Follow the AT Chaplain

Today, the boys and I left Four Pines Hostel and headed up to the third and final feature of Virginia’s “Triple Crown,” Dragon’s Tooth. It’s a huge stone monolith that looks like well, a dragon’s tooth. Check out the size of this thing compared to me!The majority of my day was spent hoping and praying I didn’t step on a yellow jacket nest. It’s their most aggressive time of year right now and I’ve passed three in the middle of the trail so far. Thankfully, so far so good with spotting the cloud of bees and going around their home.

In addition to befriending a new thru hiker, Pocket, this afternoon brought a huge milestone-mile 1500!!!

I know that every day on trail is forward progress, but this one has a special significance as it means I have just over a quarter of the trail left.My heart is nowhere near ready to quit, but my legs are looking forward to Springer a bit more. We’ll be there soon enough!

BamBam and I decided to celebrate 1500 by stopping short of our goal today in hopes of a big day tomorrow.

Today was supposed to be another 20. It didn’t become one, but it was definitely a blast! This morning, Spork and I set out for a sunrise at McAfee Knob-the most photographed spot on the AT.We were hoping the fog would clear off, but it didn’t…so we took naps on the rock instead. After the knob, we went down to an AT classic–The Homeplace. It’s an all you can eat southern gem.

I also got the privilege of hanging out with Pastor Scott of Catawba UMC. Thanks for the ride and the tour of town! After the Homeplace, all I could manage was 6 more miles to Four Pines Hostel. They even let me borrow their van for a snack run. It’s even blue!

Today seemed to include a little bit of every bit of life on the trail. I woke up early, forded a creek in the dark, and hiked into the sunrise.

At mile 11, about 5 other hikers and I made a quick stop in Daleville to resupply, eat 2,000 calories worth of Wendy’s, and charge our devices.

From there, we were nowhere near done hiking and continued on towards the most famous section of the trail in Virginia. Check out this lake we passed along the way: The highlight of the day was cooking dinner on Tinker Cliffs…pictures really can’t do it justice.

The sun came out! The sun came out! The sun came out! I know I sound dramatic on this blog, but I can think of few things more discouraging and uncomfortable than days and days and weeks of rainfall. Virginia is ahead by 10 inches.

With the sun came lifted spirits and my first views since Maine. We spent almost the entire day criss crossing the Blue Ridge Parkway-a famous roadway. When you walk on a hilly, rocky trail within sight of a flat, smooth road it gets a little bit tempting to just grab a hitch. However, all of the hikers (to my knowledge) resisted the urge for today.

One of my favorite parts of these sections of trail is reading signs for tourists explaining what I’m doing.If you look carefully, the trail is about 150 miles longer than it was when this sign was placed now. Bonus points!

The conditions today were perfect for hypothermia. It was in the 50s, windy, and pouring down rain. Nonetheless, I made some miles (mainly because I was too cold to stop walking!).

My friend Spork and I were the only souls brave enough to leave the hostel this morning, but we trust sloshing for one more day will pay off when the sun returns to the AT.

This morning we crossed the James River on the longest footbridge on the AT.

I don’t have much to report other than slightly better feet, cold rain, and a foggy ridge. However, I did pass the Guillotine-this cool rock formation. Glad I didn’t get smashed!

I put on my shoes this morning with the intention of hiking. I made it as far as the local gas station to get a hitch before I knew my feet wouldn’t take another step.

Instead of venturing back up the mountain, I called up the local hostel and declared it a zero day.

A shower and trip to the Dollar Store for junk food later, I knew it was a good choice. The sun even came out for an hour or two so I could dry out my stuff!

As with most zero days, all I did was eat and watch Netflix, but sometimes that’s what you need to do!

By the afternoon, a dozen more hikers had rolled in ready to wait out one last round of bad weather tomorrow. One of them, Frogger is becoming a fast friend. She’s 17 and doing the AT with her dad in between high school semesters. I vividly remember what the year of college apps is like and enjoyed giving her essay (about the AT, of course!) a look. A large pizza for 6.95 was a perfect end to the day! The rain is going to come down hard again tomorrow, but I’m hiking on.

I woke up to that familiar pitter patter on the shelter roof this morning. I’m writing from a dry tent under a currently not-leaking sky.

My feet are in pretty rough shape, so the boys and I decided it would be good to go back to the valley where it’s of course not raining. After twenty pretty painful miles, we made it to Glasgow, VA. There isn’t much here besides a dinosaur statue, a Dollar General, and a town-sponsored trail shelter. However, that’s all we need!

However, exciting news!Though it was brief, I saw the sun today!!! On the way down to town, we got a little clearing that made a world of difference in spirits.The best metaphor we could come up with is that last 30 minutes of a long haul international flight when you’ve been crammed in the middle seat and miserable for 14 hours and then you open the shade and see the Sydney Opera House below. Everything still hurts, but there really is a sun up there!

Once in town, it was time for a DG resupply and all you can eat pasta for $5.50. That’s a deal I can get onboard with any day! Back to the trail with an 80-100% chance of rain for the next several days. Please pray for my disintegrating feet. Goodnight!

Guess what? It rained all day again! The weather shows no sign of stopping…at least the fire danger is pretty dang low.

Regardless, ministry continued today. I actually had one of the more serious conversations of my hike with my new trail crew today. Spork and co are all recent college graduates, two of whom don’t have a faith background and two of whom walked away from faith in college. When they asked me what I had going on my headphones (and I replied worship music), we had a 5 mile conversation about life and faith. They want to keep talking, so please join me in praying that these conversations do indeed continue and are fruitful.

After a very spiritually/emotionally intense morning, I had the gift of hiking with three other hikers I just met in the afternoon. On the complete other end of the spectrum, they are all believers (two of whom are hiking the trail before moving to Southeast Asia in the spring). It was an incredibly nourishing time for all of us to process the trail from the shared lens of faith.

When it stops raining, I promise I’ll get to take/post some more pictures, but goodnight for now from almost halfway through Virginia!

After an amazing breakfast with Kim, it was back to the rainy AT again this morning. Nothing quite like wet feet in the first step!

Still too rainy for pictures today, but I caught back up to four of my new friends-Spork, BamBam, Slim, and Ollie. They are all guys around my age and a blast to hang out with…which comes in handy for all of us when the sky continues to bucket and the temps continue to drop.

After fording (yes-fording in VA) several creeks that are crazy high due to rain, we all attacked one of the most daunting southbound climbs together: The Priest.

It’s a far cry from Katahdin, but 3,000 straight feet of vertical climbing certainly gets your blood pumping.The best part of the climb was reading the shelter log at the campsite on top. Hikers for years have used it as “confessional” for all of their trail sins. The most common ones (that are blog appropriate) are not hanging food and digging cat holes right next to perfectly good tent sites.

I had to come clean to the latter for my entry…but it was an emergency!

There aren’t too many pictures from today because well…it’s still raining.

I don’t mean to complain, but I’ve seen one sunny day since Harpers Ferry and it looks like another week of rain is on the way. Wet and wild!

Anyway, after a lovely trip to Charlottesville it was off to hike alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I got to meet a maintenance crew at the shelter I ate lunch at and couldn’t thank them enough for clearing Flo’s blow downs. I am looking forward to joining the Tennessee Eastman trail club while I’m at ETSU for med school. Nothing better than a little manual labor to break up the studying, right?

Before the rain really got going, I found this little guy-say hello to Buster the box turtle!He’s a little camera shy.

As the rain starting coming down hard and the fog got denser, my spirits started sinking. When I finally got to the road where I was planning to hitch to Devil’s Backbone brewery to meet my friends, I was worried I wouldn’t even get a ride in the dark, cold fog.

The Lord had other plans. The first and only car that came by in my direction pulled over and not only gave me a ride down the mountain, but took me to their nearby vacation house!This is Kim, my rescuer. She treated me to leftover spaghetti, a salt bath for my destroyed feet, and a warm/dry place to sleep. I’m going to have to call this magical evening the best trail magic yet!