We hit the trail around 7:30am today. We passed by a “hiker feed” at a dude’s house who is simply named “The Captain”. This is something he apparently does roughly two weeks after Trail Days every year. He makes a crap-ton of free food for hikers. His house is literally right across a creek from the trail and he has a zip line to get there. Pretty badass, but it was too early in the morning for us to stop in when we got there. Anyway, I’ll come back to him. Continue reading →

We headed out of the hostel by 7:30am while most of the youths were still snoozing away drunkenly. We had an extra mile or so today from town to get back to the trail. Yesterday we were fortunate enough to get a lift into town from a church group who is doing a portion of the trail together called Y-Wam (I think?). We have chatted with them a few times and they’ve been really nice. Anyway, we had heavy packs from the resupply. We just go nuts at the grocery store when we buy supplies and get way too much. It’s always fun to eat it all though after we lug it up the mountain. The trail traversed through a yard and then some wooded areas right by some industrial plants outside Pearisburg.

Yea right through some dude's lawn...strange

So scenic

We ascended out of town, which is always steep it seems. We encountered this little guy on the trail.

A turtle doing its turtle thing

We had a couple nice views from some of the ridges today. We were basically right on the Virginia-West Virginia state line on this ridge. I think we stay on the border for a bit here (but don’t actually go into WV for quite a while).

West Virginia off the left/west

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We ate breakfast at hippie land ranch and hit the trail to Pearisburg around 9:30am. Breakfast was delicious. We needed to head into Pearisburg to resupply and send back our winter gear (coming your way Packey and Tapey). Woohoo, lighter packs! We hiked the 11 miles or so and got to town around 2pm and did our errands and decided to stay put at a hiker hostel. The motels in town are apparently all sold out because they are occupied by contractors working on a large local construction project. We are some of the older people in this joint. The weather forecast looked pretty bad for the night with some big storms and heavy rain predicted (which hit the area in the afternoon hard), so it made that decision easy. It’s been super muggy down here, so hopefully these storms break that. The hike was one of the more scenic ones we’ve had in the last week or so, so that was cool.

Pearisburg from above

Crazy blooming

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We got up a bit earlier and hit the trail by 7:15am or so. The suspension bridge over the creek where we camped was neat.

Suspension bridge over Kimberling Creek

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We hit the trail a little before 8am to sunny skies. The weather threatened all day, but we only got a little rumble or two and some sprinkles in the late morning. We did some road walking (the trail took us that way) and crossed over I-77 early on.

Mountain pass on I-77

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We headed out and finished the climb up to Chestnut Knob first thing. It had some bald views of the Virginia ridges.

Views from Chestnut Ridge

The shelter at the summit had a door, which is highly unusual for a shelter.

Weird enclosed shelter

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We headed out of the Relax Inn and grabbed breakfast at The Barn, which is basically a diner-ish restaurant across from the truck stop near where the trail goes under I-81. It was pretty good stuff. We hit the trail around 9am. It was pretty similar to the past few days with rolling ridges and occasional farmland pasture/meadow crossings.

Farm and trail crisscross

Some ridges in the distance that we hiked down from

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We made our way out of camp and towards Atkins by 8am. The hike was mostly easy terrain, with some minor elevation change. We eventually started seeing farms and hearing the familiar highway noise of I-81. The Relax Inn is right off an exit and the trail goes through an underpass here.

Ridges and valleys of southwest Virginia

Small Virginia farm

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Another night without Internet. Wtf? 😉 Actually I’m surprised this only happened now in Virginia, we seem to be closer to civilization here than in most of NC or TN. I can’t live without Interweb!!! Continue reading →

We had some intense severe thunderstorms throughout a lot of last night. We were safely tucked away below the exposed ridge / bald of Whitetop Mountain though. Continue reading →