Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [13]
“Jen, are you in there?”
“Wake up, sleepyhead!”
The rain had lulled me into a deep sleep, and it took me several seconds to realize that it was morning and Sarah and Doug were calling to me from outside my tent. I slowly unzipped my rain fly and squinted into the fresh morning air. Looking up, I saw my friends standing a few feet away, dressed in colorful rain gear and obscured by a heavy white mist.
“I’m glad you slept right by the trail,” Sarah said. “I was worried we wouldn’t be able to see your tent through all this fog.”
“Yeah, we had to stop yesterday afternoon because of our blisters, but we woke up early to catch up so we could all climb up Springer together.”
Springer Mountain was just four miles away, and the thought of climbing the legendary summit and seeing my car, which would take us down the mountain to showers and food, gave me a sudden burst of energy.
“You guys go ahead, I’ll be right behind you,” I promised.
Sarah and Doug hiked away, and I began to pack up my things. I was happy with how well my tent had held up under the precipitation the night before. There was some condensation on the inside walls, but by contorting my body and changing clothes at a 150-degree angle without touching the tent fabric, I managed to stay relatively dry. But taking down the wet tent with numb hands and trying to shove the saturated fabric into a small dry sack proved impossible, so I finally decided to just shove the soaking tent inside my pack and let everything dry out at home. Hiking away from my campsite, my pack weighed down with water, I began to rethink the practicality of trail shelters.
Initially I thought that the morning’s heavy mist was temporary or isolated to a certain valley, but it never lifted. The trail remained shrouded in white and I struggled to define objects ten feet in front of me. The white blazes blended in with the atmosphere, and it became difficult to follow the trail amid the haze. After two hours of hiking, I was relieved and excited when I walked out of the woods and into the Springer Mountain parking lot where Sarah and Doug were waiting beside my car. The fog could not hide their smiles, and I responded with a proud grin of my own.
From the parking area, we still had one mile to travel to reach the summit. Hiking to the crest, we rose above the fog cover and could see distant sapphire peaks jutting up through a white blanket of clouds. I stumbled along the trail and stubbed my toes on large rocks that littered the path, unable to take my eyes off the breathtaking vista.
We were so focused on the scenery that it was almost a surprise when we reached the plaque at the mountain summit. Looking at the rock monument that marked the southern end of the Appalachian Trail, I was hesitant to approach it. I didn’t think that arriving at Springer Mountain would feel so overwhelming, but being at the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail—the spot where thousands of dreams are launched every year—I felt so many different emotions. I was proud to have finished our first fifty miles and excited about the journey ahead, but also anxious about what the trail had in store for me, and scared that I wouldn’t be able to make it all the way to Maine.
“Hey Jen, can you take our picture?” Sarah called.
I dropped my pack and turned to photograph my friends on top of the mountain, then I had them snap a few pictures of me. We were proud to document our arrival at Springer Mountain, and after finishing our photo shoot we searched for the Springer register so that we could sign our names in it.
Trail registers are a tradition along the path and are located in almost every shelter from Georgia to Maine. Some hikers sign almost every booklet, while others sign very few. I had not signed one yet but was looking forward to leaving my signature in the trail’s southernmost journal. We found it in a metal box carved into the side of a rock. As I sat down and prepared to sign the journal, I realized there was a small problem: I didn’t have a trail name.
Trail names, an Appalachian Trail tradition, are