VA Blues
June 29
2024
As the Proclaimers said: “Oh I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more” and so readers, who I have begun to think of as my imaginary friends though I know you are real, I have walked 500 miles and then I did, in fact, walk 500 more. (And yes, we definitely had a sing-a-long at both those milestones, not to worry). Sorry it’s been so long since my last update but Virgina has well and truly consumed most of my energy for the past month and a half. Virginia spans 554 miles of the AT, the longest of any state on the trip. After that, it's just 4 miles of West Virginia; barely long enough to get to the "West Virginia" part of Take Me Home, Country Roads, before moving on to Maryland.
Besides its length, Virginia has stood out for other reasons. The rain combined with the heat and the dense tree coverage in this area has made it feel like we're hiking through a rainforest, complete with exotic (sometimes comically cartoonish) bird song that Moon Unit loves to imitate and heaping helpings of mosquitoes that love to feast on me. Judging by the number of bites I've sustained, I'd say I'm missing about a pint of blood at this point. Maddenly, Sandals seems to get no bites at all. He’ll just shrug and say, “Must be because I taste bad”. Luckily, mosquitoes are the only biting creatures that have actually had success so far, with one notable exception which deserves its own paragraph. In fact, nearly all the wildlife we've seen has been pretty harmless. There are plenty of deer around, countless tiny, bright orange lizards we've dubbed "Gummy Lizards", Rat Snakes which like to lie across the trail and just stare you down (they're non-venomous, but alarmingly huge), and... ponies. Yes, that's right, ponies! Just north of Damascus, there's an area called the Grayson Highlands which actually has herds of wild ponies to help control the vegetation. It's a popular local spot, so they're very used to people and you can just wander amongst them, as if you were in some sort of Enya music video. Tree Beard decided they were going to wander off and commune with them and we didn’t see them again until camp that night. To this day I still don’t know what happened.
A definite lowlight, on the other hand, happened just on the other side of Damascus, two days before we hit town. We had just finished up a brutal 18 mile day, and ended up claiming the very last tent spots at the nearest shelter. The water source was down an extremely steep grade which stretched down so far it felt like we were hauling water out of Hell. So I guess it was really no surprise that, when we finally collapsed in our respective shelters, we completely slept through the brazen theft and vandalism of a bunch of our cooking equipment. The suspect: raccoons. Nearly everything in that particular bag was gnawed into uselessness, and Catnip’s cooking pot was missing entirely. We spent a good while combing the underbrush for it, but without success. Presumably there is now a gang of raccoons out there making fiendish little stews and scheming after a nice cutlery set. Catnip now has a blood feud against racoons and I caution any that might be reading this to steer clear of her in the future.
Also, it turns out that Virginia wasn't exactly the land of gently rolling hills and effortless travel that we had been led to believe. The rock dial has definitely been turned up over the past few hundred miles, as has the heat dial, and the 'feels like an unvented bathroom after a long shower' dial. You may feel my complaints are exaggerated, however, I will just say if you have hiked Virginia’s “Roller Coaster” in 90 plus degree heat, then you will know that I am not. For those of you who might not have undertaken such an insane thing, this is the jist: the Roller Coaster is an infamous section of the trail that covers just 13.4 miles but has over 3500 vertical feet of steep up and down hills with absolutely no views as pay-off. I think this must have been where the term PUD (pointless up and down) had to have originated because the Roller Coaster has them in abundance! The hardship though makes the cold beers at the end even sweeter. It makes me lose myself in the sound of my tramily laughing. It reminds me that these are all just moments, some beautiful, some terrible but all fleeting and there won’t be an infinite number of them. The halfway point approaches and with it….the end not too far behind.