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 88: 10/16/05. In a weekend mostly consumed by the first annual Blue Ridge Music Festival at Salem Memorial Baseball Stadium (featuring two days of the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show, Blue Highway, Rhonda Vincent, 13-year-old Sierra Hull and many more), The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and I stole away from the non-stop bluegrass for a few hours to complete our fall tour of Virginia's Triple Crown, with a quick hike up the Dragon's Tooth Trail (off Va.
311) up to the Appalachian Trail and then on up to the tooth.

And the Day Hiker, with the excitement of the wedding of our oldest son behind her, her new screened-in porch pretty much completed and facing a week on the road to do training (and maybe just a little too much bluegrass), found herself just a little blue on the way up the mountain, wondering, as we perched ourselves on a lower outcrop for lunch, about the etiology of her post-nuptials letdown. But as a good walk to a beautiful spot will do, as we ate and gazed east onto the valley, her woes wafted away with the wind on a beautiful fall day with the Peaks of Otter clearly visible on the horizon. And an added bonus:
Even in the middle of October, the vista before us was almost completely green, giving rise to hopes that we still have perhaps a month of fall foliage vistas in front of us.

The trail up and down the mountain on this pretty Sunday afternoon was busy, with couples and families on their way up or back from one of the favorite hiking destinations in the area. Gail, as is her practice, dragged me past three or four sets of hikers on the way up, and brought us back down in similar good-pace fashion. The hike itself, even aside from the end-point, is a worthy one, with generally gentle climbs, a few rock-hops across streams and some minor rock climbing toward the peak.

I'm always reminded, at the point of the rock scrabbles, of the late Earl Shaffer (who was the AT's first thru-hiker – in 1948 – and half a century later became the trail's oldest thru-hiker), and his complaints about the current keepers of the trail tending to make it difficult for difficulty's sake. You think of Earl's 79-year-old knees making their way up and down the rocks and you can feel proud to be walking the same ground he covered, and glad that your own knees – with 20 years less wear on them than his – still cooperate with the will to climb.

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