“Even Shorter Shorts”

AT Day 56

Miles Today: 25.4

AT Mile: 1020.1

(Clarion Inn, Harper’s Ferry)

Two days ago I realized that I’m going to get into Harpers Ferry well before Boots arrives. It was three weeks ago when we arranged to reconnect up here, and at the time I just loosely projected my miles up trail, thinking that it would be impossible for her to make the drive up. But to my surprise, she found the time off work, and we put it on the calendar.

This is to say that I wasn’t perfectly accurate with where I was going to be on the 8th, but I just gave it a “shot in the dark” and told Boots that I’ll be around Harper’s. If I’d looked at the maps a bit closer I would have realized that I’d be farther north by this weekend, but after she said she could make it happen, I went ahead and booked the hotel in Harpers and just accepted that I need to slow my miles a bit between now and then, lest I end up north of Harper’s when she arrives.

When I realized that I’m still ahead of schedule, in spite of my attempts to slow my progress, I texted Boots, basically asking if there’s any way that she’d be able to make it to Harper’s before Friday. She said no.

Then, this morning I woke up to a text asking “If I do make it to Harper’s tonight, where would we stay?” She’d managed to get the day off work and was headed north a day early.

All this to explain, I’ve been dragging ass these past two weeks, so as not to get to Harper’s too early. Then this morning I got the message that she’ll be arriving a day early, and all the sudden I needed to get toot-scooting-and-boogying.

It was about 30 miles to get to Harpers, on a late start, but there was a road where I was able to get a hitch into town, 7 miles back from the entrance to Harpers. So I ended up not having to do that 30+ mile day (thank god), but still made it to the hotel before Boots, so that I had time to clean up, get checked in, and settled into the room.

She’ll be here in an hour or two.

It’s a 9 hour drive north for her.

—

Between that morning text and this journal, there were a lot of hills and a lot of sweat!

Today was the Appalachian Trail “Roller Coaster.”

I remember hearing about the AT Roller Coaster all the way back in 2019 when I was hiking the CDT. The guy I was hiking some of Colorado with, a guy named “Hemlock”, told me about this section of AT trail that is just up and down and up and down and up and down, for 15 miles. It was the first time I heard of “PUD” (Pointless UPS and Downs).

Well, there’s been talk for the last week about this upcoming “Roller Coaster” but it wasn’t until talking to a hiker last night that it came to my attention that *today is the day*!

Before getting to the start of the Roller Coaster, I noticed a marking in the sand where it looked as if someone had scratched their name in the dirt with a hiking pole.

I was reading it for a moment, trying to figure out what it said, then realized that it said “Bees!”

I remembered someone yesterday telling me that he saw some other hikers at the beginning of the Roller Coaster and they “had just been mauled by bees.”

“Excuse me?” I asked. “They were *what*?” I was pretty sure that I’d heard him correctly, but I’d never heard the term “mauled” applied to anything smaller than… let’s say… a pit bull. I’d never heard of being “mauled by bees.”

It pissed me off right away. It was more of that fear mongering shit that gets under my skin way too easy. But I also tried to brush it off. Apparently not well enough though, as my attention was on trying to get through that little stretch of trail without being stung, and I didn’t even notice the sign on a tree that said I was beginning the official start of the Roller Coaster. I only saw the sign after 15 miles, the sign on the other side, welcoming NOBO hikers to the end, and welcoming SOBO hikers to the beginning.

I may have been more freaked out about the bees after being stung two days ago. It was my first bee sting of the trail, and I still don’t know if that’s what it was. But I’m pretty sure–a bee or a wasp or something.

Didn’t get stung today though. It was still early in the day. The air was still cool. The bees seemed to still be dormant.

—

So I got through the “bee mauling area” without taking any bee stings, but I did not get the Roller Coaster as smoothly.

It did a number on me!

The temps were hot yesterday, but today there were intollerable. I knew that the heat out here was going to be different than the heat of Arizona. I understood the concept of humidity. But I also understood that I wasn’t going to know what I was getting into until I was in it. I’ve said that same thing about the AT as a whole. I needed to get out here before I could understand it.

Well, my cheerful friend… I feel that I can now say that I know what it’s like to hike in the humidity and heat of the Eastern US. Not pretending that today was the worst that I’m going to see this summer, but today absolutely was the worst humidity I’ve ever hiked through!

I was fucking soaked today.

Pardon the profanity, but I don’t know how to express the difficulty of today without it. Maybe someday I’ll be a better writer and have more words at my disposal to describe misery. Until then however, I’ll have to stick with this: It was fucking hot and humid today, and I was fucking soaked!

I started the day hiking in my sun hoodie. But dear lord, that didn’t make it far. Within an hour of hiking I did something that I *never* do, but I tried it today–hiking without a shirt on. I feel like such a douche like that on trail… but it was just unbearable. I was so wet that I was dripping sweat with every other step. But after awhile without a shirt, I decided that I needed to wear at least something, so I put on my town shirt–the short sleeve green shirt.

It was soaked through in less than 10 minutes.

For the next 15 miles, the trail went up and down nearly the equivalent of the Grand Canyon, except in intervals of about 1-2 miles at a time. Up. Then back down. Then up. Then back down again. Then up… you get the picture…

In the heat, it was rough.

I knew there were going to be hard parts on the AT, but this was one of the roughest moments I’ve experienced on trail. Norovirus sucked. That bacterial infection from day 10 sucked too. But dude… the heat and humidity today… I don’t know how to put words to it.

Three times today, amidst the heat and the humidity, I had a bug fly directly into my eyeball. Not sure why a bug decides to do a B-Line at my eye like that, but it quite sucks to be so sweaty that you’re basically looking like you just stepped out of the shower, then have a bug kamakazi it’s way into your eye, so you have to pick little mashed-up bug pieces out of your eyeball for five minutes…

All this to say, the trail sucked today!

I crossed the AT 1000 mile marker today, but barely had the will to take a picture of it. I was miserable.

Sweat was pouring off my face, I’d wipe it with a towel, and before I could get a picture, it was beaded up on my face again.

The heat was just miserable.

And I know that there’s a lot more of it to come this summer…

On of the problems I have with the heat is foliculitis. It’s a skin condition that I’ve had as far back as I can remember. Most of the time it’s literally a non-issue, but if my legs sweat and don’t have ventilation (like with shorts), it causes them to break out very badly. It’s a lot of the reason that I wear short-shorts on trail. They mostly don’t collect sweat, and they keep me from having breakouts on my legs. But today’s heat and humidity was enough that even my little running shorts were drenched before 10am, and were rubbing against my quads, starting to lead to chafing.

The only way I could make things so the shorts weren’t bothering me was to take the side seam of my running shorts, roll them in, and tuck them into the leg holes of my briefs. In other words, I made my short-shorts into *even shorter* short shorts. Basically they just covered my ass and diddly-bits, leaving my full upper legs exposed to the open air and ventilation.

It helped, but it also looked like I was hiking in a Speedo. The few times I saw other hikers I pulled the tucked part out of my briefs so they fell to their normal length.

Even with that however, I can already tell that my thighs are starting to break out from the accumulation of sweat through today… and although I’ll spare you the wonderful details of this next bit… I have entered The-Land-of-Ass-Chafing. It’s never been an issue on any of the 8,000+ miles I’ve hiked before this. But now that it’s too humid for sweat to evaporate, everything is soaking wet and just rubs and burns in ways that it doesn’t when I’m dry.

Dude… today sucked.

Good thing I had something to look forward to.

—

About have way through the day, right as it was HOT, I got a text from Plinko who had gotten out of camp before me this morning. He said that he’d stopped at the road side restaurant up trail and that it had AC and cold beers. So I made the .3 mile detour to join him and get out of the heat.

Sitting there and enjoying a burger and NA beer, I looked at my maps more clearly since I was out of the heat. That’s where I saw that I could get a ride to hotel in Harpers from 7 miles before town, thus giving me time to get in before Boots arrives tonight at 10pm.

I was also starting to get some ass chafing at that point in the day, so plotting a way to get off trail early also saved me a lot of pain which would have been 7 more miles of this today. Thank god this worked out, and I can hike those remaining 7 miles into Harpers with Boots tomorrow. We’ll just take a shuttle back down trail to where he picked me up today and finish up the last bit of Virginia together.

I would have stayed at the bar a bit longer, and soaked up a bit more of the AC, but right as I was starting to munch on my burger and absolute drunk stepped in and started making a scene. It was about 1 in the afternoon, but from what I could tell, he seemed to have started drinking at about 1 in the afternoon YESTERDAY.

As he stepped in he made a comment about worrying that if he sat too close to me that people might think we’re gay.

“Maybe I am gay.” I said in response, and it was clear that nobody had given him that before. This was one of the “good old boys,” for whom the word “gay” is an unacceptable insult. So to have someone taking that insult and saying “maybe I am gay” was something he’d never heard before. Didn’t know how to respond. The 25 beers that he had in his system by then didn’t seem to help his quick wit either.

Within 5 minutes Plinko and I both left back to the road walk and back to trail. Plinko made comment that the drunk had probably never experienced push back like that from someone at that bar. Seemed to be more the places where other drunks gather to slur their words and barely listen to the other party.

I told Plinko that I not only doubted anyone had ever given that guy any lip like I had, but that was probably too drunk to realize that I even was giving him lip.

I digress… bar culture just fucking sucks.

The only other true “bar” that I’ve been to on this trail was in Damascus; a guy told me he’d buy my meal for me there, so I joined him. But while I sat there drinking an NA beer and burger, someone at the bar used the “N” word twice within 5 minutes.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in my life at bars like that. The AT has taught me I’m not missing much.

—

I’m at the Clarion Inn now, waiting for Boots. She’ll get here a little before 10… an hour still.

It’ll be the first time we’ve seen one another since meeting beside a fire, on mushrooms, at Trail Days. The little bit of time we had there was nice, but I know we’re both looking forward to having more time this weekend in Harpers to get to know one another better, do some hiking, and be tourists.

She’s been single for some years not. Like a lot of women, got treated like shit by the boys she’d been dating for some time, and basically said “fuck this” and hasn’t been dating for a few years. Which is why it was so hard for me to knock down the walls she had up to try and get to know her there. Since Trail Days however, we’ve both been a lot more open towards one another, and as such, the time we’ll have here in Harpers will be much different than what we found in Damascus.

Since she’s driving so far and we may not be able to see one another for the remainder of the trail, I’m taking the rest of the week off to spend with her.

Tomorrow we’ll hike those 7 miles into Harpers, like I said, and then we’ve got the rest of the weekend to be tourists. There’s history stuff, river floating (maybe), and just relaxing off trail.

My dad told me to have fun and not get married. I’m planning to follow both pieces of advice.

Probably won’t write every day this weekend. Will probably just write after I’m back to trail.

Wormwood.