A Hiking Story
Wednesday
November 23 – the ninth anniversary of my ordination - was the third day of my
hike. The first day was foggy, the
second day was rainy. For two days I had
passed colorfully named scenic view after scenic view, but could only see
through the fog and rain for 100 yards or so. The third day – well. All days start about the same. It takes about an hour to get some breakfast
– even if it is just some granola bars and hot chocolate – and get everything
packed back up and ready to go. It was
nice starting downhill – but downhill means you-know-what, and on Wednesday it
meant going down low enough to meet the highway and a park entrance. Going back uphill was a two-hour trek up the
east side of the Shenandoahs to the top of Mary’s Rock. It seemed like a worthy goal for an
ordination anniversary. The rain was
dripping off the trees and it seemed like it was going to rain again – which
mean putting on my rain gear, and then taking it off when it didn’t really
rain. Rain gear does a good job of
keeping the rain out, but it can also make it steamy “inside” especially when
burning all that energy to climb as well as walk. Climbing means fighting gravity as well as
inertia. I do better against inertia
than gravity.
Getting to
the top was elusive. It seemed like it
must be just around the next bend or just behind the next rock. I was almost relieved to get there several
times before the rock in front of me was the last one. Stepping around the rock from the east side
to the west side, the wind and the view hit me at the same time. It seemed like the wind was blowing at 40 –
50 miles an hour as it hit the side of the mountain and then was forced up and
over the top, and I was at the top. I
could hardly stand up, and the cold wind that was beating against me was
chilling me so fast that it scared me a little.
But the sun and the view out over the Shenandoah
Valley was amazing. Little
farms with barns and silos covered the valley floor, with little clusters of
houses in villages and bigger clusters in towns.
Wednesday
was a long day, hiking right along the crest of the ridge. Every time the path ducked down on the east
side of the ridge there was some relief from the wind. Every time it passed along the very top or
down the west side, the views were great, but wind! I had to cover a lot of miles that day to get
to the next shelter. By 2:30 in the
afternoon I was passing by Skyland Lodge – the place where Valerie, Margaret
and her mother and I would share a late Thanksgiving on Friday. After hiking for ten miles, I still had four
miles to go and sunset comes at five o’clock.
In good terrain I can make two miles an hour. I was tired, but told myself, “You can do
this” as I passed the stables where the horses were already out in the pasture.
The light
was getting dim when I started smelling the smoke from someone’s wood
fire. That meant the shelter was pretty
close. As I turned off the side trail
down to the shelter the sun had already set.
The view out over the Shenandoah Valley
revealed the sparkling lights from a small town. The shelter was empty, and even though there
was a pile of wood that some previous hiker had gathered, the wind was too
strong to make a fire. The temperature
was down close to freezing and the wind made it feel even colder, but I had
enough layers to stay warm and get set-up for boiling some water for dinner
with my alcohol stove. There must have
been a clear line-of-sight to a cell-tower down below because I got a good
signal on my cell phone and called Valerie.
A hundred
yards further down the path, there was a small cabin – one of several that the
Potomac Appalachian Trail Club make available.
Soon, a father and son came up the trail to check me out and invite me
down to warm up by their fire. It was a
nice ending to a long day. A family with
three sons had rented the cabin for the Thanksgiving holidays and were roasting
a chicken over the fire. They had spent
the day gathering firewood and now were enjoying the results of their
adventures. The well-chinked logs kept
the wind and cold out. The gas lantern
made it bright and cheerful, pushing bedtime back later than it would normally
be for me who would usually eat, clean up, and crawl into a warm sleeping bag
no matter how early it might be. It was
nice to be able to peel off my layers and get warmed up and spend a little time
with some people who just chanced to meet out in the woods. But soon, even though it was only 8:00, my
tired body told me it would need the next ten or eleven hours to recover for
the next day’s hike.
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