Virginia Nature Triathlon

Category: Hike

  • Day 2: Zero Day

    Sometimes a rest day isn’t really a rest day. Yesterday was a planned day off — but not entirely from responsibility. I had a final class to teach remotely, my students presenting their capstone projects, and I wasn’t about to miss it just because I happened to be living out of a backpack in the mountains of southwest Virginia.
    Not wanting to spend the whole day cooped up at Lady Di’s, I laced up my shoes and headed out for a walk down to the Food City, a grocery store about a mile and a half outside of town. The walk itself became its own small adventure — I slowed down to read the historic placards that line the streets of Damascus, ducked into a shop or two, and let myself move at the kind of unhurried pace that a trail town naturally invites. There was nowhere to be and no miles to make.

    Damascus

    Food City delivered exactly what a hungry hiker needs: a bag of chips, a sandwich, and a chocolate milk. Simple pleasures. Out front of the store, I could’ve been mistaken for a homeless man. As I was eating my lunch on the ground beside a newspaper box, my eye landed on the front page. The face staring back at me was Tim Kaine who had been in Damascus just a week earlier to provide an update on a $250,000,000 federal project to rebuild a large section of the Virginia Creeper Trail.

    The trail had been devastated two years prior by Hurricane Helene, which tore through the region and took out significant stretches of the beloved rail-trail corridor.

    On the walk back to Lady Di’s, I stopped into the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s regional headquarters, mostly out of curiosity. That’s where I got the news that would reshape the next leg of my hike. A 22-mile detour is currently in effect off the Virginia Creeper Trail, where crews are in the process of replacing all of the trestles along the route. The alternative path runs along the Iron Mountain Trail — and as it turns out, that’s not just any reroute. The Iron Mountain Trail is the original Appalachian Trail through this area, the route that thru-hikers followed before the AT was redirected onto the Virginia Creeper Trail corridor in the 1970s.

    It’s a rugged, ridgeline path that trades the gentle, converted railroad grade of the Creeper for something older and steeper — more in keeping with the character of the AT as most people know it.
    In a way, the detour is a step back in time. And I found myself looking forward to it.

  • Day 1: The Road to Damascus

    Day 1: The Road to Damascus

    My first day on the trail began not at dawn, but the afternoon before. Clayton dropped me off at Logap, Tennessee around 2PM, about eleven miles shy of the Virginia border, giving me just enough daylight to make it up to Abingdon Gap Shelter. I strung up my hammock and settled in, but sleep came in restless waves — an hour or two at a time — until pale morning light finally crept through the trees.

    It was chilly. The thermometer hovered somewhere in the high thirties, maybe low forties, and that was reason enough to pull the quilt tight and drift off again. I didn’t rise for good until 8AM, coaxed awake not by an alarm but by the sound of hikers passing just a few feet from where I hung.

    The morning was easy, almost meditative. Five miles of ridge walking toward the Virginia-Tennessee border, the kind of hiking that lets your mind wander while your legs find their rhythm. The forest came alive with native wildflowers, and among them, a dozen or so lady slippers — delicate, improbable things tucked along the trail like little surprises. The canopy shifted as I moved — rhododendron and mountain laurel crowding the understory, eastern hemlock standing tall and dark, sassafras throwing its odd mitten-shaped leaves into the mix.
    I reached the state line around 12:30, and that’s where the day took its first real turn. Waiting there was Melissa, an ATC Ridge Runner working a 73-mile section up toward Mount Rogers. She snapped my photo and we talked for a while about her work on the trail — the kind of quiet, essential stewardship that keeps places like this intact. Then came my first trail magic of the trip: a few strips of homemade beef jerky, made by a friend of hers down in North Carolina. It was simple and perfect.

    The descent into Damascus brought one more good encounter. I fell in alongside a couple from Rhode Island — Jack and Sue, recently retired Navy veterans. We traded stories about service, about the particular world that military life creates, and about their son, currently serving in the Marine Corps.

    I rolled into Damascus right around 3PM, trail dust and all, and walked straight through town to Lady Di’s. The B&B is run by a former AT thru-hiker, which means the host understands exactly what you need when you come through the door — and exactly what you don’t need, which is anyone making you feel out of place for smelling like the woods. I’d stayed here during my 2023 hike and never seriously considered going anywhere else. Some places just earn that kind of loyalty.

    A shower first. Always a shower first. Then the easy, unhurried business of settling in and letting the day’s miles drain away. It didn’t take long before I’d fallen into conversation with some of the other hikers passing through — the way you do at places like Lady Di’s, where the shared experience of the trail makes introductions almost unnecessary.

    By evening we’d formed the kind of loose, spontaneous fellowship that the AT seems to manufacture out of thin air, and we wandered over to the Old Mill restaurant for dinner together. Good food, good company, and the particular satisfaction of a meal eaten after a full day on your feet.