Random thoughts, musings and things I think are interesting…

I might have had the best night of sleep on the trail last night yet. Definitely top 3. Part of it was certainly the fact that I’d had only 5-6 hits the night before (would totally do the home zero again – worth the short night!) but maybe more of it is I decided to…

I woke up before the alarm at 4:30 and was on the road 20 minutes later. The route to Damascus took me down the mountain parkway onto KY 15 straight into VA. I rolled into the long term parking by the pool a few minutes after 10 and my shuttle driver was already waiting for…

Not much to report for today. Spent the morning working on my PF (rolling, stretching, sauna), the afternoon doing some drying, gear repair and resupply and the evening getting some more “town food” 😝. Heading out tomorrow at 5 AM for a 10:30 shuttle in Damascus to Iron Mountain Gap and then a 12 mile…

Just to dispel any concerns if you missed my last post, only home for a zero tomorrow. Plan to be back on trail on Saturday where I got picked up today. So last night was a doozy. The storms that were supposed to roll in today came early and started hitting us around 12:30. I…

So about last night. After I posted (from the tap room) hilarity ensued. We ended up forming a trivia team (Serenity Now! – our captain, T-bone, is a huge Seinfeld fan), losing badly, taking an unscheduled shuttle trip to Bojangles (hiker hunger is real!) where we heard stories of accepting hitches from kidnappers and then…

The first rain storm last night led to 3-4 others about an hour apart, some with some pretty rowdy thunder and lightening (one that seemed pretty close) and a tree falling at about 4 AM (no one was hurt 😝). As a result I didn’t get too much sleep so when 6:30 rolled around I…

One thing I forgot about last nights shelter: the walk to the water added at least another mile to the total for the day. In have seriously never seen water so far away from a permanent shelter. Whew, ok with that out of the way, today was a weird weather day. We left camp about…

Well that wasn’t that bad! The worries about the weather were unfounded – it ended up being a beautiful day for hiking. A little cloud cover, lower humidity and great temps. That combined with some of the flattest and best terrain (for the first 3/4 anyway) let us put in a 20 mile day on…

The word of the day today was: moist. It rained lightly overnight on and off. We got lucky in that it let up around wake up and breakfast time. But it was cloudy and on and off rainy all day. Honestly it was a little welcome since it made some of the climbs a little…