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.

The Hike, Week 97: 12/18/05

One of the more popular hikes in the Roanoke area gave little evidence of that popularity on this cold, icy Sunday, with only one car in the lot on Va. 779 at the base of the Andy Layne Trail around midday. We started a few minutes behind the occupants of the car--a father and son, we assumed--and The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All seemed mildly dismayed that she did not overtake them until about halfway up the mountain, where the two steepest stretches of the trail were so icy that the dad seemed to being reconsidering going all the way to the top.

It was not far beyond this juncture that we met two people who'd gotten on the trail on Friday night about 12 miles to the south, where Va. 311 crosses the Appalachian Trail. Our son David and his friend Dalton had spent a night each in the scout shelter just in from 311 and in Catawba Shelter just down from McAfee Knob. They had also left the only prints we saw as we headed on up toward the AT, and in many instances those prints were especially welcomed since we did not have to do all the surface-busting of the ice layer to get to the more sure footing of the snow beneath.

Between those steep sections and its intersection with the AT at Scorched Earth Gap, the Andy Layne Trail makes a series of perhaps half a dozen switchbacks, with several of the southbound sections taking the hiker along a pathway that reveals itself, especially in icy conditions, to be very narrow. It was on one of these that Gail's old-gal dog--too enthusiastic to know she's likely too old to hike in any conditions--missed the sunken spots for a step or two, tried to recover her footing and then began sliding--her head facing desperately uphill--down the steep, crusted slope. She slid, yelping, maybe 50 feet before some combination of stumps and branches brought her to a relatively gentle stop. She yelped some more, tried to climb, slid back and yelped some more, looking with trembling legs for help.

Her master, normally calm and in full control in the woods, began yelping herself, as she slid down the mountainside--downtrail from where the dog was--with a goal to place herself below old Gunnar to prevent her from sliding further down a slope that went on for perhaps 200 more feet. Meanwhile, uncharacteristically ahead, I began to foot-chomp my way across and slightly down the mountain toward the yelping dog, doing my best to ignore the yelping woman's impugnings of not only my intentions toward her dog but also, as a result, my character in general. Accompanied by admonitions that we had no choice but to turn back and that I would be stupid to consider anything else.

Ah, but once the ol' black lab/retriever had a path forward and upward to follow out of her pickle, she was of course all about the ascent once again, and so Gunnar and I, along with snow-dog Fluff (white, part
Samoyed) ambled along slowly ahead for awhile, with the distance and the crunching of the ice/snow keeping us out of earshot of the The Pretty Poor Ice Slider as she made her way back up the steep slope to the trail. At some point her loyal dog paused to look back and wait for her master.

We'd hoped to eat lunch up on Tinker Cliffs. We'd then considered, given the conditions, stopping at Scorched Earth Gap. But in the end, with deference to dogs' paws having been on ice and in snow for more than an hour, I suggested we take the AT north for the .6 mile distance to Lambert's Meadow Shelter, as had also been considered. It was only here, with the sun beaming onto the warmed floor of the shelter, with lunch spread out and with her dog demonstrably none the worse for her slide, that the Day Hiker was ready to be fully civil to me once again.
She couldn't resist, of course, pointing out that we'd walked all this extra way to the shelter and Fluff would have none of it, preferring to plop himself down in the snow and wait for his food.

By the return trip, The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All was fully recovered. She led and laughed as she always does, and when we were finished with the steep sections that had kept anyone else from coming all the way up the mountain--we'd talked at lunch about the two black-diamond slopes we were going to have to navigate on the way down--she said she was a little disappointed at how easy they were.

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