Thursday, June 4th - Got up at 5:45, after a terrible night with the biting flies. Whoever picked this spot for a shelter should be forced to live here from May 15th til June 15th every year for all eternity. It rained again overnight, from about 12:30 am til around 4:00 am, heavy at first but eventually fading away to tree-drip. Got out around 6:20, dreary and overcast to start, and stayed that way all day. But (at least) it was dramatically cooler. Passed the first shelter without stopping, and just pressed on.
Had some interesting trail magic today - first, we passed through some pretty impressive "fern-fields," with many thousands of ferns (to the exclusion of virtually any other plant except trees) alongside the trail. In one spot, the ferns were taller than I am, something I don't think I've ever seen before. Second, we also passed through more areas where the rhododendron trees were in full bloom; again, thousands of purple flowers, an amazing sight. And again, other areas where we were walking through tens of thousands of blooming mountain laurels. I'm not sure pictures can do these sights justice, and I hope the readers can appreciate what I'm trying to describe. God's Garden? Finally, coming up over a ridgeline, we had a large doe standing in the trail about 20 feet in front of Mark, wholly uninterested in our presence. Mark finally waved at it at bit, and it wandered off the trail by about 15 - 20 feet, and began grazing (with one eye still on us) as we walked on by. I'm sure we'll see hundreds of deer in the Shenandoahs, but it's still an interesting sight right now.
We came to another shelter (forgot to record the name of it), where Fidget was catching a nap to recover from the night-of-no-sleep at Bryant's Ridge. We also took a break, and chatted with a trail volunteer who was weed-whacking a section of the trail. Among other comments, he warned us that we had very heavy rain expected later this evening and overnight (which we hadn't known, because we couldn't get a signal on the weather band radio down in the hole at Bryant's Ridge). Got out of there soon thereafter (12:50) and pushed on hard. We had a very short but very hard burst of rain right after we left the shelter, but (oddly) that was it for quite awhile.
We had three very tough climbs during the afternoon, the first over Floyd Mountain, then over a ridge, and then another lesser mountain that was more difficult due to our fatigue than the actual elevation. The rain got going around 3:00 pm, then more heavily as we climbed this last hill, but that only spurred us to push harder. We pulled into Matt's Creek Shelter around 7:30, and lucky for us we had pushed - because it was just pouring within 10 minutes of our arrival. Surpisingly no one was there (and no one else showed up for the rest of the night). So, 22 miles today. We are VERY happy to be under cover - as it turned out, we got 6 inches of rain total from mid-day today through mid-day tomorrow(!!!)
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