June 20

Celebration day

I heard some rustling just after first light.  Crayola was packing up and moving on to meet her parents who were picking her up.  Guess she's not one for goodbyes.  The rest of us slept in pretty late.  We didn't start hiking until after 10am I think.  Today is a big day though.  It's June 20.  That means it's the first day of summer, the summer solstice.  It's Crayola's birthday too, and Bambam hiked out fast from camp to try to catch her to give her a card we had all signed.  He was leaving the trail for a bit anyway, and needed to get back to his vehicle a couple hundred miles south.  It's also West Virginia Day, and Rainbow Eyes is really excited about that.  He's really wanting us to make it to the border today, so we can be in his home state of WVA for WVA Day.  This year the border just so happens to be at the 1000.0 mile mark too.  Pretty cool, but that means we need to hike about 23 miles today.  Also since it's the first day of summer, it's unofficially "hike naked" day on the trail.  Spoiler alert:  I didn't participate.  Sorry ladies!  It sure would have made sense to though.  It's brutally hot today.  Our pace is slow.  We are drenched in sweat.  My feet are soaked.  Not from rain, or stepping in a creek.  No, the sweat is rolling off of me, down my legs, and saturating my socks and shoes.  We've been taking small breaks all day, pretty much at every water source.  Drinking whatever water we were carrying, and refilling there.  Dipping bandannas in the springs, and cooling off our legs, arms, and heads.  The heat is miserable.  We would hear later that the temperature was around 97 degrees.  We got to Rod Hollow shelter around 2pm or so.  Took a lunch break.  Drank tons of water.  We all took naps.  Apache and I strung our hammocks up across the beams of the cooking pavilion here.  We spent about 4 hours at the shelter resting in the afternoon heat.  We had only hiked about 10 miles.  We still have 13 more to do to get to the West Virginia line.  Totally demoralizing.  Not only that, but right past this shelter is the start of the infamous "roller coaster".  I've heard mixed things about the difficulty of this section, but what it boils down to is a 13 mile stretch that is a series of 10 or so climbs of about 300-600 feet.  Up and down, up and down.  We trudged out to the start of the roller coaster, in relatively high spirits.  The first hill was tough, but we did okay.  Second climb came up and we tackled that.  We were still going strong.  I even got a hilarious video of the crew coming over one of the ridges.  Going up the hill they were making 'click-click-click' noises, like you'd hear on the way up a hill on roller coaster tracks, then as they passed the top and headed down the descent, they all raised their hands up in the air, screaming 'wwwweeeeeeeeeee' on the way down.  Hey you've gotta keep yourself amused out here.  Somewhere around the third or fourth climb, it was dark out.  Still hot as Hades.  We were night hiking over the roller coaster, trying to finish out a 23 mile day, in upper 90 degree heat.  I never said any over our ideas were smart.  Hey, we're just trying to add bonus points to our hike.  Anyone can hike the Priest and Three Ridges, but who marathons it?  At night?  Anyone can hike the roller coaster.  But who does it at night?  My new mp3 player is failing though.  It got wet with sweat, or humidity, today.  The speakers are still great, and I used Tink's Ipod to give us some hiking tunes along the way.  The roller coaster ended up getting the best of us though.  I don't think it would have been so bad if the trail was graded better.  The climbs and descents were one thing.  It was really steep for most stretches of it.  And it was very rocky and rooty.  Then there was the heat.  It was a recipe for slow hiking.  Our head lamps attracted all kinds of bugs.  I kept breaking through spiderwebs with my face.  We were dripping with sweat, tired, and miserable.  We ended up stopping at a campsite, about 3 miles short of our goal of the state line, totally drained.  I'm having huge foot issues from wet shoes rubbing my feet for the past couple of days.  All us guys have some bad chaffing issues in terrible places to be chafed.  The roller coaster gets my vote for worst section of the AT so far.  Tink had packed out some sparklers, and despite us just wanting to pass out, we lit them in honor of all the things we were celebrating today.

The worst roller coaster in history.