AT Adventures: Day 21, 7-5-07

Brutal day. Only 16.6 miles, but brutal. It didn’t start off too badly, but we had to battle through a 4-5 mile section of downhill from about mile 8-9 to about 13. Downhill is hard on your joints. Trekking poles help a lot with that. So we get to that point, and then realize that we’ve got 3 miles to go to get to the shelter we were planning on stopping at that night. I assumed that C would want to pause after those 13 because of his leg, but he was game for continuing, and so was I, so we pushed onward. At the 13 mile point, we met Krebopple and these two guys and their dog. They were hiking for a bit, and wanted to go further, but their dog was having a pretty tough time. She was young, and had gone crazy at the beginning of the hike, so she was pretty tired now and panting a great deal. So we start on the next 3.6 miles, and the profile didn’t look too bad. It looked like it would mostly be a ridge run. It’s here that we learned a bitter truth: the profile lies! It does. It was a ridge, certainly, but it was a roller coastery ridge. Up a hill, down a hill, up a hill, down a hill. We were starting to struggle, and I had hit the wall so hard I was thinking deliriously of food. I pause on an uphill and turn to Caleb. ‘Buddy, I’m about done. I need to eat something.’ So we grabbed our food bags. The Prof, earlier (the day before or this AM, I’m not sure), had given us 2 packs of Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal. We pulled those out, ripped open the tops, and then each of us ate a pack of dry oatmeal. It was…now that I think about it, pretty gross. At the time: wonderful. We sucked down some water to help get it all down, and then kept on. It was the best thing ever. We picked up enough to get into camp and not kill anyone or each other. Ate a snack, set up our hammocks, oozed through getting the other stuff ready for the night, and crashed, secure in the knowledge that we had only 3 miles into Hot Springs the next day.