Day 88
We planned to get and early start this am and go about 12-15 miles. We were woken up early in the morning by rain and it had continued raining into the later parts of the morning, so we stayed in our tents until about 8:30 to wait for it to let up. Turns out, everyone else camping near our site (Pelican, Clifty, and Tyvek) all had the same idea. We didn’t get out of camp until 10:40, but we weren’t in a big hurry since it was only our second day back out on trail. We met a new thru hiker, Yoda, on our way out. He was super caffeinated and talked quickly. He said he had to be done by August 8th and he started in mid April. He has to average 23 miles a day for the rest of the trip to make it on time. I thought it was really sad he was making such a mad dash to finish. He mentioned he didn’t have any friends on the trail also and it just broke my heart. Then, he quickly took off and said he hoped to see us again. We know we wont see him as we arent doing big days anymore. From Clarks Ferry, we had a mostly level ridgeline walk to the Peter’s Mountain Shelter where we stopped for lunch. We met some trail maintainers there and talked with them while we ate. They told us of the trail conditions coming up and warned us to watch for all the poison ivy. The rocks weren’t too bad, but we were feeling tired after all our days off. We slowly made our way down the hill to Clark’s Creek. We had dinner there and decided to head up to a pipeline as the maintainers told us there was a nice campsite there. We showed up and Otto and Testament were set up, so we camped with them. It was a great site with wonderful company. The photo is me underneath a pink blazed trail marker. On the AT, pink blazing is when a guy is chasing a girl down the trail ;)