We had gentle thunderstorms most of the night. I find this to be the most relaxing sound to sleep to (even ahead of mountain streams and box fans). That is, unless you are married to a woman who is irrationally afraid of storms that screams at every lightening flash. Nutiket, my 5th Great Pyrenees, was not afraid of storms until Bunny and I moved in together. It didn’t take her long to pick up Bunny’s fears and start locking herself in the closet during thunderstorms. If I came home and a storm was raging, I knew where to look first to find the two of them.
I woke up at 6 to pee for the first time. Did anyone catch that. I slept all night without getting up to pee. That’s how dehydrated I was from the heat yesterday. Also, I felt like crap at 6 so I tried not to wake Bunny up because I had no desire to get up without a full recovery. If only I didn’t have to blow my sleeping pad back up (but I’ve only got one more night of a leaking pad but probably 45 more years with this bladder/prostate combo). Bunny feigned sleeping because she didn’t want up this early either.
By the time we got up at 8, the family with 30 kids across the stream had already gotten up and silently left. I was amazed that they could silently break camp when so many people in a shelter feel the need to wake everyone else up. Only Devin was still in camp with us. We met him and his aunt in Harpers Ferry after they had hiked a 45 mile section. She went home, but he decided to keep hiking and is going to do the entire trail. Since we were camped near a shelter, we decided to check out the facilities before hitting the trail.
After just a little distance on the trail, we came to an informative set of signs about the Rausch Creek and the village of Rausch Gap. The unproductive mining community finally disappeared when the railroads and more productive mines came into being. Rausch Creek, where we camped, is highly acidic (pH of 4) so no aquatic life can survive. (Coincidentally, it would have been nice to tell us this BEFORE we drank the water). A couple of passive pulverizing wells were installed that break the natural limestone down and lower the acidity of the creek bringing the pH up to 6. Trout thrive below where we camped thanks to these wells.
Not too much further, we came to a flooded section of trail. Initially, I thought this was a result of the storms last night, but upon closer inspection, we saw a massive beaver dam running beside the trail. Damn beavers. I have a personal history with beavers. When I had my farm, I had 3 ponds on it. I had a beaver come in and build a lodge on the largest pond. I thought it was kind of cool until the little bastard decided my pond needed to be deeper. He kept blocking my overflow to raise the pond level flooding out part of my dam. I’d get out my tractor and knock it down only to have him build it bigger and taller. After repeating this battle 3-4 times, I decided to hire a hit on him. Bottom line, I’m not as much of a beaver fan (the little rodent type) that I used to be.
Bunny’s feet got soaked trying to navigate the flooded trail. I managed to make it across without drenching my feet. When we were getting near the end, I screamed “How much further does this sh$& go?” I heard a voice say “You’re almost through.” Nightengale was sitting down putting on her boots. She had decided to not risk it and put on her camp shoes to navigate the trail. We hadn’t even thought of that as a possibility.
I hadn’t loaded up on water when we left the shelter this morning because we had a lot of water crossings early on. After we made our second road crossing of the day, there was supposed to be a spring in less than a half mile for us to camel up on. We walked further than I expected without seeing the spring. I stopped Bunny to check Guthook for the location and saw that we were over a quarter mile past. It was 8 miles to the next water source, I was already dying of thirst and out of water—in short, I started having a panic attack. I hate to retrace my steps on the trail, but we had no choice.
After we got water and had some lunch to calm me down (I know it’s hard for people to fathom that I got agitated when I’m usual calm like the Amish), we started hiking again. Pennsylvania has a reputation of being a rocky state. People call it Rocksylvania. People are asses. We’ve gone over halfway through the state and we haven’t seen rocks like this since GA, NC, TN, VA, and WV. Yes, you have to watch your feet or you’ll fall. We are hiking on a trail, not a paved path. PA doesn’t deserve to be called a rocky state anymore than VA deserves to be called a level state. It’s all hype. I’m sure we’ll have some rough spots ahead, but unless it’s all boulder fields to NJ, I don’t want to hear Rocksylvania again.
Plans change. We started out planning to hike 18 miles today. Around lunch time, the heat was catching up with us so we dialed it back a couple of miles to the 501 Shelter. An hour later, we were feeling like crap and decided that was still too far. We dialed back another 3 miles and settled on the William Penn Shelter. We felt very comfortable with staying at his shelter since we had our pictures taken with his statue in Bristol, England last year.
The guidebooks say to expect a crowd at the William Penn Shelter because it’s popular with locals as well as hikers. When we got there, it was empty except for two guys cooking on the picnic table out front, and they were both planning on camping out. For the third time this trip, we had the shelter to ourselves and I didn’t even have to introduce myself to clear it out.
We are still trying to use up all of our food before our next resupply and we are getting close to being successful. We have been at mission critical stage for a couple of days now (mission critical=no M&M/Mars products on hand). Tonight, we had peanut butter and fudge for dessert; no tortillas. If we don’t make town tomorrow, we will be eating mayo and Taco Bell salsa for our last supper.
EFG