July 3  Mile 980

Spent another great night at Don's place. One nice thing about slack packing this way is we become like a day hiker- take your own fresh water from home, make a fresh sandwich, and have lots of room for fruit and chips. And Oreo cookies. Yum. Normally our lunches are peanut butter or cheese and tortillas shells. With Don dropping us off and picking us up, we had to do a configuration that linked hiway to hiway- today that meant another 20 mile day, basically 20 miles north from Front Royal, Va. Fortunately, it was a another nice terrain day. We were again in the woods all day, until about mile16 when we entered Sky Meadows State Park. The trees departed and we had nice views across meadows and into the valleys below- hence the name- Sky Meadows, I suppose.
I rattle off these miles like they are nothing- that is not so. They are all very hard. I can't believe we are doing 14 or 15 mile days, much less 20s. It's not monotonous, it can be grueling if you are climbing big mtns or struggling to pick your way through boulder fields. You just have to keep on going. And it's always changing. Someone recently said, there are no easy miles on the AT, and I think that is pretty much true. When the trail goes flat and smooth, you think, ahh, finally, but it's short lived and you are back to rocks or mtns or slabs of tilted sandstone. But you just keep going, cause you want to know what up beyond that next bend. Someone asked me about what it is like to have to hike 14-15 miles every day. Hadn't really thought about it that way and didn't have a good answer. I think it's because you take the trail in little bites. It makes my head hurt to think of the whole thing at once, sort of like trying to understand the size of the universe. Take it a day at a time, I suppose and let that be sufficent. We are out here for 6 or 7 months, and that's a long time to get somewhere. Before this, when I  did day hikes, I might do 7 miles, feel exhausted, feel proud and go home. We have to at least double that every day. But it seems to go quickly, and as I have mentioned, even on woodsy days, you pass great rock outcrops, beautiful streams, cliffs, fields up high few have seen, old farms, orchards, and views. If terrain is good, we go about 2 miles an hour, as I have mentioned before. So if we start by 8, we can do 10 miles by lunch, and finish by 5-6 PM. The longer we are out here, the greater the endurance it seems. It's just if my foot hurts, or my knee hurts, or my back, that makes it difficult.
Today we had an extra treat discovering mountain raspberries, or as the locals call it wineberries- Cisco picked them right from the vine and ate them all afternoon. I didn't have but one, being afraid to eat anything out here- but they seem harmless enough.
So we finished up the day earlier than expected, ending at 6:45, with Don picking us up. Tired, but not exhusted. We have done three 20 mile days in one 8 day period- going 127 miles. Never thought we could do so much. Hadn't done a 20 mile day since the Smokys. Others do a lot more, but this is enough for me.



Sent from my iPhone