Gilligan on the AT Revisited: 29-Jul-1993

July 29, 2008

This is a 5-month long series of blog posts that are the entries in my journals written on most evenings as I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1993. The journal entry appears first — indented — and then any additional commentary from my 15-years-removed perspective follows.

7/29/93 – Thur.

Probably another short entry here, as I am pretty tired. Julie crashed about twenty minutes ago, and seems to be sound asleep.

We’re both pretty tired because we did not get much sleep last night. We stopped at the Peters Mtn. Shelter yesterday around 2:30, filled up with water, rested, ate dinner around 5:00, and then loaded up and hiked on another 3.3 miles to camp. The idea was to lengthen yesterday’s hike in the interest of shortening today’s. Well, I’m not carrying a tent, so our "camp" was a groundcloth on the ground with a piece of plastic nearby to pull over us if it rained…which it did…around 1:00 AM…hard…for over an hour. For starters, the groundcloth and plastic are sized for one person rather than two. They probably still would have been adequate had the rain not been coming down so hard and had we not picked a spot where we could look up at the stars — meaning no canopy to slow down the rain.

The long and short of it (mostly long) is that we got pretty soaked and didn’t get much rest.

Julie does not have a very positive attitude when she is tired, so today’s hike was an emotional roller coaster of sorts — the more we went up a hill, the more down her mood would go.

I think/hope a good night’s sleep will make for better hiking on the morrow.

Posted in Appalachian Trail, Tim