Friday, June 5 9:03 pm 18.8 mi
AT 452.2 Double Spring Shelter → AT 471.0 Damascus/Broken Fiddle Hostel
Weather: Pretty heavy rain at times overnight, off and on rain all day
Trail Conditions: Wet ground – saw 14 orange salamanders (red efts/red spotted salamanders), 2 snakes
My Condition: Left ankle held up better today than it did yesterday but is still sore. Lots of itchy bug bites!
Silky smooth trail into Damascus today. Some days you spend most of the day looking up, like at Max Patch or Hump Mountain or the Roan Highlands. Today was not one of those days. I looked down most of the day – definitely green tunnel territory with not a lot of views. I also noticed an orange salamander on the trail early in the day, and then another, and then another – and suddenly I found myself carefully watching my steps so as to not step on any of the beautiful creatures. A loud cacophony of sound slowly built up as I neared Damascus – at first I thought it might be a chorus of crows, but it got louder and louder and I realized I was hearing frogs – not the spring peepers I’m used to hearing but something similar. Treehouse, the employee at Broken Fiddle Hostel, thru hiked a few years back. He started in February and finished in mid-November, taking 109 zeroes along the way. He had some crazy experiences up in Maine that time of year, shoes frozen solid every morning, shouting up the Kennebec for an hour until the local he shouted for showed up with her motorboat. He lived in Latrobe for some time and we trash talked some Red Wings fans and talked about how Sidney Crosby is the best player in the world.
*Note after the fact – the noise I was hearing may have been cicadas!
Post Trail Analysis
The noise WAS, in fact, cicadas. I am quite familiar with the sound of them from my camp days and love the sound of them, but I’ve never heard them like this. It was eerie – I went from thinking it might be crows, then that it might be a car alarm, then that it might be frogs. It was a veritable chorus of cicadas. In the next couple weeks, I would see more probably 50x more cicadas than people as they crawled from their underground burrows and sang their cicada song. I called in early to make my reservation at the Broken Fiddle, and got a text from Treehouse as I was rolling into town asking if I was still planning to stay since a scout troop showed up looking for a place to crash. Soaked from sweat and rain, I really had to work to get the screen, and a finger, dry enough to send back a text saying I just had to walk through town and I’d be there in a few minutes. This was among the many hostels that were limiting the number of guests they allowed per night, and Treehouse definitely took the cleaning seriously. I was craving Subway, which I almost never crave, so I went and grabbed that for dinner.
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