Day: 036
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2023
Start: Jefferson National Forest (AT Mile 508.5)
Finish: Mount Rogers National Recreation Area HQ (AT Mile 534.3)
Daily Kilometres: 41.6 (Ascent 4009', Descent 5633')
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 902.4
Weather: Foggy and cool early then mostly sunny with a couple of heavy rain showers in the afternoon.
Accommodation: Motel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts.
Lunch: Trail mix.
Dinner: Hamburger & fries, peach pie & rice pudding.
Aches: Dave - very tired with battered feet; Julie - nothing to report.
Highlight: Our biggest day …. just under 26 miles. We didn't start out with that intention, rather a more modest 21-22 miles, with the plan to camp a few hours hike short of Mount Rogers National Recreation Area HQ and then to hike to there before hitching into the small town of Marion tomorrow morning and have the most of tomorrow off. However, while we were having our breakfast around 9:00am, after four miles of hiking, "Phoenix", a girl we met at the Damascus hostel a few days ago, walked by, having been dropped off at the highway we had crossed 10 minutes earlier. She was slackpacking, not carrying her full pack and getting dropped off and picked up at the end of each day's hiking. She was being picked up at Mt Rogers NRA HQ, 22 miles ahead, at 6:30pm, and said we could get a lift with her if we reached there by the same time. This would give us a full day off in Marion tomorrow rather than part of the day. We accepted the challenge, and walked hard for 3-4 hours, well Dave walked hard while Julie and Phoenix chatted up ahead. The quest seemed hopeless at lunchtime, partly due to an error on our navigation app which showed we a couple of miles more to go than we actually had. We told Phoenix to go on ahead while we resigned ourselves to our original plan of camping. However, over the next two hours the navigation app had a compensating error and we "gained back" the lost two miles. Suddenly we were in with a chance again and began walking hard again. In the event, we didn't make it until 7:00pm, but still proud of our effort.
Lowlight: None really.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We woke at 5:30am on a foggy morning with a very wet tent fly and started walking around 6:40am. It was again very gloomy in the rhododendron groves though a few were in glorious pink bloom, and the trail was rocky, rooty and hard work. We were hoping for easier trail today, but the signs were not good.
Fortunately, the going did improve a little after an hour but our pace was still slow and we only managed four miles in the first two hours. While stopped for breakfast, "Phoenix" came by and our plans for the day changed (see above).
During the next section we climbed up to the base of Comers Creek Falls which were roaring and then carried on through the forests and glades. After lunch a highlight was crossing a picturesque meadow. It was amazing how much hotter it was in the open out of the forest.
Around this time we realised we may have a chance of reaching the Mount Rogers NRA HQ around 7:00pm, and the balance of the afternoon was spent making as fast a pace as possible, though Dave was struggling. Some rocky path and roller-coaster hills along a long ridge didn't help.
The last hours seemed to go on forever but, eventually, we reached our goal at almost exactly 7:00pm. At first, it looked like we were going to have trouble hitching a lift the 6 miles into Marion on the highway as there was very little traffic but, lucky for us, some of the thru-hikers camped nearby had ordered pizza and the delivery driver offered us a lift to our booked motel for a gratuity ($20) and we checked in, Dave exhausted, at 7:45pm.
We found the energy to venture a quarter mile down the road to buy some late dinner before eating showering and going to bed late.
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