Our groups is down by two… sort of three. It’s only temporary, but it feels weird. We only have three tents up at our site. Usually there’s five. Snow Monkey and Wonder Woman are off for four days to go to a cousin’s wedding. Atlas has his parents in town for the weekend. He’ll still hike, but is spending the nights with his folks. The awesome part about that… we all get to slack pack!
Slack packing is when you just take a day pack out and all of your other stuff is dropped off to you at the end of your day. We are all super excited. Warthog and I haven’t had a chance to slack pack yet. Well… technically our first mile on the approach trail to the lodge was a slack pack. This will be the first time we get to do it for a whole day. We will only cover ten miles tomorrow since Atlas’ mom will be joining. The day after that we hope to hike 26. If we can do it, it’ll be our biggest day yet by far.
Today we hiked 13 miles. It took us to the road crossing that all three of our friends got picked up at. There is a campsite nearby that we set up at. That way we will be right at the parking lot ready for when Atlas’ family arrives to take our stuff.
The miles were actually pretty easy, but it still felt tiring. By the end of the day my feet were exhausted even though we’ve gone through much harder terrain. We walked near the Blue Ridge Parkway a lot today. It reminds me a bit of the section of trail that runs through Shenandoah National Park. Several times we came out near an overlook for cars to pull over and take in the scenery. We ate lunch at one of those spots. It was beautiful, but we didn’t stay long because there wasn’t any shade. Today was in the low 80’s. In the forest, under the protection of the tree canopy, it seemed cooler. Although there was a ten mile section without water. Knowing that, I hydrated up before and then carried a little more water than I normally would.
The forest and the path was pretty. Poor Warthog was feeling lousy and nauseous for most of the day, so he really didn’t enjoy it. I think it was dehydration. By the afternoon he was doing better. Much to his enjoyment, we ran into a bit of trail magic at one of the road crossings. It was the family of a current thru hiker (Grateful). He’s the one I wrote about that sleeps in his truck and slack packs everyday. His wife and son were out visiting so they were waiting on him to arrive. In the meantime, they offered us some soda. Of course Warthog took a cola. It seemed to help.
There isn’t too much more to write about today. It’s early now and I’m excited about crashing by 9p again. We ate dinner and then dove into the tent. In the hour and a half we’ve been there, we’ve found three separate ticks. None have bitten us, but it makes me nervous for the many we haven’t seen. We’ve known this was coming. We will just make sure to be extra diligent in our checks now. As soon as we have another day off, we will also treat our clothes with permethrin. Anything to combat these nasty little blood suckers.
-ansel