April 7 – Down Buchanan Trail, through the wet glens that mark the approach to Jennings Creek. Next came the sharp incline up Fork Mountain to Bryant Ridge Shelter and from there the 2100 foot climb to the tip of Floyd Mountain. Cornelius Creek was just beyond. 12.6 miles.

  My first night in a shelter was a great success. Dodged some rain, wasn’t woken by Ratatouille during the night (mice in the shelters are always a risk), and woke to a mist that gradually gave way to the sunlight lancing in from the east.
After oatmeal, I hit the trail. A pleasant day was made even more pleasant with a series of low-grade switchbacks easing downhill. As I descended I passed some Southbounders heading the other way, had a quick word, continued on.

The trail meandered downhill, through a glen crosshatched with fallen trees, over Jennings Creek, and to a shelter where I met two section hikers headed northbound, ate lunch, and logged in the communal journal (there’s one at every shelter, good fun to read). Then it was straight up Fork Mountain, the toughest I’d faced yet.

Now the story picks up the pace. Halfway up I noticed storm clouds gathering. Not to be dissuaded I donned my rain gear, covered my pack and plowed onward. Twenty minutes later the rain began, but there was something odd about the way it rattled off my jacket so I paused for a closer look. It turned out to be hail. Tiny hail, but hail nonetheless. The skies overhead were growing darker.

I’d been climbing for what seemed like an hour, and rued the idea of  turning back now, so I pushed on. And for ten minutes all seemed fine. I was even starting to feel confident. Slogging up a mountain through hail on day 3? Man, I thought I was something.

I should have known better. Mother Nature is the great leveler, and when it comes to crushing hubristic rookies no one does it better.

Out of nowhere a frenzied gust of cold wind nearly took me off my feet. Dazed, I glanced to my right. That was when I saw it: hurtling towards me over the mountains was something that could only be described as a goddamn monsoon. My twenty minutes of being superman was up.
It was going to hit me. Hard. I was certain of that much as I watched it swallow mountain after mountain, each peak disappearing behind a veil of grey.

I could go back, or go on, those were my options. It took me 5 seconds to make a decision, and when it was made I started to run…forward, to the summit, with a 60 lb bag and two metal hiking poles that might as well have been lighting rods. Yippe-kiyay.
It wasn’t the safest way, or the wisest, but it was the one I chose to take. And the fear I felt lent me speed. I must have sprinted 2 miles uphill to the next shelter, squinting through the hail, driving furiously against the weight and ungainliness of my pack, heart hammering audibly between booming peals of thunder.

But I made it, miraculously intact. The only real casualty a broken strap on my pack.

When I staggered into Cornelius Creek shelter there were two hikers already there, but I couldn’t manage an introduction as I was bent double catching my breath.

For those who like to crunch numbers here are some: I’d averaged a 2.5 mile an hour pace for the nine miles to the foot of Fork Mountain. It took me 25 minutes to go the three from the base to just past the summit. Adrenaline, folks, is a hell of a drug.

Anyways, I survived my encounter with Thor. Even felt a little empowered by it. If I wasn’t a mountaineer when I went started my climb that morning, I felt I’d earned the title now. And to top it off my shelter buddies soon had a blazing fire going as the rain abated.
In no time at all a trying day turned into a rewarding night. I dried my gear around the fire, cooked a big bowl of chili to trim down my pack weight by another 3 lbs, and got to know my bunkmates, who allowed me to dub them Torch and Tinder for their uncanny fire-starting abilities (Tinder had even gathered a ziploc bag full of dry leaves from the day before as, you guessed it, tinder). The wind that had blown the rain clouds in earlier now served to wipe the sky clean, like a kid’s hand wiping perspiration from a car window. In its subtle way stillness stole the breath from the world again.
T and T shared a couple smokes and we sat around the fire until it burned down to embers. Then stillness stole over us as well, and, as tired hikers are wont to do, we went to sleep without another word, each of us certain that we weren’t strangers anymore.

Cheers from the Nomad