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Weekend Hikes - Week 80
WEB EXCLUSIVE
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The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children. |
Week 80 : A week of several little milestones . . .
1. The first time we’ve planted a car where we’d finish; the deal was we’d help Adam with stuff he needed delivered to Virginia Tech if he’d follow us south a ways and drop us off. He could hardly decline, having just the day before done a 21-mile assault on The Priest and Three Ridges with one of his brothers.
2. One result of the drop-off was a 13.3-mile hike – all in one direction! And that direction was south to north on the Appalachian Trail from U.S. 21/52 to Va. 608, a relatively flat section after an initial climb; not our longest hike, but likely the most new miles of AT in one day.
3. And one result of where we were is that we’re within about 20 miles of all of the AT between I-64 and I-77 having passed beneath our feet. And those 20 Nelson County miles promise to be pretty ones. We discovered too, during lunch reading, that it’s “only” 120 miles to the NC line to the south! With views of Burkes Garden just ahead, and Mt. Rogers to come!
This section of the AT is mostly a ridge walk along Brushy Mountain. We walked on a day when the weather forecasters were talking about new, cooler weather in a day or so, and the immediately perceptible change in temperature between up on the ridge and when the trail took us down on the east face of the mountain made us think we were at the refreshing leading edge of the new weather.
The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All, as she is wont to do, made a shambles of this flat walk. She loves her lunch-time wildflower book reading (“the yellow stickies at the top are what’s in bloom now, these stickies along the top of the side are what’s coming in September, and these here…”), and I think the hiking speed she sustains is for that one purpose: to give us a longer, more leisurely lunch break. The walking time for the 13.3 miles: 4 1/2 hours – just about 20 minutes per mile on the button. And that includes the stops to quiz me on the flowers I kind of knew last week. Lunch was at a spot so perfectly receptive of the ridgetop breeze that Gail talked about being a little cool – on this, the 21st day of August.
We had the trail to ourselves save for one southbound thru-hiker. He stood and talked far longer than most thru-guys do, perhaps owing in part to being that relatively rare southbounder.
“Aside from in towns, you’re the first people I’ve talked to in a month,” he said. Which brought to mind the big swell of northbound thru hikers who started in March in Georgia. They’re now pushing in a loose clump deep into New England, toward Katahdin-before-the-cold – a sort of annual pig in a python along the hallowed trail.
Click here for the archive of Kurt's Hikes
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