Day 28

I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone, in a dark wood.

Day 28: 34 miles

I spent the morning trudging though deep snow again then I dropped down to resupply in town. It took me a while to get a hitch into Narrows, VA but I got a quick one out and it ended up being a pretty efficient trip. I finally got a replacement part for my broken trekking pole so I’m back to being fully armed.

The day was going alright until it got dark. All day there were no tracks to follow and the trail was covered in a foot of snow so I had to find my own way using the blazes and intuition. After it got dark this became increasingly challenging, and this section of the trail was notorious for being poorly maintained I guess.

It started just as the sun was setting. I was at the top of a mountain and there were seemingly 2 paths that looked legitimate. I chose one and started moving. It turned out to be the right one, but for the next 7 hours there was absolutely no inkling of a trail to follow and I was just weaving back and forth over it according to my guthook (gps app) which has not been working properly for the past week. I would walk for a while and then look around in all directions and there was no indication at all of where to go. And as if it couldn’t get worse, around 9 it got super foggy and I couldn’t see anything more than 10 feet away. Shortly after, it began to rain off and on. I probably ended up walking an extra 4-5 miles because of randomly walking astray and realizing I’m walking in circles. I didn’t finish until 1am and I was exhausted when I finally did reach camp after hours of extreme frustration.

The only other tracks I saw besides some deer tracks were from a cougar. They were pretty large and I was following them most of the night. Also either this one doubled back on its route or there were multiple because there were multiple sets of prints in rapid succession. No Steve French tho

2 massive, roughly 18 hour, days in a row with a very bad night tonight so I will probably get back to normal and knock the miles down a bit

Song of the day: far from home- five finger death punch