Day 43

We're currently camping at the last campsite walker and I stayed at in 2020. Tomorrow, we will wake up and do a very simple 20 mile section. The elevation change is the easiest that we've potentially ever seen and the weather should be decent. 

Before I wake up and hike though, what did we do today? Well we started moving around 7 and by 8:15 we were ready to start getting the show back on the road. Chuck took us to Arby's, where I got a bacon, egg, and cheese on a biscuit, a sausage, egg, and cheese on a biscuit, and a smokehouse brisket sandwich, which is just brisket, cheese, BBQ sauce, and a bun. Needless to say, I wasn't hungry again for another couple of hours. 

We started hiking around 9 and I remembered most of the trail today for one simple reason, it wasn't very hard. We started the morning with less than a 1000 foot climb, and once we got back some of our elevation, we mostly just ridgewalked for the rest of the day. Surprisingly, we got a good dusting of snow while we walked. We even had some horizontal snow in some sections when the wind decided to pick up.

By 12:30, we had gone 12 miles and stopped at Jenny knob shelter for lunch. By 1:30, we were back on trail, and our afternoon was somehow easier than our morning. At around 18 miles into the day, we descended off the mountain side that we were on, and walked through a series of grassy meadows, some of which bordered a rocky creek with rushing water from the recent snow / rain. 

We then crossed a road where we had the option to walk .5 miles to Trent grocery, where we could have gotten hot food and or ice cream. We went there in 2020, but decided to not go there this time since we had just left Chuck's and would be taking a zero in a couple days. 

From this point, we only had 5 or 6 miles left for the day, with less than 1,000 feet up. We hiked past dismal falls, and for the next 4 miles we're interjected dismal creek non stop. 

When we got to camp, we ended up staying there with 3 other people that we had seen on and off before we had gotten sick a few weeks back. They seem to be pretty strong hikers, and although they aren't quite going at our pace, they're making good time, and we'll probably see them again since we're taking a zero. 

It still feels surreal to me that I'm hiking the AT again, and that tomorrow I'll be back in Pearisburg. Maybe once I'm out of Virginia I'll actually feel like this experience is real. 

Daily recap:

- Total miles: 24.2

- From: mile marker 592.1 616.5

- From Chuck's place in Bastian to dismal creek famosite 

- high temp of 45

- low temp (morning) 40

- low temp (evening) 30

- total ascent: 4,500 (roughly)

- total descent: 4,000 (roughly)

Thanks for following along. 

Tyler M.