Thursday, June 11th - Up at 5:30, somewhat overcast, 58 degrees, rather sultry already. We're happy to have escaped last night's heavy thunderstorm. Unfortunately, I did not escape the 3:00 am alarms set by two of the shelter residents, both of whom failed to wake up of course, so only the rest of us suffered on that one (thanks, guys!) On our way by 6:00.
Today marked our first sightings of bears, both moderate sized, maybe 75 pounds. The first was off to our left, and seemed far more curious than alarmed by our presence, approaching slowly until he was about 25 feet away - at which point we moved on! The second was up a tree, but did a fireman's exit and skeedaddle as we approached. So Mark owes me a steak at Ruth Chris', since he bet me we'd see no bears on this trek (and he was right, til today). Easy trail today, probably our easiest to date on the trek, and we now understand better why people like the Shenandoahs so much. But it was hot and humid, and we were both sweating rivers as we went along.
Stopped at Black Rock Hut (Mark headed down to get water and sign us in on the register). Water was a bit of an issue today, and we probably ended up drinking 2 gallons each. Mark discovered one very unexpected thing at the hut; that being that Thunderpants and Sis had quit the trail three days before ("It's been fun but we've had enough"). I was surprised how much this depressed me; they seemed like they would be going all the way. Even though they were just acquaintances, they were genuine trail-friends, and you hate to lose your friends. Something I suspect we'll be seeing more of as the weeks wear on. No comments from Salty (who had been co-hiking with Thunderpants and Sis), but we saw that Yoon had returned after what appeared to be about 5 days off the trail.
We arrived at Loft Mountain (one of the SNP camps) around 3:45 or so. We decided to walk all the way around the camp on the A.T. in order to save a half an hour's hiking tomorrow (when we're trying to meet up with Jim and Kim Smith). The trail around the camp was very thick, and obviously had had no trail maintenance in some time (and I wondered if most through hikers were just cutting across the camp to save themselves about 3/4's of a mile of hiking). We ended up coming out at the campstore, so in all we ended up doing about 20 1/2 miles or so.
After getting some drinks and the lay of the land we headed up to the actual campground (about a quarter mile walk) and self registered for a tent-site. Being it was only Thursday, the camp was mostly unoccupied, so plenty of sites still available (Friday would have been a very different story). Got a nice site (A-1-D), reasonably flat and fairly high - a good thing in view of the forecast, still calling for rain. Once we set up, we grabbed fresh clothes and headed down the road about a mile and a half to the wayside restaurant - we tried to thumb it, but no one would pick us up, so we ended up walking the whole way down. Decent food, but quite expensive (are we surprised?; did we care? - No!) Coming back, we were happily surprised to be picked up by the very first vehicle, driven by several section hikers - saved us a long, steep climb back to the camp. Per our request, they dropped us off at the campstore, where we got a 5 minute shower for a buck. After that we visited the campstore itself, picking up a bit of supplemental food and a couple of beers, then headed back to our site - finding a note from the host to come see him. Mark wrote some postcards while I tracked down the host (we needed to put our receipt on the campsite post). After we enjoyed our beverages, we got ready for rain, as an approaching storm was "announcing" itself with dark blue skies and distant booms of thunder. But we were grateful that the rain had held off til 8:00 pm. The rain arrived around 8:30, and after an initially heavy flurry it moderated to light drizzle by about 10:30 or so. It will be a wet packup, but all in all a very good day.
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