Later on I started to prepare my dinner of orzo, dehydrated cheddar cheese, onions, peas and chicken. A sort of 1 pot casserole. I asked Dee what she was having for dinner. Her reply was that she wasn't going to eat and hadn't eaten in 5 days. She then starts to mention how she didn't bring any food except for some grape juice and beef bouillion cubes. Her goal was to fast for 40 days. She thought it would be easier to accomplish this by being out on the trail, away from temptations. Her reasons for the fast were both spiritual and to detoxify her body. I was hungry and was looking forward to eating my dinner, even though I didn't manage to finish all of it.
Cooking dinner on the AT
Seeing how hiker's midnight is right around sundown, I ended up going to bed sometime around 8pm. I set my hammock up on the 2nd floor of the shelter. I added in my mattress pad, zero degree sleeping bag and silk bag liner to make me a nice little cocoon for the night. Right after dinner the rain started to fall. It rained all through the night.
When I woke up on Monday morning it was still raining. I didn't have a weather forecast so I didn't know how much longer it would last. I heard that the Harpers Ferry area got quite a bit of rain on Saturday. When I got home and check the local weather, it showed that Harper's Ferry received almost 1 inch of rain on Monday. I repacked my backpack and tried to arrange everything in some sort of logical order. The pack only has 5 compartments, with 2 of those being side pockets that aren't very deep. I brought an excess of ziplock bags and put similar types of gear together. I tried waiting out the rain, then it looked like I may have to spend another day in the same place at the rate it was falling. In the mean time I read all the register entries that other hikers had left. My favorite was the group of hikers that had 1 car in Harpers Ferry and another car at the MD/PA border for when they were finished. They get in the second car and drive down to their starting point. It saves them having to hike back from where they initally left. It seems that the keys for car #2 were locked in car #1. So they were planning on heading back to retrieve the keys. Ouch.
Around 2pm I was getting a little bored and anxious to get back out. I put on my pack cover and raingear and started hiking north. I didn't see another hiker all day. I had to watch where I put my feet since most of the rainwater didn't soak all the way thru. The trail was quite wet and in someplaces underwater. I went thru Gathland state park. There is a memorial to Civil War correspondents there. That was the only time my feet got wet was when I had to hike thru a field with tall grass. When I got to the trail that led to the Crampton Gap shelter I decided to continue hiking north. I didn't see any point in stopping when I got a late start and I still had quite a bit of daylight left. I was going to push on to the Rocky Run shelter, which was the next shelter in succession. Shelter sites usually have a water source and a privy or outhouse. And if it was going to rain again it would be better to be in a roomy shelter instead of my cramped tent.
What the trail looked like on Monday afternoon
Gathland state park memorial
Gathland park building
Not everything on the trail is green
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