June 27

Getting my learn on

After yesterday's average-type hike of about 14 miles or so, today sure was different.  We didn't make it very far.  A laughable 5.7 miles to Pine Knob shelter.  The hiking was great.  It was ungodly hot, so that had a lot to do with it.  We took several long breaks throughout the day for water and rest.  We had a lot of fun too though.  First up was Washington Monument State Park.  We went into the museum there and saw all kinds of amazing artifacts from the Civil War.  The Park Service staff there was extremely knowledgeable and I really enjoyed the information that he gave us.  I knew going into this hike that the section around WVa and Maryland would put us really close to Civil War battlefields.  But I was taken aback to learn that some of the same gaps that we had just walked through in the last day or two, were the bloody battle sites, were in some instances, over 6000 people had died.  Absolutely staggering.  Like, oh, by the way that shelter back there in such and such gap, yeh, that's were thousands of people died 150 years ago.  Wow.  If there's anywhere on the trail that you're going to have an encounter with the supernatural, this would be it.  Totally surrounded by history.  Ugly history, but history nonetheless.  We hiked up to the monument, built in the 1800s by local towns people, to honor George Washington.  Nice views from the top of the stone tower.  The rest of the afternoon, we got distracted on numerous occasions to pick wild fruit.  Cherries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries.  Yum!  We came out of the woods briefly into a residential area, and crossed a fenced in footbridge that went over I-70.  It kind of looked like the pterodactyl cage from that Jurassic Park movie (JP3 I think).  Anyway.  We got lots of waves from cars going under us, and even a honk from a trucker.  Awesome.  We pulled in to Pine Knob around 3:30 or so, planning to just take a break, but we ended up calling it a day.  We set up camp in the woods away from the shelter, started a fire, and cooked dinner.  Late in the evening, Tink and Highking pulled in, so that was cool that they caught back up.  Apparently, they had gotten tied up in Harper's even longer than we had, and had been trying to catch us over the past few days.

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here" - quite the description of battle.  Wow.