Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [7]
As I zipped up my raincoat and adjusted my pack, I heard Sarah call to me from the edge of the woods.
“Hey Jen, come look at this.”
She had found our first white blaze. One of the things I loved about the AT is that it seemed idiot-proof. There are two-by-six white rectangles marking the trail every hundred yards. I didn’t need a map or a compass; all I had to do to make it to Maine was follow the white blazes.
I walked over and stared with wonder at the simple stripe of white. I curiously grazed my fingertips along the bumpy rectangle of tree bark, and then, noticing that my friends were already twenty yards up the trail, I stepped past the blaze and began my thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail.
It was 4:30 when we started. In early March, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that meant we had an hour and a half of daylight left.
Our first day’s distance and ascent wouldn’t be difficult for a seasoned hiker, but I wasn’t used to hiking with a heavy, awkward backpack. It felt like I was giving a hefty six-year-old a piggyback ride up the mountain.
I tried to take my mind off the climb. Glancing around, I looked for the natural beauty that is synonymous with the AT, but all I saw were naked trees shuddering in the wind. Looking up into the blustery wind made my eyes water, so I dropped my head and stared at the trail. For the rest of our uphill journey, I concentrated on the rocks and roots on the trail, and the big white puffs of air that appeared every time I exhaled.
It took us just over an hour to hike the 2.2 miles from Unicoi Gap to blue Mountain shelter. The three-sided wooden shelters are an important part of the trail and trail culture. With a shelter approximately every ten miles, hikers will gather at the lean-tos during the day to socialize, and at night the structures provide cover for those who don’t want to pitch their tents.
Peering into my first official shelter, I was not impressed. The floorboards looked dirty and the sides of the building had gaping holes. Sarah walked up behind me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, “I guess we should try to stay here since there’s not enough daylight to set up our tents. I just hope there aren’t any mice.”
Mice? I hadn’t thought about rodents living in the shelters. Thankfully, blue Mountain Shelter was too full of large, two-legged creatures for me to notice the small, four-legged kind. Amid the sleeping bags and backpacks, I met four college-aged girls who called themselves the Georgia Peaches. They were here on a spring break hiking trip. Even with just their noses poking out of their sleeping bags, it was clear that they were attractive, personable, and had already made quite an impression on the other hikers, especially Eskimo.
Eskimo was a retiree from Alaska who had situated himself directly beside the Georgia Peaches. He spent the evening bragging about his handmade gear and sharing his preferred hiking techniques with the cute coeds.
Two young men also occupied the campsite. One was tucked into a blue sleeping bag in the corner of the shelter. He wore a green ski mask that covered his entire face, and as Doug set up his bag nearby, I overheard the guy mumbling something about insulin and what Doug should do if he didn’t wake up the next morning.
The other guy was wearing a navy blue down jacket and walking away from the campsite with his water bottle in hand. I grabbed my own empty water bottle and quickly followed.
The hiker stopped two hundred yards downhill from the shelter and crouched over the water source: a small puddle formed by an underground spring. With pump in hand, he meticulously filtered every ounce of water flowing into his bottle.
I watched him in awe: I didn’t have a pump. I also didn’t have iodine, chlorine dioxide, a SteriPEN, or any other acceptable form of water treatment. I had decided, based on Warren Doyle’s advice