AT Adventures: Day 41, 7-25-07

Caleb and I faced another day of rain today. So-Close had mailed her rain jacket home early in her hike, so she didn’t have that at all. Caleb and I were worried about that, because…well, we’d had experience with rain and the importance of Rain Jackets. You need to be able to stay dry. Or at least barely damp. After a while, there isn’t much you can do, but the drier the better. She picked up a poncho at the Ranger Station, so at least she wasn’t getting rained on again. About midway or so we ran into a shelter and a sad entry by a person we had been chasing for a while, Phoenix. We found his hoodie and a desperate note in the Log. He didn’t have any rain gear, and up to that point, the summer had been very dry, so it wasn’t a big deal. If it rains one day, but the next is nice, then it’s no worries, you dry out during that day. But this was the 3^rd day that it had rained, and he was (Mother and Speed had met this guy, so we learned about him from them) wearing jeans and a cotton hoodie. There’s a hiker saying: Cotton Kills. This is because once a cotton garment gets wet, it never gets dry again. Caleb and I discovered this on our first trip. We went out, sweated a lot the first day, and that shirt was soaked. Sweated a lot the second day, and the new shirt we put on that day got soaked. 4 days later we emerge, still soaked. Cotton never dries. This means that, if it is cold, the water gets cold, and sucks your heat away. So this poor guy was hiking in soaking wet and cold clothes, with two dogs, one of which didn’t like him. At the end of his note, he stated that his hands were having a hard time grasping the pen. He was cold, and had been cold for a few days. That sort of trial gets into your head very quickly. There was a highway only a few miles away, and he expressed a desire to find a hotel and get extracted. So after this shelter, we find some blackberry bushes and gorge on tasty blackberries. Cross I-81. There was a hotel there, and a big red barn restaurant. Caleb and I actually walked up to this restaurant, sad in some chairs by the entrance, and took off our shoes and socks. Then I took the insoles out of my shoes so they could dry a little bit. It was then that I realized that my right insole had been pounded between the ground and my shoe so much that I had worn a hole in it. I was impressed. I guess about 600 miles would do that…we decided to keep going, and found the shelter we were to stay near. It was pretty nice, but I-81 could still be heard. That was annoying. I didn’t want to hear cars zooming by all night…oh well. I still went to sleep very quickly.