Start: Tom Floyd Wayside
End: Dicks Dome Shelter
Miles: 18 today, 964.8 total
Talk about yer late starts! Got up at 7:47am. Atropine, a section hiker and only other hiker at the shelter, got up and left before 7. So I woke up and no one was there. I had purposefully (is that a word?) decided to not set my alarm since I knew today would be a short day. Ha! 18 miles - a short day... whoda thought. And then, when I was leaving camp at 11am, Afterthought and Dragonfly were stopping for a break at Tom Floyd! They had already hiked 6 or 7 miles from Gravel Spring Hut. After hiking over 50 miles in the past two days I think I deserved a relaxed wake-up.
Hiked the rest of the day. Since it was a Saturday, there were a lot of weekenders out on the trail. Had some trail magic right before crossing Va. 522. Someone had left about 5 or 6 gallons of bottled water, a bag of potato chips, some snack-size bags of Goldfish, and a quart of Gatorade. I drank the Gatorade and had a couple bags of Goldfish. Before moving on, I read a letter in a Ziploc bag stapled to a post from a would-be thru-hiker who had been struck by lightning up on Mary's Rock (just before Thornton Gap in SNP) and was quitting the trail to be with his family. The letter was dated June 23. He's lucky to be alive.
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