(4-5-23)
The morning fog was impenetrable! We woke up to the sound of dripping outside. With all the fog the trees were drenched; they'll drip for HOURS as if it's still raining outside, even though it isn't. There was a storm overnight so I pitched my tent as low as I could (Big Agnes tents don't allow much variability) with the foot to the wind.
The morning fog made me want to write horror stories about the Appalachian Trail. What scarier place could there be than the top of a desolate mountain with 15 feet of visibility? And the vines that hung, lifeless and leafless, swaying with the breeze . . .
In other news, spring flowers started to bloom! I'll probably post WAY too many pictures of flowers, I'm borderline obsessed. It reminds me of living in England, where there were ALWAYS flowers in bloom - and soooo many rose bushes everywhere. Ok, not actually very close to that (yet), but I delighted in the flowers along the trail. It's a great way to find little spots of beauty amid the dark brown and detritus. And the bugs! Some of the biggest and weirdest critters I've ever seen. The internet tells me these white beauties are Blood Root flowers. Later on the trail we would use an app to ID as we went - complete with hokey poems for the different plants.
I found some tragic beauty along the way. Nature is always balanced... this pretty butterfly was fluttering across the ground. I gave it a place to rest, but there's not much recovering from half a wing.
We stopped for the night at our first "stealth" campsite. Along the trail, stealth has come to mean anywhere that isn't an established campsite (usually with a privy). There are only a few areas where truly concealing your campsite is necessary. This was easily our favorite campsite from our early days. As crowded as many of the shelters were, this was our first truly quite, peaceful, and secluded camping experience.
I continued to take pictures of our bear hangs for basically the rest of the trail as they tended to be an ordeal to hang every time - both for our entertainment, sometimes at significant risk of injury, and sometimes a source of great frustration. One of the nights, it took the better part of an hour to get our hang in place, and OM pestered us through the whole process - that we should give it up. After 45 minutes or so, we basically did, only to immediately be pestered about how perilous it could be if we didn't keep trying. This caused some great tension, and an hour or so of uncomfortable silence.
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