May 3: Partnership Shelter

I took my time in the morning, as I always do when staying at a hotel. I updated the blog in rapid time. The continental breakfast seemed all the more tired because it was the third morning in a row of little cups of juice and coffee, a waffle and cheap donuts.

After resupply and McDonalds stops, my parents dropped me off at Va. 603/Fox Creek. My mom gave walking around the parking lot in my fully-loaded pack a go, which was pretty amusing. It must have been close to 40 pounds. And then they were off to Ohio, six hours away, while I sauntered into the woods.

It wasn't long before I realized my backside was soaking wet; I feared the worst. Indeed, I plucked a freshly malfunctioning water bladder out of my pack. The best I could do is turn it upside down and keep it in the outside pocket of my pack as an emergency water reservoir. I'd use my two 20 ounce water bottles as primaries and resign myself to going longer without water and taking more breaks.

The hike went unbelievably fast. I couldn't believe my luck as I churned out the miles, free of hunger and spending only a total of 30 minutes not hiking in my quest for the Partnership Shelter. Somewhere in the hike I stepped into a cow pasture. "I'm liking Virginia, if this is what it's going to be like," I thought.

Eight hours and 23 miles later I walked into the shelter area and saw a crowd around a fire, empty pizza boxes and 2-liter soda bottles strewed across the ground. Partnership Shelter is renowned as one of two shelters on the entire AT where you can have pizza delivered. Myself and A.D. [Asian Dreads, Asian Dude?], a young, dreadlocked hiker famous for his guitar skills [and he grew up a county over from Frederick, Md.], went to the Mount Rogers visitors center, where a binder held info for hikers - shuttles, nearby hostels and hotels, pizza - and where hikers can use a free phone on the outside wall. It took a while to realize that the car honking on the other side of the building was the delivery woman stuck at the gate, but we got the pizza, and it was amazing.

Some weekend hiker fried in his camp pot some frog legs he'd harvested nearby that day. He seemed quite excited about it.

"There you go, eat you some," he said, offering some to A.D. "I figured an Asian would appreciate frog legs." A.D. picked them out, battered and greasy, from an empty pizza box.

I knew a lot of the hikers at the shelter - Thin Mint, Creepy, Greendog, Nobody -  and others I recognized from brief previous encounters. The shelter has two floors and a shower; both floors were stuffed wall to wall, so I joined some other guys in cowboy camping under some pine trees near the fire ring [tenting around the shelter is prohibited].

I woke up in the night feeling drops.

"You're being timed, dude; you're being timed!" Nobody said from the dark ground nearby as I frantically put my tent up where I'd been lying. The rain pretty much stopped right about the time I got inside it.

[Partnership Shelter the morning I left, May 4.]