My walk through southern Appalachia (mile 200 to 511) was marked by three major events. Some more traumatic, some more nauseating, and some more awe inspiring, but all certainly eventful. These 311 miles were a rollercoaster. Sometimes you ride a rollercoaster after a big meal and you loose your lunch. Other times you were scared to ride it, but you had so much fun you keep jumping back in line. But in the worst cases, you ride a rollercoaster that whiplashes you in way that convinces you to never go back to that amusement park again. Luckily, I’m still riding the rollercoaster, but it did have me questioning why I ever got in line for it.
Imagine you are hiking uphill in the beating sun through snake infested meadows and humid forests. Your pack is heavy from a resupply and your stomach is full from the “best breakfast on the AT” (which it certainly was) at Mountain Harbour BnB. You’re anxious to get to camp, because your resupply took way longer than expected and you have miles to cover on the nero day. You get to a road crossing and continue up the hill, but you turn around when the bushes behind you rustle. A puppy with curly white hair stumbles out of the woods and begins to follow you. At first you don’t believe what you are seeing and you continue hiking. But, the rustling grows and you turn around again to see six other puppies now pursuing you too. This exact situation was what Mummy (like an Egyptian mummy), a member of our hiking group, faced at Campbell Hollow Road.
Milk (right) and I (left) enjoying our time around the fire with blissful ignorance of the abandoned puppies.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group (including myself) was in camp enjoying an evening by the campfire with s’mores and games that I was terrible at (Word Smash). We were blissfully ignorant of the crisis at Campbell Hollow Road, until Mummy’s hiking partner, Avalanche, walks into camp as the sun begins to set. They explained the situation and I made the mistake of deciding to go down and see the puppies.
Mummy, the discoverer of the puppies, holding one the puppies as she chews a stick.
While we were enjoying ourselves, Avalanche and Mummy were trying to find anyone to help them with these puppies. Apparently, a man on an ATV drove by and stopped to talk with them. He seemed eager to help and he drove away promising to find someone who would take the puppies. So Mummy, Avalanche, and now I sat in the trail playing with seven abandoned puppies.
Two of the seven puppies sitting in my lap as we waited for help.
Knowing that it was unreasonable to keep these puppies or bring them to our camp, it was annoying how cute and polite they were being. They fell asleep in our arms and batted at our trail runners. Sometimes they slept on their back and put their paws on their stomach. Instead of just peeing all over our laps they got up and walked into the woods to take bathroom breaks. Each of them had personalities and we made our second big mistake by giving them funny names.
As the sun set we waited for the man on the ATV and tried to find a place to get phone service. Eventually, Mummy’s phone was functional enough to leave a message with the county’s animal shelter. It was getting close to ten and all the puppies were dead asleep and the man in the ATV was no where to be seen. We considered sleeping at the road crossing but it was heavily sloped and very wooded, so we placed the sleeping puppies into a cuddled up ball and walked up to camp.
A puppy fell asleep in my arms as we unsuccessfully tried to flag down cars.
Distraught and exhausted, we did not sleep very much last night. This trend would continue but for different reasons.
In 1975 Janice Balza was murdered by a mental patient who “coveted her backpack” while sitting at the campfire at Vandeventer Shelter. The FarOut comments claim that her ghost continues to haunt the shelter. While, we did not directly see or hear such a ghost that place is definitely cursed and I wouldn’t touch it with a thirty foot pole for many reasons.
The cursed shelter looking ominous. Credit: Strange Outdoors
The first being that the water source is a 0.3 mile death march of 300 feet of descent away. The second being that it can get quite windy and cold at night. The third reason though is more compelling and quite frankly much more nauseating. Vandeventer Shelter is where three members of our hiking group, plus myself, came down with some sort of stomach bug (probably norovirus).
I awoke first, twisting and turning from stomach pain, confused and annoyed. I didn’t know what my body needed until the person sleeping next to me in the shelter bolted towards the bushes and laid waste to patch of nettle with partially digested dinner. That’s when I did the same and wretched on the other side of the clearing. Little did we know, only a few moments before a third member of our group had sprinted across the campsite and blasted the bushes with his ramen dinner. Within minutes the whole shelter was consumed by panic and horrible stomach pains. We took turns committing biological warfare at different points near the shelter, often not able to make it to our preferred unloading spot.
After several horrible hours and with the intervention of some graciously offered nausea medication we finally began to fall asleep in the early morning hours. Upon waking up the next day a little more level-headed, but very tired and dehydrated we knew that the specter of norovirus had collided with our digestive systems.
The morning after falling sick we stumbled out to the view behind Vandeventer Shelter and attempted to eat some dried fruit.
The disgusting origins of a sickness like norovirus left me in denial. I wanted to blame its cause to the curse of Vandeventer started by a fateful murder 48 years ago, however, that’s unlikely I suppose. It’s more likely that someone somewhere did their dirty business too close to a water source and we (and a few others who got sick a couple of days later) blissfully filtered that water for consumption.
The only silver lining of the night was the origin of Mousetrap’s trail name. Following our disgusting sputtering, a mouse was caught in her tent. Luckily, Jukebox was awake to help her chase out the rodent. All the patient zeroes in the shelter heard the scream that accompanied the mouse’s discovery, but were too weak to emerge from the shelter. Which I guess was a smart move, considering the last thing Mousetrap needed was norovirus herself.
Okay maybe that’s a lie. Although, I love state high points, Mt. Rogers doesn’t have a view nor a summit sign.
The trail takes but the trail also gives. And after a week of the trail taking our sanity and digestive health we arrived at the Virginia Highlands and we finally got some of that giving we’ve been waiting for. So when I got to the top of Mr. Rogers, unsure that I was even at the top and unaware that I was in probably the lamest part of the Virginia Highlands, I still pretended like the summit was a Katahdin moment for me.
Katahdin wishes it could be Mt. Rogers.
I traversed the Highlands with two other hikers from our group, Jukebox and Mousetrap. We had a ball. We climbed the rock formations and frolicked in flowering rhododendron tunnels. The weather was sunny and beautiful.
Tunnels of rhododendrons exploded in pink blooms.
We came down from one particularly beautiful rock formation and emerged into a meadow where a massive cow was staring right at us. This was a complete surprise. We had heard of the Grayson Highland ponies, but not the Grayson Highland cows. He looked up towards us, swinging his long horns as he did. Unaware that this cow wasn’t alone, we continued along the trail, just as his friend bursted out of the brush right in front of me. The giant black body towering over me as the cow lumbered a few feet from Jukebox, Mousetrap, and I.
Big hunk of cow that burst out of bushes a mere feet from Jukebox, Mousetrap, and I.
It wasn’t until the next meadow we saw the famous ponies. A herd of ponies meandered towards us as we walked down the trail. The fowls were curious, but their mothers were cautious. One even licked Jukebox. Which was pretty cool until we took a good look at the pony’s nasty brown tongue covered in digested grass. Honestly, brown tongue or not I was hoping I would get a pony lick, but they weren’t that frisky around me.
The Grayson Highland ponies in all their glory.
The trail decided to take many things over the last few hundred miles. But, whatever it decides to take it returns to you in moments like the many I had in the Grayson Highlands. Moments that remind you of the simple joys of the trail.
(from left to right) Moustrap, Avalanche, Jukebox, Mummy, and I enjoying some rest in Damascus after a heinous week.
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