AT Adventures: Day 39, 7-23-07

It was an odd day today. It was cold and late when we woke up, but it cleared up nicely and warmed up as well, so it wasn’t too horrific. VA had been really good to us so far, all the trails were kept up very nicely, with a minimum of undergrowth and assorted other trail annoyances that you run into when dealing with a trail that’s gone to seed. Anyway, it starts to rain. We put on our pack covers and keep moving. It starts raining harder, so we put on our rain jackets and keep going. It keeps raining. We were hoping to camp alongside this creek, but when we arrive there, its on the side of a cliff, and there’s nothing nearby to camp at. Nothing at all. So we keep going, looking for a spot. Eventually, we end up at Trimpi Shelter, 20 miles from where we started. When did we plan on doing a 20 miler? But oh well. So this shelter had been made a while ago, and was built of stone. It also had a fireplace built into it. After Caleb and I set up, he has the idea to start a fire. I start looking for wood, and he steps in. ‘Greg, you aren’t going to find anything that’s on the ground that’ll be good. The rain would have soaked into it by now, and it will all be super hard to light.’ ‘Well, what do we do?’ ‘We look for dead trees’. So we found a few that were standing around the random camping area. Caleb grabs on side, I grab the other, and we start shaking. Eventually it starts working loose, and falls. We drag this log over to where two trees are growing close together and use that as a leverage point to break this tree into smaller pieces. Then we repeat for a few other trees, until we had a decent pile. And then: fire! It was the first (and last) fire we made on the trail. It was totally worth it. All our stuff got dried out, and that was glorious. The wood supply ended, and it was dark, so that was the end of the day for this particular event-filled day.