got started around 5 a.m. and were in Harper’s Ferry around 9 a.m.–so we settled for a photo in front of the building.
How wonderful it’s going to be to catch up in depth and in person, after only phone calls with family for the past 3 months. We’re also salivating for Ethiopian food and to see, as surprised as I am to say this, something other than forest and rocks.
Capitol city-state, here we come! Let’s go get tired of the concrete jungle again.
