Friday, July 24 8:45 pm 17.4 mi
AT 1264.5 Tentsite → AT 1281.9 Stealth Site
Weather: Rainy overnight, warm and overcast/sunny today
Trail Conditions: Rocky sections alternating with relatively smooth section that I’d still manage to trip and stumble through
My Condition: In need of a new pair of shoes! Very much looking forward to a night in town, a nice meal or two, a shower, a good resupply, and a new set of kicks
Late start this morning – didn’t leave camp and hit the trail until 10am. Woke up pretty sore today. Really didn’t want to put on my sopping wet clothes this morning, but once you grit your teeth and do it the discomfort melts away incredibly quickly. Blue was sad she ate the last of her dried pineapple, Puddles was sad she ate both her Snickers bars last night and didn’t have any for today now, and I was sad when I ate my last cosmic brownie and pepperoni stick. We’ve all got food on the mind! Thru hiking definitely has a way of breaking down normal barriers of social etiquette – pooping, periods, flatulence, and the like are all topics that are normally taboo but are openly discussed on trail. My trail family continues to be amazing – surplus food, medical supplies, bug spray, body wipes, stoves, you name it, they’re willing to share it/pawn that extra weight off on you. I was walking behind Blue as she texted with Cage, and hearing the conversation brought a big old smile to my face. Seeing how close the trail has brought two people definitely gave me great joy, and I hope when this is all said and done that I’ll be lucky enough to have experienced that level of closeness. Excited to leave Pennsylvania – never experienced the Virginia Blues, but the Pennsylvania Blues were getting to me today. There are so many cool places in the state – the Laurel Mountains, the Standing Stone trail, the PA gorge – too bad the AT completely bypasses all of them just to swerve into another boulder field! Trail angel Mun, who fills and manages caches of water jugs through the entire dry stretch of PA, is incredible and has made my experience here leaps and bounds better.
Post Trail Analysis
Thru hikers, especially once the hiker hunger has truly kicked in, have an interesting relationship with food. You can’t wait to eat every single item you pick out while you’re in the grocery store, you’re shocked by how much packaging is between you and your food when you’re unboxing and repackaging things for the trail, you curse at yourself when you feel how dang heavy the fully loaded food bag is, you start picking away at all the snacks you were most excited about getting, pretty soon you’re out of those things you’re craving and you’re wishing you had picked up more of those and less of that other stuff that doesn’t sound so good right now, you’re starving so you eat it all regardless of how appetizing it sounds (hunger is the best seasoning after all!), you get to the bottom of your food bag and you’re both excited at how light it is, and devastated by the lack of snacks left, and then you get to the next town only to start the process anew. It can sometimes be tricky to know what to get – what sounds good in the grocery store won’t necessarily sound good at the end of a 30 mile day. What sounded good to you before the trail may have gotten extremely old by now (looking at you, Clif Bars and peanut butter). Some things never got old (CHEESE!!! FRUIT SNACKS!!!). Some things went through phases (pepperoni, various types of high calorie candy bars). By this point in the trail, I just knew that I needed to shovel in a ridiculous amount of calories.
Almost done with Pennsylvania!
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