Day 29: 5/8/16 (Virtual AT 2020 Day 36)

First off, happy mothers day to all the moms out there… especially our mothers who are both very supportive of this journey of ours.

We learned one very important lesson today… the first rule of trail magic is you don’t talk about trail magic. We heard that there was some big trail magic thing on top of Camp Creek Bald all weekend. Unfortunately, we were sure it would be over by the time we would reach it, so we didn’t think to much of it. Then about 4 miles from the top, a hiker coming in the other direction said that there were two hiker feeds going on up the mountain, and one of them looked like they’d be going all day. Of course this added a bit of motivation, and got us excited at the prospect. When we were about a half mile from the top, we passed another hiker heading downhill who informed us that we had missed the trail magic.

This was a little disappointing, but the first hiker mentioned that there were two, so we didn’t let it get us down. We ended up hiking until a little after 1pm, easily 1.5 miles past where the trail magic probably was, and determined that we missed it. Sitting around camp tonight, it sounds like we weren’t the only hikers that were told about trail magic, only to hike the whole day with none. We all decided that it’s much better to not be told ahead of time about trail magic… I think we all would have had a better day if we didn’t know what we had missed.

We did 13.6 miles today, and we’re tenting near Jerry Cabin Shelter. Aside from the missed trail magic, it wasn’t an easy day… a long climb, and then a rough, rocky, ridge walk. The ridge walk was pretty cool, and afforded us some nice views. According to a sign at Howard’s Rock, the ridge walk was actually added later, as the blue blazed “bad weather” trail used to be the route around the ridge. That blue blaze is still used in case of bad weather when you wouldn’t want to be up on the exposed ridge. But oh man, it was not an easy stretch… lots of rocks to climb up and down,  uneven rocks, and to top it all off,  a good amount of mud.

There are still quite a few thru-hikers out here… pretty much everyone at the shelter tonight. It seems like most of the hikers here have seen each other before, we’re the newcomers in the bubble now. It’s okay though, like most other hikers on the trail, everyone seems friendly.

One exciting milestone today… We’ve gone 300 miles so far, which felt pretty good, and within the next two weeks we’ll be over 400 miles… in fact we’re not taking another zero day until after we’ve surpassed 400 miles.

In other news that I forgot to mention a few days ago (well ok, a week ago), Casey has a trail name. Back in Hot Springs I decided to call her Bear Bell. During the first month of hiking, Casey had a little cold which included a cough and lots of sniffing and nose blowing… so she made quite a bit of noise as we walked. I had made the joke that we wouldn’t need to worry about seeing any bears with all the noise she was making… just like a bear bell. So there you go… We’ve both got trail names.