Harpers Ferry, W.V.

6/10/2010

Hello from D.C. I’m taking a few days off to visit friends in the city, but on the trail I’ve left off at Harpers Ferry, W.V. That means I’m at the “psychological halfway point,” and done with the southern states’ portion of the A.T. I’ve had some great adventures since my last update.

After leaving Waynesboro (Kristy, our trail goddess, drove us all over town the morning of the 1st to run errands, and then dropped us off at the trailhead. Thanks for the support, Kristy!), we did a short day into Shenandoah National Park and stayed at the first shelter. Shortly after we all bedded down for the night, my hiking friend Jibitz screamed out loud–a large black mass in the corner of the shelter she had thought was trash turned out to be a very, very large spider. Luckily the shelter had two stories, so we all crowded into the lower, spider-less area. I had dreams that the spider had built a fake shelter to trap hikers as prey, and that the entire park was staffed by giant, Smokey-the-Bear-esque spiders wearing ranger outfits. Luckily, neither of these dreams came out to be true.

After two months on the trail, I finally saw a black bear. The trail through SNP parallels Skyline Drive, a scenic byway built during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps. All along this road are waysides, buildings which contain a gift shop, short-order restaurant, and restrooms. I was taking a day off (”zero-ing”) at one of these waysides with Jibitz, Fynious and Heads Up when a black bear came out of the woods and started walking down the road. He walked right past us and up through the woods towards a camp ground. This turned out to be standard behavior not only for bears, but all wildlife within the park boundary. They definitely are aware that they are protected in the park and behave accordingly, without fear of people. I saw five more bear before I left the park, including two cubs who were mugging for tourists along the driveway to the park’s Big Meadows Lodge.

It took me 8 days to move through the park, with 2 of those days being spent in Fairfax, Va., with a group of hikers at our friend Marty McFly’s house. We went to an REI, where I made some gear changes (lighter rain coat, lighter sleeping pad, sent home rain pants), and to Chipotle, which I didn’t know I had missed until I took my first bite of burrito. I took more time off in the park when my friends from D.C. came to visit at Big Meadows. I took them on a day hike down to a waterfall, and it started to pour on us. We tried to dry off in the lodge’s taproom, which was very reminiscent of The Shining (the lodge hasn’t been updated in many years), but I think they still went back to the city soaked to the bone.

Instead of bear cables like they have in Georgia and North Carolina, the food-hanging system in SNP is this device called a bear pole. It is a tall iron pole with hooks on the top. Hikers use a ten-foot iron rod to hoist their food bags up onto these hooks. At one of the shelters, I was struggling to get my heavy bag of food (with all the waysides and lodges, I barely ate anything out of my own bag all through the park) up onto this rung. With the bear pole being in full-view of the shelter, my trouble getting my food bag up was the entertainment for the night. It took me a good 20 minutes to do the job, with the full shelter heckling me the entire time.

We walked out of the park on the 8th and into Front Royal, Va., for a quick resupply and lunch. We ate at a pizza place where they must not get many hikers, because the owners kept peppering us with questions about the hike–where do you sleep? what do you eat? why on earth would you do this voluntarily? From the shelter we stayed at that night, right past Front Royal, we were only two days from Harpers Ferry and a scheduled pick-up for this time off in D.C. Fynious was catching a ride into the city with me, so we did two big days including “The Rollercoaster,” a silly section of trail so-named because it is 14 miles of sharp ascents and descents.

The walking through Northern Va. was nice–I passed through Sky Meadows State Park in a dense fog, which felt very ethereal and other-worldly. I kept imagining the ghosts of Civil War soldiers to emerge from the trees. The walk into Harpers was nice, crossing the Shenandoah and climbing down to the historic downtown. Laura and Chris came to pick me up and got to meet some of my hiking friends, like an old German guy named Eddy who is very funny. They got a kick out of listening to him talk with another German hiker, as they both speak a bit and could understand the conversation.

Plans for D.C.–World Cup! Old haunts! Not Hiking! Till next time.