History, naturally

About two weeks before Christmas, desperately hoping to wrap up (no pun intended) my Christmas shopping, I rode my bike in to the Mall to take a look in the Smithsonian stores.  I like being able to support the Institution, because even if a lot of what they have is mass-produced stuff, it's sciency mass-produced stuff.  I also hold the opinion that anyone should be excited to get a dinosaur for Christmas.

My first two stops were busts.  I hate Christmas shopping anyway, and it's worse when you have no income; I feel obligated to buy things for other people, because I can never convince them to not buy something for me, but I still have no good way to pay for that stuff.  To take my mind off it, and take advantage of the trip, I poked around in the natural history museum for a bit before finally locating something that might work as a gift for someone.

This sign wasn't here the last time I visited; this time, there was one on each side of the lab.

I like re-visiting the natural history museum mainly because I like looking at dinosaurs, but the random stranger I started talking to didn't seem to appreciate my insights, so I kept to myself for the rest of the visit, and paid attention to signs I hadn't fully absorbed in the past.  That's how I learned a fascinating new word.  I don't know how much I'll get to use it, but my very favorite word really only comes up in conversation when I mention what my very favorite word is (it's self-defining!).  I have a coffee mug sporting my second favorite word, but the context tells the reader nothing of its meaning.

After my tour of the cretaceous (and early mammals), I somehow found an entire hall that I don't think I've ever visited before: early man.  There was a really good display of hominids that showed life-size models of their heads displayed in cases around the room to simultaneously show how tall average members of the species were.  It was a simple and very effective way to give me an idea of scale that I'd never had before, and I learned about a species I'd never even heard of, despite a college anthropology course dedicated specifically to man's evolution.

Homo floresiensis lived on an Indonesian island, stood about three feet tall, and had a brain about a third the size of ours, but employed fire, tools, and hunting.  Being small was an advantage in an environment with limited resources, but they were easy prey for the much larger Komodo dragons.

This blows

...but not like that.  It was actually really, really fascinating, and I hope I get to go do it again.

A friend of ours does glass blowing.  I don't know how long she's been doing it, but it's been long enough that she sells stuff on Etsy, and she likes to stock up a pile of ornaments before the holidays so she can sell those, too.

This piece has already collected some frit, and been re-heated.

We learned through a mutual friend that she sometimes enlists helpers to make the ornaments, and offers up one of the ornaments as payment.  Sucker!!  I would have done it just to watch the process.  For that matter, I would have sat quietly in the corner and never said a word, if she were willing to explain everything to me as she worked.

Glory hole.  Hee hee!

She starts by collecting some white (clear) glass from the crucible in the furnace.  There aren't any pictures of that because it's so ridiculously hot in there that you can't even see where the air stops and the glass starts until you dip a pipe in low enough to disturb the surface of the glass.  Everything inside the furnace glows bright orange; the glassblowers all wear sunglasses just for this step.  I didn't even think it was safe to point my camera in there.  The hot glass is rolled on a metal table called a marver to give it a slightly tapered shape (see the first picture, above).  Color is added by rolling it through tiny pieces of broken glass called frit.  This can be arranged in stripes on the table to get certain color patterns in the finished piece.

Forming the glass with tweezers.

The glass may be reheated several times in a smaller furnace ("glory hole") to keep it soft enough to form.  The glory hole is around 2,000F.  While she formed the pieces, we sat at the other end of the pipe and provided air.  She told us all we had to know was how to blow up a balloon, and how to hit something with a hammer (it turned out to just be a stick of wood), but even at 2,000 degrees, glass doesn't want to change shape, so it's less like blowing up a balloon and more like trying to inflate a Coke bottle.  There were times when it hurt my head a little.

Blowing red-hot glass in a mold gives texture to the finished piece.

After she was done forming the ornament (using whatever method she chose for that particular item), we took it across the shop to another table to break it off the pipe.  This sometimes required rotating the pipe as we went, because the glass was still hot and pliable, and we didn't want it to distort its shape or fall off the pipe.  At the table, we held the pipe high and vertical to set the ornament in a heat-resistant fixture, then whacked the pipe with a stick.  The shock on the pipe broke the connection to the ornament, leaving it in the fixture.  This part always worried me.  I was sure that I'd hit it too hard--or not hard enough, requiring further whacks--and ruin the ornament she'd spent so long making.  This might have derived from the third ornament we made, which really was ruined at about that time.

Collecting frit from the marver.

While we were banging pipes with sticks, she would collect a glob of glass from the furnace.  The Girl or I would hold the ornament with tongs while our glassblower friend applied a dollop of hot glass to the top of the ornament, sealing it and covering the broken edges.  While it was still hot and gooey, she'd twist it with tweezers to form a loop.  There aren't many pictures of these last few steps, because I was usually too busy holding or smacking things to get my camera.  I try to not screw around too much when I'm handling anything over 1,000 degrees.

Using tweezers to stretch out a molded ornament.

Once the loop is applied, the ornament goes into an annealer (a very hot box) to cool overnight.  When the ornament goes in, the box is around 900F.  The temperature slowly drops over twelve hours.  If the glass cools too quickly, it will break.

Feathering the glass on a wrapped ornament.

She also showed us a wrap, another way to apply color to an ornament.  While she prepared the basic clear ornament, I kept a separate rod (which wasn't hollow, so it wasn't a pipe, but I don't know if there's a technical term for it) hot in the glory hole, taking it out periodically to keep it from getting too runny, and rotating it the whole time.  She had already applied a glob of colored glass on the end of the rod.

The wrapped ornament gets a loop.  Note that the loop glass is still glowing.

When the basic ornament had its shape, I stood behind the glassblower and held the rod over the ornament.  She used tweezers to pull out a line of glass (think about hot cheese on your pizza) to the ornament, then rolled it forward as I followed to get a spiral of solid color wrapped around the ornament.  Then she'd usually re-heat the whole thing, and use a hook to pull on the bands on opposite sides to get that swept-up look--that's called feathering.

Frit for a striped piece.

I like knowing how everything is made, and I'd never been able to see glassblowing up-close and personal before, much less help do it, so I was enthralled all night.  The shop we visited often has events, open houses, and classes, and if you're interested, I'd recommend a visit.

Juneau? Alaska.

The Girl and I had three separate Thanksgiving dinners this year, and managed for the first time in several years to attend my family's traditional Game Gatherings which occur on Turkey Weekend.  By the time we reached our third tableful of turkey and associated sides, I was just about spent.  I mean--one of those meals alone had three different turkeys.  I felt like I should fast for a week after we got home just to feel normal again.  I mean, I didn't, but I felt like it would be perfectly reasonable, and for me, that's saying something significant.  I don't skip meals.  Sometimes I invent new ones.

The nice thing about Thanksgiving with her family is that it's always been the last of our Great Turkey Stuffings (wordplay! ZING!), and it's also the most low-key.  For the past few years, the four "kids" have made the meal, and when I revealed last year that I make a passable pie, it became my job for this year.  Now that I know it means I can do my work in the morning and then get out of the way for the rest of the day, I will never relinquish that role.  Why would I?  While they were going crazy about some silly game, I slipped out and went for a walk.  When I got back to the yard, I still didn't feel like being inside, but I noticed that the snow was packing really well.  I started rolling a big snowball, while my internal soundtrack making me laugh a little, without any real idea of what I was going to do with it.  Maybe a snowman.

Nope.  Instead of a snowman, this happened.

It's more spacious than my posture would suggest.  But not by much,

It didn't get finished until the next morning, and The Girl's brother came out to help finish it, but I still had a lot of fun using up every bit of snow in the yard (think I'm kidding?  Look at the picture.) to build an igloo.  I hadn't built one of those in decades.  When this one melts, the front yard will have a swamp full of leaves, hickory shells, mushrooms, apples, and all the other lawn litter that got collected with the snow.  I made it for myself, because I just really wanted to, but the excuse was The Girl's nephew.  They told me he had been watching me build it and was very interested, but when we tried to get him to go inside, his emotions ran closer to "terrified."  I don't think he appreciates how cool igloos are.  Maybe next year.

Ohiopyle

Earlier this year, The Girl got a fitbit pedometer.  The fitbit website's leaderboard and stat tracking, combined with her ravening addiction to competition, has made her... "monster" seems harsh, but it also fails to capture the extent of her dedication.  If, at 10:49 some evening, she checks in on the website and discovers that she has only 14,789 steps for the day, she will pace the length of the apartment with exaggerated fervor in order to win the "15,000 Step Badge," a digital token of her day's efforts.  If the step count is 19,208 steps, she will exit the building, clad in pajamas and a jacket, and walk laps around the block until she has earned the slightly more elusive pixelated medallion for a 20,000 step day.

I mention this only because I aim to express to you the extent of her rage after the battery died at the end of a long day of hiking in Pennsylvania, and even though she replaced the battery to preserve the unit's memory, she was somehow denied the 25,000 Step Badge she would have otherwise earned for that day.  It happened in mid-October, and she still mentions it, fury simmering under her constrained voice.

Otherwise, it was a great weekend.

We had enjoyed an earlier weekend camping and hiking in the spring with the same couple, and even though The Girl had spent some time gallivanting through Germany with them over the summer, I didn't get to go, and they really like eating Dutch babies (I promise that's a real thing that doesn't involve any actual infants, but you feel free to let your imagination run wild), so we planned another excursion this fall.

The variety of colors and shapes exhibited by fungus fascinates me, though I have made very little effort to learn more about them.

This time, instead of the Shenandoah's Middle District, we aimed for Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, which was more central to our two locations, and offers some fun whitewater which is still easily managed by beginners.

No rafting on this trip, but plenty of good hiking.

Nobody wanted to go rafting with me.  Something about "too cold in October."  To be honest, I stopped listening to the reason when they started laughing like I was crazy.

I hadn't been to Ohiopyle since I was in junior high or high school, when my brother was finally old enough to go whitewater rafting, and Mom and Dad took us there to raft the Youghiogheny River, which is nearly as much fun to spell as it is to say (most people just call it "the Yough," which inexplicably rhymes with "the rock").  We camped, we rafted, my brother was launched high into the air, and we went to see Falling Water.  It was a great trip.

As the four of us planned this trip, I left most of it to the other three.  I knew I'd be outside a lot no matter what they planned, and that's enough to keep me happy.  I directed my attention toward the menu (I was responsible only for dinners and breakfasts--the other two planned lunches).  Despite not baking a single baby, the only criticism I received was that they thought there was too much food.  I managed to solve that problem single-handedly.

Later, we found out that another pair of hiking-inclined friends had also spent the weekend in Ohiopyle State Park--had we only known ahead of time, we could have planned a little better, and I wouldn't have had to eat all the leftovers myself.  Plus, the cabin we rented had two other bedrooms we never used.  It was huge.

Cucumber Falls

Saturday was our long hike, wandering along the Meadow Run trails to Ohiopyle and Cucumber Falls, then trying to find our way up to a higher viewpoint over the valley.  That effort was thwarted by a combination of inaccurate maps and poorly marked trails, but we still got a good hike out of it, and we met a trio of other hikers who had found a young salamander (photo somewhere below).

Plus, it was the height of Pennsylvania's autumn, and the fall colors were pretty incredible.

See?  I told you there was a salamander!

On Sunday, we parked in Ohiopyle, saw the falls, and hiked along a towpath trail for a while.  This side of the park was charted a bit better, and we were able to find the trails we wanted.

Ohiopyle Falls

Handiest trick I learned all week, even if it only works in PA.

Round pupils!  He's just a harmless Eastern Milk Snake.  Adorable, isn't he?

All of us had to drive home Sunday, so we didn't hike as much as the previous day.  As it turns out, we timed the day perfectly, because it started raining shortly after we got back to the cars, and poured like crazy for the entire drive back to DC.  Every time we drove downhill, I wondered if there would be a road or a river at the bottom.

Cucumber Falls from a higher vantage point.

About a month ago, we started planning the next trip.  Maybe this time I'll cook some babies.

Botanic Garden, again

When my friend came to visit, we accidentally wandered into the National Book Festival, which was an adventure in itself, and maybe I'll mention it again later.  For now, suffice to say that The Girl was so excited that it was happening again (and my friend, for reasons of his own), that we scrapped our plans to go to Harpers Ferry on the last day of his visit and instead went back to the Mall for more book madness.  The Girl knew who she wanted to see speak, and since we had until afternoon to make that show, we spent the morning at the Botanic Garden.  We need no other excuse for that; it's beautiful, generally peaceful, and I tend to take visitors there because I like it.  There's no need for further explanation by now; just enjoy the pictures.

Vanda "Robert's Delight" Orchid

Cleistocactus winteri

Baja Fairy-Duster, which seems to be in bloom every single time I visit the Gardens.

cacao pods

Pineapple!  I love pineapple!!

Purple Heart reminded us of the red plants brought by the invaders in War of the Worlds.  Don't hold that against it.

Venus Fly Traps.  Who doesn't love carnivorous plants?  That's SO COOL!!  The Girl might have tickled a couple to see them close.  She's down to nine fingers now.

Miltonia Belle Glade Orchid

Udvar-Hazy

In September, one of my life-long friends (somewhere there is a picture of us standing in front of a kindergarten bus together) came to visit us, and he had only two requests.  One was the USS Barry, but a recent shooting at the Navy Yard had resulted in increased security, removing that option entirely (despite a misleading website which said everything was still open.  But they had some things to deal with, so that's understandable).  The other was the Udvar-Hazy Center.

I'll admit: when he told me he wanted to go, my first response was to look it up and try to figure out what it was.  I knew that the Smithsonian had acquired a space shuttle--heck, I watched it fly over the city--but I wasn't very clear on where it went after it buzzed the Mall.

Turns out Discovery went to Udvar-Hazy.  If the Smithsonian is "America's Attic," then Udvar-Hazy is the garage where America keeps the vintage automobiles.  Aircraft from every single stage of human flight is present here, in person or in replica.  Including at least one from the future, sort of.

The studio model of the alien ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind was built using spare parts and bits of several model kits, so if you look closely, you can see things that look like railroad signals and farm silos.

You also see things like R2-D2, airplanes, a mailbox, and a graveyard.  Model makers have a good sense of humor.

I was only disappointed because we were limited to the outsides of all the aircraft.  I realize that allowing thousands of eager museum visitors to go stomping through the space shuttle would be a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but they managed to allow us to go through the SkyLab module at the Air and Space Museum--can't we at least get a peek inside the cockpit of an SR-71?  Pretty please?

I sometimes felt like I do at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Museum; that in order to really get a lot out of the experience, you have to be fanatically into the subject before you step through the door.  That's a letdown, because I remember going to museums as a kid and they would get me excited about the exhibits and make me want to learn more about aviation, or science, or natural history.  Then there are museums that are aimed at people who already know everything about the subject, and are only there to revel in the presence of these artifacts.  I feel like there's a lost opportunity there.

On the other hand, it was still interesting to see so much of aviation's history under one roof, to marvel at the things we have accomplished as a species, and to goggle in bewilderment at some of the ridiculous ideas we've had.  My friend and I specifically sought out the Manta Pterodactyl Fledgling, solely because of the fantastic name, to find out what that aircraft was (a record-setting ultralight).  And the thing about him is that he remembers everything, and reads everything, so it was sort of like taking a tour of the museum with an aviation authority.  And it's good just to see him having fun.

Enola Gay

Cribs, with Tommy J

Yes, I know, I missed a couple weeks, but things got very busy here, and when they settled down enough for me to write, I was already dedicated to working on Plan B for  few days.  I'm very excited about Plan B.  If anything ever comes of it, I'll let you know.

When The Girl came to pick me up at the end of my tour of the Shenandoah, the first thing she did was to buy me a burrito.  Perhaps without coincidence, visions of burrito had been dancing in my head the entire previous (27-mile) day.  The second thing she did was to unequivocally state that she was not going to drive six hours round-trip just to buy me a burrito, so we went to Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson's home had two big selling points that morning.  First, it was very close to the end of my hike.  Second, it's not run by the federal government, so it was not affected by the Shutdown.

Some of Tom's grapevines.

I will say this: if you go to Monticello (and if you like history or gardening, you should), go early in the day.  There are several little tours in addition to the main house, and they each offer unique perspectives on the grounds.  Most of them are included in the price of your admission, and a couple are self-guided, but others require better timing.  We only made it through the main house, and a self-guided tour of the grounds and cellar.

Our house tour was scheduled for an hour after our arrival, so we started by wandering around the grounds and gardens.  Jefferson had his own vineyard, and the gardens were expansive.  In Jeffferson's time, there were actually several different gardens, for different purposes.  One was the cook's garden, supplying food to the table each night (or to be stored for later), other gardens produced goods for sale, and slaves had their own gardens to supplement their diet, though they could only work on those after their actual slaving was done (see more cynicism, below).

This enormous creepy alien squash was at least three feet long.  The shadow of my camera is provided for scale.

Photography was not allowed in the house (though it's fine everywhere else), and it's too bad, because there's some pretty cool stuff in there.  One of the first Jeffersonian relics you see is a compass rose on the ceiling of the open front porch; it's connected to a weathervane on the roof, so you can see which way the wind blows without going outside.  Jefferson recorded the weather conditions twice daily whenever he was at Monticello, so he got good use of that gadget.

Good news: the bee is no longer in my bonnet.

Immediately through the porch door is a wide parlor where Jefferson would greet his less-distinguished guests (when you're a big deal like Thomas Jefferson, you get trick-or-treaters year-round, hoping for a handshake and a moment of basking in your glory).  It's decorated with portraits, artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition, and a seven-day clock T.J. designed himself.  As the counterweight which powers it sinks, its position on the wall shows you the day of the week.  The only design flaw is in the height of the ceiling: the marker for Saturday is in the basement, past a hole in the floor.

These days, the gardens are rotated seasonally.  The plants displayed are all from Jefferson's days, including hybrids he developed, but are chosen to depict what would flourish in the current season, whatever that season is.  Volunteers and staff members are present everywhere, tending plants, walls, and a small archaeological dig.  They are all eager to tell you that Jefferson wasn't crazy about being a statesman.  He considered it an important duty, but it wasn't what he loved.  In his heart, he was a scientist first.  He observed weather patterns, dabbled in architecture, and spent a lot of time with botany, cultivating and hybridizing various plant species.  While I freely admit that the man was a genius, and certainly a great scientific mind, I feel like they are a little too eager to gloss over the fact that he was only the brains of the operation, and that very little of what he accomplished would have been possible without his vast holding of slaves.  I was a little upset to read a sign that described how the greenhouse, where Jefferson kept his citrus trees and other delicate plants, was protected from cold weather by the slave quarters--meaning that their living space might have been freezing, but at least his oranges and hibiscus were safe.  It reminded me a lot of my visit to Mt. Vernon.

Jefferson wasn't the only architect to call Monticello home.

SNP AT

In the spring, I had an (obviously failed) plan to get in one backpacking trip every month until at least October, to make sure I had the right gear, familiarize myself with said gear, and spend some time on the trail mentally cataloging shelters, water stops, and resupply points.  I have been backpacking four times this year.  Whoops.

I also had a goal of getting at least one week-long trip, because I felt like the weekend getaways weren't taxing enough to give me a good idea of what I was starting.  I nearly succeeded.

My route, roughly, through Shenandoah National Park

On a recent Sunday afternoon, after the second half of a two-day Ultimate tournament, The Girl drove me to Front Royal.  (On the way, we took the Jubal Early ferry across the Potomac.  Not that Jubal Early.)  The Appalachian Trial passes a few miles outside of town, and I was able to start hiking at about 3:30 that afternoon. The problem was, to make my schedule for the rest of the week work well, I'd have to hike about fourteen miles that afternoon, which meant finishing in the dark.

Chicken of the woods?

The Girl hiked with me almost as far as the Tom Floyd shelter.  On her way back to the car, she met Skurks, a southbound thru-hiker who I didn't meet until Wednesday night.  Skurks and I didn't realize he had met someone I knew until Thursday night, and I admit being pretty proud that I was able to maintain that much lead for at least a couple days.  I didn't meet any other long-distance hikers that day, but just outside the park boundary I met a family of five (there was a sixth member who was sick, and stayed at home) and their three cats who had followed them on the mile-long walk from their home.  The mother of this group has a southbound thru-hiking cousin on the trail this season; the father works for a tree-trimming company whose trucks I've seen in our neighborhood.  It was neither the last, nor the most striking example of "small world" that I encountered that week.

The Gravel Springs shelter was full when I arrived that night (about 8:30), and the picnic table was full of people cooking and eating their dinner as quietly as possible.  I slipped past them to find a tent site, and was glad that my late lunch and heavy trail-snacking left me full enough that I didn't feel cooking dinner that night was necessary.

Monday morning sunrise

There was a tent on either side of me that night; Handyman rose from one and greeted me on his way past the next morning.  I later learned that Cakes ("as in Johnnycakes") was in the other.  I packed quickly, and was the first to leave the shelter area that morning.  My proof?  Spiderwebs in my face, all morning long.  For a while, I considered the trailname Webwalker.  But being early has its advantages, too.  A few miles from camp, a side trail led to a spring, where I saw my first two bears of the week.  I'd never turn down an opportunity to see bears.

Not a bear, but still neat to see so close.

Later that day, I started to feel the effects of skipping dinner the night before, but I had plenty of snacks to sustain me.  Knowing it could be my only big training hike, I had filled my pack with ten days' worth of food, just to make sure I could carry that much next year, should the need arise.  I know now that I can, and that I don't want to carry that much food again if I can help it.

The view from Mary's Rock is not usually blocked by blue buffoons, but it was that day.

I spent Monday night in my tent, pitched behind Byrd's Nest #3 shelter (there are at least three more structures in SNP called Byrd's Nest; one is a picnic shelter relatively close to the trail, one is on Old Rag, and I still haven't found the last).  Handyman and Cakes both passed through on their way to a nearby campground, and Big Island stayed in his hammock two tent sites away from me.  Boulderdash had the shelter to himself until a late arrival joined him.

Tuesday sunrise

I found Cakes and Handyman the next morning as they were wrapping up breakfast, and exploited the running water to brush my teeth, fill my bottles, and "camel up."  The three of us hiked together from there to Skyland, talking variously about Boy Scouting (it was the nineteenth anniversary of the day I became an Eagle Scout), job searches, and the possible impact on our hike of the impending government shutdown.  Truth be told, it had been a popular topic among everyone I saw on the trail that week.

I was slow with the camera, but this bear started closer to me than any other that week.  It was pretty exciting.

For a while, I was in the lead of our little group, and it was during this portion of the morning that I had my second most exciting encounter of the week.  I heard some noise to my left, and scanned the hillside, but didn't see anything.  Usually, those noises are just squirrels int eh leaves, making noise vastly disproportionate to their size, but the previous morning I had heard the thuds of the bear's paws as I approached the spring, and I was still keyed up at the idea that I might see another.  I kept walking once I failed to see anything--even a squirrel--among the fallen leaves, but as I passed a tree, I heard more scrambling noise, and a crashing thud as a bear hit the ground coming out of the same tree.  Moments earlier, Cakes had been complaining that he hadn't gotten to see a bear yet, and this one nearly fell on top of us.

View from a morning snack break.

I sent a couple postcards from Skyland, and Cakes and Handyman decided to stay for a hot breakfast, but when we arrived, we had found verification that the government--and the national parks--had been closed.  We had 48 hours to get out.

Knowing that I would one day write about that hike, I had a moral dilemma.  But I'm going to be honest here: I kept hiking.  I wanted to go as far as I could in that 48 hours, and I'd like to add in this paragraph that I was outside the park boundary by Thursday afternoon.  In the meantime, I stuck to the trail, practiced Leave No Trace, packed out my garbage, and avoided park services.  Later, I learned of several people who went on day hikes in national parks during the shutdown, and one group in Maine who ignored the closure and then required a rescue, thereby taxing the park's skeleton crew.  I do not condone any of those activities.  I felt bad for the rangers who had to tell people to leave; that's not how they want to spend their day.  On the other hand, most of the people I met (and all whose trail names I have mentioned here) were one-way, long-distance hikers, and didn't have the option of getting back in the car and heading home.  We all did the best we could to get out of the park by the posted deadlines.

An hour after I sent a postcard to my nephew telling I had seen three bears, I saw a fourth wandering down the trail ahead of me.

Looking west between Skyland and Big Meadows

A fawn eating either an apple, or a hickory nut.  After I finished taking pictures of her, I turned around and saw her mother on the trail, watching me.

I shared a campsite with Handyman that night, and learned that his son volunteers in the same park group as The Girl and I.  I also learned that he had talked to a ranger who had told him that they weren't going to bother the thru-hikers; we had official legal sanction to continue our hike, and I relaxed a little.  I am not accustomed to living outside the Law.

Looking north along the trail Wednesday morning, just before I caught up with Boulderdash.

Wednesday afternoon, I stopped in Simmons Gap for water, and met my first ranger on the way out.  "You know the deal right?" he asked after some introductory questions.  "Get out of the park as fast as I can?"  He nodded, checked my backcountry permit, reminded me to stay out of park campgrounds, and sent me on my way.  I felt better then, because I had personally gotten clearance from a ranger.  That night, I found out that Handyman had left the park in a ranger's truck.

Marbled Orb Weaver. I saw an awful lot of these along the trail, and felt bad when I had to tear down a web to get past.  They are a beautiful species.

I spent Wednesday night at Pinefield Hut, where there is no field, and I had to look around a bit to find a pine tree.  It was still a beautiful spot, and I arrived early enough to pitch my tent on the hillside above the shelter, rub my sore feet, stretch, and spend some time sitting quietly and listening to the forest before I made my dinner.  I think it was the most relaxing time I had all week, and it made me really happy to be there.  I forgot how much my ankles hurt, and the worrisome starts of blisters I was developing, and how I hadn't slept very well all week. I didn't care about any of that--I was just happy to be out in the woods.  That night I met Slim, a thru-hiker who was carrying a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Skurks, who had met The Girl Sunday afternoon.

I gotcher mobile home right here.

Thursday was my longest day on the trail.  Depending on where you got your information, I hiked between 26 and 28 miles that day, with plenty of climbs, and only one reliable water source.  It was also the day of the best sunrise all week.

Hello, Thursday.  So nice of you to join us!

I could have gotten water at park campgrounds, but after the ranger's warning, I decided it was best if I avoided them entirely.  It wasn't easy.

Black Rock summit, 3,092 feet

Halfway between Pinefield and Calf Mountain shelters is Black Rock Shelter.  I figured that would be a good opportunity to refill my bottles.  Luckily, I didn't guzzle everything I had before I arrived, because there was a boil advisory at Black Rock, and I didn't know whether that meant I had to boil it in addition to filtering it, so I left without any new water.

hiking down from Black Rock summit

By the time I got to Calf Mountain shelter, I felt pretty bad.  Not dehydrated, but exhausted and sore.  I was also hungry, because I knew most of my food would make me thirsty, so I had skipped my last snack break and stretched the time between the others.  When I arrived, I chugged a liter of water, refilled both my bottles, and ate something.  I felt better immediately.  I also felt better when Skurks, the sandaled bad-ass southbound thru-hiker, arrived and declared that day was "a rough hike."  If it took a toll on him, I didn't feel so bad about feeling so bad.

Gecko and Mule (British citizens with nice accents and warm spirits) were already at Calf Mountain when I arrived.  Later, they let me use their cell phone to contact The Girl and tell her that I would be at our designated meeting point a day and a half early, and would she please come rescue me, and bring something cold to drink?

I saw stick insects Thursday.  I like stick insects.

tractor seats on top of a hill, arranged in a ...viewing area? near a communications tower.

Friday morning was a relatively quick hike, when you consider I was averaging close to 20 miles a day the rest of the week.  I got to our rendezvous by 10 AM, talked to a Coast Guard retiree who was disappointed that he and his wife wouldn't get to see Skyline Drive, and waved to Skurks as he went to meet his ride into town.  The Girl arrived about forty minutes after me, cold drink in hand.  But the highlight of the week was just before 9 that morning.  I was climbing, and saw some motion at the edges of vision.  From the size, shape, and color, I guessed it was some sort of raptor; then I realized I hadn't heard it, and wondered if it was an owl.  Then it flew back towards me, and landed less than twenty feet away.

my friend the Barred Owl

Twenty feet away and almost directly above the trail!!

It's hard to tell with all the leaves, but the trail goes right under the owl's limb.

I had hear them earlier in the week, and loved listening to them at night, but I hadn't seen one.  This was closest I'd ever been to an owl without a cage or handler involved, and I was captivated.  We spent close to ten minutes staring at each other.  I took almost twenty pictures, just hoping a few would turn out well, and he occasionally looked over his left shoulder, to show me he wasn't nearly as impressed with me as I was with him, but I was happy just to spend the time with him.  It was a great end to a great hike.