Today's miles 17.2. AT miles 769.4
A complete contrast to the last couple of days, it was an uphill day today for most of the day! I've taken photos of the pages from our AT guide for yesterday and today which shows the elevation profiles, yesterday's profile was more steady, today's profile just goes up, down a bit and then up again and repeat. We probably hiked over 5000ft of ascent plus around 2500ft descent. The AT guide is our trail bible, it lists all the information we need - mileages, water sources, shelter and camp site locations, trail elevations plus town info and it's what we use daily to plan our hikes and follow where we are.
We left camp at 9:15 straight into a 1100ft climb up Fork Mountain only to go straight back down again 800ft the other side to Bryant Ridge Shelter. A lovely huge double storey shelter that sleeps twenty. There was a section hiker there 'Bass' from Harpers Ferry, the AT's midway town plus another four young thru hikers arrived for a break just as we were leaving. From there it was another 2300ft, 4 mile climb up to Floyd Mountain, luckily the paths were mostly OK. A short downhill of 500ft past Cornelius Creek shelter where we stopped for a snack and to fill up with more water. We bumped into Nubbins there again, she was just setting off as we arrived and the group of four arrived again as we were ready to leave. They told us our friends who'd stayed another day in Daleville got back on the trail yesterday so they're only a day behind us. They'll catch us.
It was a cloudy, coolish day today luckily, we wouldn't have liked all the uphill in the heat we had last week. Another slightly easier 1200ft climb took us to the top of Apple Orchard Mountain (4225ft) where there was a big FAA tower and great views, albeit a little hazy. Not long after the summit on a rocky outcrop we passed what is known as 'the Guillotine'. A large rock boulder balanced/trapped between two rock faces which the trail passes under. There were still patches of frozen ice on the rocks there. Another mile on and we reached Thunder Hill Shelter where we had originally planned on stopping for the day. There was another retired thru hiker staying at this shelter for the night. We keep meeting new hikers which is nice. We passed a southbounder today also plus a few section/weekend hikers. It was only just after 4:30 though so we decided to carry on another three miles to a camp spot at Harrison Ground Spring. We crossed over the Blue Ridge Parkway again a couple of times and past Thunder Ridge Overlook which had fantastic views. The camp spot is 600ft lower than the shelter so a little less cold as we are still at quite a high elevation, 3300ft, so it may be a cold night getting close to freezing. Nubbins arrived an hour after us, we passed her on the trail, there's only us and Nubbins camping here tonight.
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