“We are lucky to have had the opportunity to hike with this group,” Tag-Along shared during our drive home. Her comment sums up one of many great aspects that characterize our recent seven-day hike in Virginia. A trip report follows...

On October 8, Tagless (Dane), Tag-Along (Connie), and six other hikers put on the Appalachian Trail (AT) off the Blue Ridge Parkway and for the next seven days hiked southbound 66 miles to Catawba, VA.  Our daily mileage was 9.4 per day. The longest day was 13.5 miles.

Members of our team included Rylan Herring (The Chef), Golden Jenkins (Booty Kicker?), Bart Eisfelder (Superman), Mike Unruh (Puddin?), Dale Gear (Eldorado), and Kent Zotter (Toothless).  Members of our group travelled from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas to hike together. A wide range of ages and career paths were represented.  Everyone enjoyed the start of beautiful fall colors, excellent weather, and fun times while in camp each night.  Once again, we are reminded how hiking is the great equalizer, uniting people of different ages and diverse backgrounds.

Our week on the trail offered a good opportunity to review gear choices and make needed adjustments in anticipation of our 2009 AT thru hike. Overall, we were pleased with our hiking gear and didn’t see the need to make any major changes.  On the drive home, we did discuss some minor modifications and lessons learned. These include:

Eat more continuously throughout the day to maintain a better energy level. When we focused more on this, later in the week, positive effects were quite noticeable.

We sampled a number of backpacking meals that will be “keepers”  - refining our knowledge of how much ingredients to use when preparing these. Food was given away several nights because the meal amount packed was too much.

Don’t vacuum pack pita bread unless you want to eat one solid mass of dough.

We will increase our lightweight backpacking cup volume size In addition to beverages, we use our cups to serve meals.  Larger cups will better meet our meal portion needs.

We underestimated the amount of stove fuel needed for seven days of hiking and realized that we need to consistently use our windscreen. Better stove efficiency was immediately noticeable when we were more diligent about using our three sided windscreen.  We discovered that one 8-fluid ounce fuel canister is lighter than two 4-fluid ounce canisters.

The 13.5 mile hike on Day 3 stretched our capacity. Limiting mileage to ten miles or so per day the first couple of weeks of our thru might help reduce incidence of injury/foot problems. 

Taking a short break every 75- 90 minutes is helpful.  We took our packs off and sometimes removed our shoes. This enhanced our overall endurance, particularly on  long mileage days.  

Lightweight “gators’ helped keep debris out of our shoes.

Kudos to Toothless for organizing this hike and bringing individuals from five states together. He has been organizing section hikes for about ten years in order to complete the AT. Many in our group learned about this opportunity through enjoying his Internet program “ATHiking – The Podcast.”  Rylan and Golden also put out an excellent podcast called “Southeastern Backpackers.” Check out both podcasts to pick up great information about hiking.

Feel free to view photos from our Virginia hike here.