The Hike, Week 104: 2/5/06 (Two Years!)

For the two-year anniversary of the Hiking Odyssey (Oddity?)--begun on Valentine's Day, 2004--we revisited the scene of our first hike and added a new little cold-weather bit to it. And we were fully alone on this windy, wintry day, with--for the first time we've ever seen--not a single car other than ours in the lot at the base of the Apple Orchard Falls and Cornelius Creek Trails at the end of FR 59.

We took the Apple Orchard for our ascent, and The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All pulled us up the mountain in a hurry designed to warm us against temperature, which dropped palpably (from 36 degrees when we got out of the car) as we climbed. The stream and the falls were in fine form given the recent wet conditions, though the relatively warm month of January had left the winter falls with only a minor version of its usual bracketing of ice formations.

We took the customary right at the intersection with the Appalachian Trail, but instead of turning right again at the Cornelius Creek Trail intersection after 1.2 quick miles (I had a brief wonder if, given the cold temps, Gail might turn right and take us on down; but hey, I reminded myself, this was TGDHOTA up there ahead of me), we continued another 1.6 miles on the AT to the Cornelius Creek Shelter, where the wood was a bit wet as we struggled to build a fire effective enough to counter the wind and the temps that now read 30 and felt colder. Still, lunch was good and warming, though the dogs seemed more than ready to get back to moving as soon as we would let them.

The shelter's logbook hadn't had an entry since January 18th, and we took the opportunity to jot down in it our presence at this spot on this very nifty day for us. Our 4.6-mile return trip back over the 1.6 of AT and down the Cornelius gives us a total of a bit more than 1,118 miles of walking in this series of mostly-weekend treks mostly in the mountains of Virginia. And our 10.7 miles for the day is coincidentally our exact average per week over the two years.

But our real celebration--the real Valentine's Day treat--comes toward the end of the week, when we hope to be in the mountains of North Georgia in a cabin in the woods and to use it as a base to do two days of Appalachian Trail hikes on the Appalachian Trail.

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