Virginia on the Appalachian Trail

Pearisburg ticked all the boxes for a town stop, with good grocery stores and decent restaurants, but it wasn�t the most welcoming place we visited. The trip to Wal-Mart had us eager to experiment with new things: for me this meant buying a �Simple Simon� electronic game to play (that lasted about five goes before I got bored and binned it); for Billy this meant buying a skirt to hike in. It was a fairly standard woman�s skirt that Billy took a knife to and shortened. Combined with a fad for carrying his food bag in his hands, this gave him the terrifying appearance of a handbag-wielding, cross-dressing vagrant.

The weather alternated between oppressive heat and heavy rain before we awoke at the Rice Field Shelter to dense mist. Julie, a girl we had gotten to know, set out before us only to scurry back five minutes later, afraid she�d lose the trail in the mist. We escorted her for a few miles until it cleared, but even we were a little spooked when we passed through a herd of cows � each looming out of the murk one-by-one and turning to stare silently at us as we passed.

The going remained fairly taxing with some good sized climbs. This section of trail has some good sight-seeing along the way so we were kept interested between the uphill slogs. I particularly enjoyed stopping off at the Audie Murphy Monument. The most decorated American soldier of World War II, his is a wonderful Boy�s Own story that is stirringly chronicled in the citation accompanying his Congressional Medal of Honour (learn more). The monument lies close to where he was killed by a crash in his private plane in 1971. We also stopped off at the Dragon�s Tooth � a rock formation that rears impressively out of the ground and can be climbed by hikers with a better head for heights than me. On this day we were relying on getting food at the Catawba grocery store - 15 miles into the day�s hike that the guidebook suggested had a full service restaurant. We didn�t eat from breakfast until 4pm when we rocked up at the store to find that the planned restaurant was not yet completed and we would be dining in a gas station store. By this stage, impulse buying was the order of the day and we left to sit in the sun and eat an awful selection of nasty food. My own meal consisted of: a large sack of potato chips, 1lb of french onion dip, 1 pint of chocolate ice-cream, a chocolate bar and half a gallon of milk. This was wolfed down quickly as we were ravenous and half of it was melting or becoming unpleasantly warm as we sat. Needless to say we both felt terrible by the end of it. My own meal had contained no fewer than 4000 calories � including 5 times the recommended daily intake of saturated fat � and it was in no hurry to be digested. We set about the remaining seven miles to the shelter with minds tightly focused on keeping our stomach contents in place � for once a trail-magic cache fruit we passed wasn�t appealing. We arrived after a trying ordeal to find that the Boy Scout Shelter had been demolished in the off-season. At least the urgently required privy was still standing, though this proved to be one to avoid if one had the choice.

The next day we stopped off for a photo shoot at McAfee Knob, a popular Appalachian Trail landmark. It is traditional to get photos of oneself on the precarious ledge that reaches out over a terrifying drop and we weren�t going to miss out. Adding spice to the proceedings were the persistent rain and stiff, gusting breeze. For me the shoot involved sitting down ten yards from the drop and scooting my way over to the edge on my rear. Dangling my legs over into the void with the wind buffeting me was not my idea of a relaxing time and I was relieved when we were through with it and hiking on towards the I81 interchange. There we booked into the Best Western before making the perilous journey along busy highway to MacDonald�s and yet another session of fast-food carnage.

While the weather continued to be hit and miss, the bugs were becoming quite consistent. I was now deeply envious of Billy�s excellent bug-proof refuge � my own bug netting was waiting for me three hundred miles further North. I awoke one morning to find every exposed inch of skin covered in bites. You don�t have pleasant dreams when you�re being eaten alive and you spend the next 48 hours itching like crazy. We broke up the stretch into Waynesboro with a pleasant daytime stop at the town of Glasgow and, couple of days later, lunch at �The Tea Room�. I was worried we weren�t properly attired for tea and scones in the company of blue-rinsed pensioners, but upon arrival it seemed we were rather overdressed. The Tea Room is a small, run-down country store that was being run by a rough looking, though perfectly pleasant, hillbilly. We found microwave snacks to lunch on and picked up a few groceries, before the owner kindly drove us back to the trail head.

On the way down the final big hill of the day I got a sudden sharp pain in my lower back. At first I didn�t think too much of it, assuming it would pass soon enough, but I was to remain in great discomfort for the next two hundred miles and, if it hadn�t been for Billy driving me on, I think I would have given up the hike and gone home. From then on every step would be a painful limp until we finally got off the trail at Harpers Ferry for a break and a visit to a doctor.

It was with a great deal of relief that we reached Rockfish Gap, gateway to the Shenandoahs, and a short hitch from the large town of Waynesboro. We weren�t quite out of the (metaphorical) woods yet though. We had some trouble getting a hitch, and the guy who finally stopped for us didn�t know we were hikers - this is generally a bad sign. He was certainly rough and probably drunk, but he was perfectly well meaning � he was even kind enough to give us a demonstration of the (doubtless class-leading) acceleration of his truck. He also did a fine job of wowing the local ladies with a charming mix of horn-honking and salacious leering. A little miscommunication had him drop us a few miles the wrong side of town and the long walk back to the centre was abject agony for me. It was too late to get the most out of a hotel room, so we spent the night in a field that the YMCA provides for hikers to camp in. From the office we had ordered pizza for delivery to the camp site. Of course, the enormous pizzas we had just Houdinied into our bellies didn�t sit well, and coupled with the extremely loud train that periodically passed in the night, we didn�t sleep soundly. Waking early the next day, we showered at the Y and limped out in search of a hotel. We came up trumps and the Quality Inn was happy for us to check in at 7.30am. This meant our $55 not only bought us a room for 26 blissful hours, but also two continental breakfasts. Sometimes it really doesn�t get any sweeter than that.


Photos of the Virginia (Central) section of the Appalachian Trail:

Apple Orchard FAA radar	Ben climbs stile	Ben crosses tree bridge	Ben summits Cold Mtn

Billy in Rice Field	Billy on McAfee	Cripple Creek Bridge	Double Blaze

Feed me Privy	B & B Tarping	Harpers Creek	Pedlar Dam

Ben on Humpback	The Guillotine	VA652 A.T. Sign	James River foot bridge

Sulfurous Stream	Lindamood School	Keffer Oak Valley	Trail in Virginia

Ottie Cline Powell	Virginia Flower

Virginia (Central) on the Appalachian Trail