Joy noble companion Black Forest and I now set oil toward the dangerous and cursed "Priest," to conquer it as we have conquered so many others. Scared? Aye. Intimidated? Aye. Brave? Aye. Double aye. Because kickin~ ass is what it's all about.
Peace out, L.rsh.
I ?S. Ladies, we left two boxes of Snickers bars on the picnic table. I've won't be needinE them where we're going'.
Stand up, Lash, tontqht we hike. Today is the day the myth of the Priest will die.
Black Forest
Jackrabbit and I hiked the Priest the next morning, in the teeth of our first blizzard. The steady uphill kept n)e warm, though the light, dry flakes sliding over the tops of my feet threatened to numb my toes. When we paused to catch our breath, I cleared the snow from a rock and danced back and forth on top of it.
"Why don't you put on your sandals?" asked jackrabbit.
"I will at the top of the mountain."
"Your feet are cold."
"I want a finishing place. I think this is the last time I'll be barefoot this winter, and I want to put my shoes on because I've gotten somewhere, not because I've given up"
"You're too damn stubborn. Way too fucking stubborn"
When I rubbed my feet dry in the shelter at the top of the mountain, they burned and tingled, as they used to when I came back from long evenings of ice skating on the town pond behind our dad's house. I felt a twinge of regret, not for the fact that I'd waited so long to put my shoes on, but for the sense of touch that I was losing. The soft brush of snowflakes, the ribbed boards of the shelter floor, even the burning that subsided as I pulled on my neoprene socks, seethed to be keeping me aware, awake to the world in a way I didn't want to give up.
jackrabbit
"hen I woke up at Seeley Woodworth Shelter, on the ridge south of the Priest, frost fingers nearly covered the small breathing hole I had left in the top of my mummy bag. The air coming in felt like spikes of ice impaling my lungs. I rummaged around in the bottom of my sleeping bag and located my gloves. It was too cold to put ny contacts in-they had frozen solid in their case overnight. I sighed and took my glasses out of the top of ny pack.
Isis was sitting up already, with her head out of her sleeping bag. Her cheeks were very pink, and her breath was a cloud of steam. She was reading the register, laughing at the entries the boys had left a few days earlier. "Look, Lash wrote a song for us: `Oh, the weather outside is frightful, and the girls without shoes so delightful. What the German and I want to know, is where'd they go, where'd they go, where'd they go?'-
"Silly boys," I said. "If they had waited another few hours at Rusty's-"
"-and not night-hiked the Priest-"
11 -maybe we could have caught up with them!" I shook my head. It was strange, I reflected, that the loneliness did not hit me with the same desperate intensity it had in New York, when we had lost Highlander and Companero. Although we were by ourselves now, and the chances of anyone catching up to us were pretty slim, I didn't really feel alone. Maybe we would still be able to catch up to our friends ahead. Even if we didn't, I knew that we were still part of a community. I thought back to the Gathering-so many people had shown us such goodwill and respect, just because we happened to be on the Trail. I could picture the invisible strands of kinship binding us to the larger world, and it gave me hope.
"Ooh, it's nasty this morning," Isis said, clapping her gloved hands together. "Where's the water for breakfast, jackrabbit?"
"In my pack, right side pocket"
She was closer to the packs, so she oonched over in her sleeping bag and took out the water bottle. She frowned and tossed it over to me. "Ice." And it was. The half liter of water left in the bottle was frozen solid. "I think we're going to have to sleep with our water from now on, to keep it warm.' Her voice was remarkably calm, considering the circumstances.
"You're probably right. What should we do in the meantime?" But the answer was clear. I got out of my sleeping bag-the air sent a jolt of cold through n)e-and quickly put on all my warm clothes, forced my feet into n)y frozen sneakers, and went to the spring for a pot of water. On the way back, I gathered a handful of twigs for the stove. Isis boiled the water while I sat in the corner packing up our gear, wearing my sleeping bag as a shawl. It would be the last thing to go into my pack.
When the water reached a boil, Isis poured half of it onto the ice in my bottle. "Good thing about Nalgenes; they won't crack with temperature changes," she said. I was grateful that we weren't arguing. The boiling water dissolved the edges of the ice, and the rest of it bobbed up and down, a pale cylinder. The water in the bottle was lukewarm. We poured out enough to nux up our instant oatmeal, and Isis made tea with the remaining hot water. By the time we drank it, it was tepid.
We had a few days of bitter, unrelenting cold. The trail wound among water-carved ridges here, the last vestiges of a mountain range that once rivaled the Himalayas. The light snow on the ground revealed the folds and contours of the mountains, their silhouettes softened by a fringe of trees. Most of the world looked like a black-and-white photograph: bare branches, vertical slashes of dark trunks, the white backdrop of snow. Far ridges blended into gray.
One afternoon, we Caine out of the forest into a high meadow, a saddle of grassland between two wooded peaks. It was still, and in places the sun had incited through the thin layer of snow to reveal the warm yellow of fallen grasses.
"I guess this is what they call a bald;' Isis said.
"A what?"
"Bald. Anonymous Badger told me about them at the Gathering. It's a high grassland on top of a ridge. Nobody really knows how they got here. Maybe they were ceremonial sites for Native Americans, maybe they were the sites of old forest fires. There are supposed to be quite a few of them along the Trail."
"It's beautiful," I said. We could see in all directions: the rumpled ridges in the distance, with a clear snow line halfway up; the rectangular golden fields and irregular wooded patches of the valley floor shining in the midday light. The sky was suddenly open all around us, no longer hemmed in with skeletal branches, and it was cloudless and limitless blue.
The cold continued. We boiled drinking water every night (the hot water bottles in our sleeping bags were a comfort), and wore the bottles under our jackets all day to keep them from freezing. After lunch every day, my hands and feet went numb as the blood flowed to my stomach. It took perhaps half an hour of hiking before the blood came back with an excruciating pins-andneedles feeling.
I soon learned to tell the temperature by how tightly the rhododendron leaves curled. When they were partway open, usually at midday in a sheltered spot, it was warm enough to stop and eat a granola bar without my hands and feet losing their warmth. When the leaves curled into cigar shapes as thick as my thumb, I knew it was warm enough to hike in my wool shirt, Gore-Tex jacket, and wind pants. On the mornings when the rhododendron leaves were tight as pencils, I wore my long underwear, fleece jacket, and hat under my outer layers, and I knew I would have to hike for a long time before I could feel my feet.
One night, darkness caught up with us before we reached the shelter. It had been a long day-almost eighteen miles over rough terrain. We had dropped down to the James River in the morning, a wide, placid stream with patches of ice in the slow eddies, and then climbed back more than three thousand feet into the Mountains. The trail hadn't been smooth in the afternoon, either; we had followed the high points of the ridge from the amusingly named High Cock Knob to Thunder Hill and dropped down precipitously into the gaps between them.
Shadows pooled in the valleys on either side and thickened behind the tall maples and hickory. The first stars glimmered between the tree limbs as the light around us faded. Rhododendron thickets by the trail, leaves curled tight against the cold, captured the almost-full moon in their maze of branches. The white blazes that marked the trail seemed to glow on the trees, and the surface of the snow held a pale sheen. There was a somber stillness in the woods, broken only by the sound of our footste
ps crunching the snow and our quiet, steady breath. I watched the moon through the rhododendrons and imagined I could feel the faint touch of its light on lily face. I thought of the millions of miles the light traveled through utter emptiness, reflected hack and traveled again. Words began to shape themselves in my head, distilling into a haiku:
And who was "he' Black Forest, Lash, Tuba Man, someone, anyone. I watched the orb of the moon until it swam at the edges like a reflection and threatened to brie) over. I touched my cheek. Wetness soaked through my glove, and I realized I was crying.
We reached the shelter late. The spring was frozen. I gathered extra twigs for the Zip stove, and we spent perhaps an hour tending the fire, melting snow so we could drink and eat.
The next day, the cold broke. Clouds came over, making a gray backdrop to the black-and-white woods, and the temperature hovered around freezing. In the afternoon we stopped for water at a creek in the valley-it was just ware) enough for the filter to work. We carried extra water up the ridge to Cove Mountain Shelter, since the map showed no spring there.
I awoke in the morning to a strange sound on the shelter roof. It wasn't rain, and it wasn't quite snow, and it plopped and glooped and plinked against the fiberglass. The light was still gray outside, and without my glasses, the trees were composed of impressionistic vertical brushstrokes, glinting strangely.
"Ice storm;" Isis said. I rolled over and grabbed lily glasses case, where I'd left it beside my impromptu pillow of fleece and Gore-Tex. The world resolved itself into gray forest covered in ice: the thin rain and mist had coated all the branches, the trunks, and the ground perhaps a quarter inch thick, with more .►ccu►nulating all the time. Chunks fell from the trees in a slow but steady progression, making the sounds that had woken inc.
I swore. "No twenty for us today. Why don't we just stay here?"
.There's no water."
I swore again. She was right, of course. Water was falling from the sky all around us, but not in a very accessible form. Rain would have dripped off the eaves, at least, and if there had been snow, we could have melted it for water. Besides, neither rain nor snow would have prevented us from hiking the twenty we had planned.
I looked out at the icy trail. I'd seen the profile map yesterday, and as I reached full wakefulness, the details came back to me. We would have to hike about six miles, up and over Cove Mountain, to reach the next shelter with a water source.
Isis untied the food bags from the mouse hangers, and we ate a quick breakfast of granola as the light grew paler outside. We packed up our gear, speaking little, and stepped into our half-frozen shoes.
We made slow progress down the slippery trail, leaning on our sticks. I quickly remembered the lessons of the first ice storm, the one that had forced us to sleep in the laundry room at Big Meadows: step on leaves, never rocks. Always be prepared to slide. If you fall-u'Iic ► you fall-catch the brunt of it on your pack. It was slow and exhausting work.
After a few miles, the trail crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway. Explanatory signs named the mountains usually visible from the overlook. Our vista that day was dreary ice fog and stark trees close by, and the signs were so coated in ice that it was impossible to read them anyway. We skated along the road for a while, taking refuge under a stone overpass to eat a quick snack. By now, icicles were forming on the hoods and sleeves of our jackets. We cracked the thin coating of ice off our pack covers.
We reached Bobblet's Gap Shelter at about three in the afternoon, sore and tired. My nerves were on edge from treading so carefully for seven hours.
"Where's the register?" I asked, reaching the shelter just after Isis.
"There isn't one," she said.
"This is what, like, the fourth shelter without one?"
"Third"
"How will we know where anybody is? And how will we entertain ourselves for the rest of the day?"
"We'll manage. There's always Passions Stealth-/ire"
Isis hung our food bags while I went to the spring and filtered water. Luckily, it was right in front of the shelter: a concrete box half full of dead leaves and mud, with a slow upwelling of water from one end. I rigged a few twigs to keep the filter intake out of the grime, tied a mostly clean handkerchief over the end, and pumped four liters of drinking water. I used my cup to scoop some marginally particulate-free water into our pot for tea.
There were a few dry sticks and scraps of wood under the shelter, enough to get a smoky fire lit in our Zip stove. I gathered handfuls of fallen twigs from the nearby woods, breaking off the ice. Isis made a pot of blackberry tea. Its rich sweet scent filled the damp shelter. I smiled to myself, thinking of Sharkbait. I wondered where lie was and wished again for a register. We got out our last few bags of crackers, a few chunks of dried papaya, some Archway cookies, and ate lunch at last.
We spent the afternoon writing scenes in our silly novel, drinking tea, and staring out into the glistening gray landscape. Icicles lengthened on the eaves of the shelter. Toward evening, the woods took on an unearthly look, full of mist and double-outlined, with vertical bars of light and shadow.
I filled the pot with water again, gathered more twigs for the stove, and Isis cooked some macaroni. After dinner, I lay on my foam pad, worrying about the next day's hike. Our food would last another day, two if we stretched it. Would the weather clear by morning? Would I be able to hike another day of slipping and sliding over an uncertain trail? My right hip was throbbing; my left knee felt weak and watery again. I curled up on my left side to spare my hip and fell asleep.
Isis
ost of the ice had melted by morning, though the weather didn't seem .to be any warmer. We hiked through a uniformly gray world: sky, trail, and tree trunks blended into each other in a chill mist. Luckily, the trail was easy, and the cold encouraged us to make good time. We took a very short lunch break at a shelter with no register. ("Damn, I wish I had a notebook I could leave," jackrabbit said.) We had set our sights on a shelter only five miles out of Troutville, a drab little cinderblock building that we reached about all hour before dusk. I had set down my pack and taken out the water filter, when jackrabbit, who'd been searching around the shelter, threw up her hands in exasperation.
"There's no register here either! That does it! Let's go to town"
Going on would mean hiking a twenty-three, equal to our longest day so far. I didn't feel inclined to argue about pace, though. Cold gray shelter? Last of onr /ood? And uvho kmm's, maybe another ice storm tomorroii or pizza, shoti'ers, and a clean hcd. Hmm, let's see ... I think I'vc vt a /iii' more miles in me.
We reached Troutville just as its impressive maze of street lamps and neon signs began lighting up for the night. This was no Trail town, but an interstate town: a tangle of intersecting freeways, around which truck-stop motels and fast-food joints rose from a sea of asphalt. Nothing except the gray-on-gray of cinderblock and concrete recalled the shades of the winter woods, though this industrial version was much less nuanced. The maze of pavement contained no crosswalks or sidewalks; apparently this town belonged to a world in which no one walked. In the last of the daylight, jackrabbit and I scampered from freeway island to freeway island until we reached the supermarket plaza. After securing our resupply and a pizza, we didn't venture out of our hotel room even for ice cream. We took turns showering, then watched the Crocodile Hunter as we packed our resupply into Ziplocs.
"He reminds me of Tuba Man," jackrabbit sighed. "He's cute and blond and so enthusiastic about his own eccentricities that everyone loves him for it"
"You're still mooning over the Amazing Tuba Man? I thought your pet German had helped you forget him."
"It's winter. I need someone to moon over, to keep my mind off this damn cold."
"Sounds like a good idea. Who should I set my heart on? Solid? That guy from Lonesome Lake? Anonymous Badger?"
"Not Anonymous Badger. He said he might come out and hike with us in January. If you moon over someone you're actually going to see again, it could ge
t embarrassing."
"Maybe I should go for my high school standby. Percy Bysshe Shelly. A safe couple of centuries away."
On our second morning out of Troutville, we hiked up to Tinker Cliffs. Below us, a broad farm valley, its meadows dark gold in the weak sunlight, wound between wooded ridgelines. The early morning light cast the crinkled flanks of the ridges, carved by the paths of hundreds of streams, into sharp relief. The same rains that had shaped the ridges had gouged and scoured the yellow limestone of Tinker Cliffs into a series of sculptural promontories. Spotted with small black curls of lichen in a pattern that resembled leopard skin, they overlooked the valley like a row of abstract sphinxes.
"If this is Tinker Cliffs, I can't wait for McAfee Knob," said jackrabbit. "That's it, see? At the end of this ridge. A bunch of nobos told me it's got the best view on the Trail."
We hurried on along the ridgeline. By the time we reached McAfee Knob, though, the sky had clouded over completely. Perhaps it was my overactive imagination, but I thought that the raw, damp wind from the valley smelled like an approaching ice storm. We hurried over the exposed top of the knob, unimpressed by the pitted, lichenless gray cliffs.
Out of the wind, we paused for a snack. Jackrabbit took a sip from her water bottle and shivered.
"This water's very close to solid," she complained.
I sighed dramatically. "I wish I could be like that water!"
'.What, almost frozen?"
"No, very close to Solid."
Jackrabbit laughed. "What about poor Shelly?" she asked. "I thought you were planning to stick with him.'
"It's too hard to imagine the perfumed zephyrs of the Mediterranean on a day like this. It's like trying to see color when you're night-hiking. I have to dream about someone closer to real."
jackrabbit
n late afternoon, we stopped at an overlook to eat a snack. The bitter damp wind across the valley intensified. Isis passed me a rock-hard frozen granola bar. With the first bite, I felt a disturbing crunch inside Illy mouth: something besides the granola bar had broken. I spat the bite of food into lily gloved hand. "I think I just broke a tooth on that granola bar!"
Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Page 36