Day 2 — 13 miles
Calf Mountain Shelter to Blackrock Hut
June 3, 2002

Spent last night with Pingo, Spiz, Detour, Heman and Lotto. They are a group of thru-hikers who are pretty much traveling together for now. We all settled in and began cooking our dinners. Jeremy and I decided on the Baked Ziti w/mozzarella. What a fiasco that turned into!

First you need to start the stove to boil the water. Here's where our trouble begins. The MSR Pocket Rocket is a great stove, it will connect to any brand canister with the same thread pattern. We had a Snow Peak canister for the week. When we hooked it up, there was no gas. There was gas in the canister, and I know the stove works, so herein lies the problem. There is a small valve inside the top of the canister that has a plunger that needs to be depressed to allow the fuel to flow to the stove. I took the canister behind the shelter, half out of kindness (I didn't want to accidentally kill everyone at the picnic table in front of the shelter) and half out of embarrassment.

Once behind the shelter I found a good sized rock to smack the top of it with, still didn't work. I got a screw-in hook from the shelter and used the screw end to pry around inside the valve. Finally a loud hiss followed by a spray of cold gas told me that I had succeeded in jamming the valve open, so now I screwed the stove an, and viola, it worked. This was no quick process, I'd say all in all it consumed the better part of 30 minutes. Now we were ready to cook some dinner.

By now we were both pretty hungry. The food cooked in a relatively short time. The pasta cooked good, but the spices weren't completely rehydrated. Jeremy got the first bowl and dove right in. As I was spooning some into my own bowl I asked him how it tasted, he responded with "It's very Bold!" I wasn't entirely sure what he meant by bold, but soon I was speaking his language. My first bite told the story. I don't know if it was too short a cook time, or just that we didn't care for the taste, but we definitely didn't enjoy our dinner.

While Jeremy finished the first bowl and went for seconds, I grabbed the food bag and went for a snickers bar. So with a tasty dinner of Snickers, we were content.

As we were eating a party of four walked into camp. It was a beat up looking group consisting of three men and a woman. Two older men, one of them very experienced in outdoor travel and the other on his first outing, ever. From their conversation, we discovered that the woman was about to turn 50 and she was also out on her first trip. The younger man seemed to be pretty familiar with camping and hiking. The group was from Iowa and was spending a few days on the trail. It had taken them about 5 hours to cover the same 7 miles that Jeremy and I had covered in 3 earlier.

Upon their arrival, Spiz, Pingo and Lotto moved their belongings from the shelter and went to work making their sites to sleep in. Detour and Heman were already set up at a tent site. Before long, the thru-hiker crowd was retiring to their homes for the night. We were to be sharing the shelter platform with the foursome from Iowa.

When word of mice and rats came up, the woman in the group became very excited, and not in a good way. Jeremy and I climbed into our bags and settled in for the night. We both suffered from the usual first night sleep problems. Off and on we dozed throughout the night. We were keeping our ears open as we dozed off for bears.

No one could figure out how to use the Shenandoah bear poles, so our food was in the shelter with us. It was hung on the mouseproof hangers, but stood no chance against a bear. We awoke at about 2:00 a.m. to Jeremy jumping up in his sleeping bag rather quickly. It seems as he slept, the mice found his sleeping bag an inviting place to be. He woke to a mouse crawling along side him inside his bag.

The rest of the night went by pretty well until "The Lumberjack" started cutting logs. I don't know whether a trail name existed prior to this, but from now on he will be "The Lumberjack" to Jeremy and me. It was very cool to spend the night with these four, they were all great people. The older guy who had never hiked before told us he was diabetic after learning of our Hike For Hope.

The next morning, I awoke knowing how to hang the bear bags I had created the solution as I slept. Guess what, we discovered it worked! We woke at 5:30 a.m. and broke camp as quietly as we could. By 6:00 a.m. we had pumped water and were on the trail. It was an easy morning.

We dropped down to Jarman Gap and the ascended, after crossing the road to Turk Gap. It was 8:00 a.m. when we got there and had expected Spiz and Pingo to have caught up with us by this point. This was where there were to meet She-ra and El-Guapo for a day of Slackpacking. None of them were at the Gap when we left about 10 minutes later. As we climbed away from Turk Gap we spotted our second deer of the morning. The first came between Jarman and Turk Gaps on the west side of Skyline Drive. When we spotted her in the woods we all stopped and stared at each other. She soon came as close as 10 feet from us. We were sure we could have gotten her close enough to pet her, but we decided we had stood idle long enough and continued hiking on.

We had been hiking for about 3 hours when we crossed Skyline Drive again at 9:00 a.m. We checked the signs and found we were already halfway to our destination for the day. Along the ridges we encountered groves of Mountain Laurel. These flowers looked out of place on these mountain tops. We soon became entranced by their beauty and fragrance and couldn't help but admire their small clusters of flowers.

We passed Riprap parking area about 100 yards after taking a rest break and wondering where on the map we were. After the parking area the trail begins to rise. We climbed to the top only to return to the bottom and cross the drive again. We climbed up and over another ridge before crossing Skyline for the last time today. On the opposite side of the road we found a sign declaring one mile to the hut.

We had a new determination and our legs carried us hastily up the slope leading to the spur trail of the hut. We soon found ourselves descending into the ravine which houses the shelter. After a brief privy break, which happened to be the worst smell I have personally encountered in my life, we found ourselves joined by our slackpacking acquaintances from the prior night. First El-Guapo and She-ra arrived and then Spiz and Pingo. We shared a few moments talking before they returned to the trail to knock out another 13 miles.

Later, Lotto stopped by and had lunch. Jeremy and I went to work setting up our tent. After the mouse incident we decided the tent would be a better place to spend the night. Plus, with any luck we we would be out of earshot of The Lumberjack, if they make it this far tonight. As I am writing this I believe I hear them coming down the trail. We really wanted to see them make it, when they round the bend and we see that it's them we'll be very happy for them.