Today's miles 18.4. AT miles 989.2
We were awake at 6:30 this morning, there was a lot of early morning activity in camp with the big church group. By the time we left camp it was 8:30, we were the last to leave as usual. Nigel gave the privy a sweep out as there were wood shavings meant to be in a bucket for the mouldering privy all over the floor. The church group had left some trail magic in the shelter, a couple of Cliff bars and sweets which was nice of them. We got a second helping of trail magic after about two miles of walking at Manassas Gap, coke and some snacks courtesy of Sky & Mo Hawk, thank you so much guys. We were almost on snack rations for today and tomorrow until we can resupply, our supplies were getting very low so the trail magic came just at the right time.
It was a lovely warm sunny day again today, temperature around 20°C. From the Gap we had a steady uphill climb, quite warm in the sun, we soon got a sweat on. We stopped off at Manassas Gap shelter half way up for a quick break then continued on the usual up and down theme. There was quite a lot of level walking today also which was nice. The forests were beautiful today, in one section the forest floor was covered in Trillium. We met an older couple who'd hiked out especially to this area to see the Trillium forest, a renowned location for it apparently. A bit like our popular bluebell woods in the UK. We were chatting to them saying we're always surprised to see so few day hikers out and about at the weekends, not long after a segregated group (coach trip) of about 30-40 people passed us! We also passed a few Korean hikers, we must have been near a Korean community.
We entered Sky Meadows State Park and bumped into Iron Man coming in the opposite direction. Dena, his wife, was down again which meant he could slack pack/run the trail today. He had over twenty miles to go and had only started after lunch. It was a steady couple of miles downhill to Ashby Gap where we thought we'd come across yet more trail magic in a couple of cool boxes, sadly it was all gone though.
Across the road we stopped for a quick break and a bit more water at a stream to keep us going the last three and a half miles to our shelter for the night. We bumped into Ravencloud and Frog Monkey on route, they continued hiking a few miles further past our shelter and we passed some beautiful but small sections of Virginia Bluebells. We arrived at Rod Hollow Shelter just after 4pm. It was quite busy with section hikers - it's the weekend again, but we found a nice tent pad. The first time we've come across tent pads, a level square area boxed by wood edging for pitching a tent. We met another new thru hiker, TreeFrog, another hiker doing some big daily miles, he started about three weeks after us.
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