Virginia Snow Day(s)

Writing to you all from the Smyth-Bland  Regional Library in Marion, Virginia.  With the given weather, happy to report that we are dry, warm, and temporarily living inside.  We are going to hole up for a couple days and wait to see what this storm does.  The last 24 hours has dumped over 2-3 feet on the peaks of the very mountains we're headed too, and we're not really equipped nor do we desire to hike in the over-knee deep snow at this time... We are evaluating the weather and what steps we'll be taking if we head back to the trail.  That may sound a bit dramatic, "if we head back out", but the last 15 miles we hiked was truly a wake up call that has left us up in the air about what to do.  So we're waiting, we're letting our skin heal from the brutal cold snow and wet that we hiked in for 7 hours and making sure that we're better equipped to handle this type of situation again if and when the snow clears from the peaks.  But enough of that, we'll let you know what we're doing when the time comes (assuming we have internet access!). Onto updates from the trail.

Last time we wrote, we had just gotten out of Shenandoah National Park.  The Central-Southwest part of Virginia has been really enjoyable.  We've had some amazingly wonderful weather before that whole Hurricane meets Nor'easter thing...  This part of the trail also held a lot of symbolic things for Abbey and I.  Virginia accounts for 25% of the entire A.T. and also has a lot of majorly photographed areas.  McAfee Knob, Tinker Cliffs just to name a few.  Places that we've seen pictures of for over 2 years and only dreamt about actually getting to.  We had perfect weather on McAfee Knob with cloudy fog packed days before and after, we are blessed.  It was really quite emotional for us to be somewhere that we heard about 1600 miles ago from Northbound Thru-Hikers.  We've come to terms with the fact that we've come a really long way.

Virginia started with some of the easiest terrain we've seen on the entire trail with long but gently climbs and descents, then even easier walking through the National Park.  And we enjoyed being able to look around at all of the fall colors while walking instead of worrying about tripping every few feet.

Then those beautiful leaves started to fall on the trail at the same time that the trail turned into very Rocky, like Pennsylvania Rocks, maybe worse in some areas (really no difference, not sure why Pennsylvania gets such a bad Rep).  We had a beautiful week of warm weather but paid for it with leaves 5-6 inches deep on the trail hiding all of the ankle-rolling-rocks, holes from rocks dug out, holes from old trees, tree roots, etc...  Some very mentally tiring hiking.  But we as always, see beauty everyday. Slept in some absolutely gorgeous areas, often in Rhododendron Thickets near summits with sunrise overlooks, which we've gotten very accustomed to enjoying everyday.

At this moment we're 75% done, amazingly astonished on how long and how short this journey has been.  We're grateful for everything, even the hard times, sometimes we're more grateful for those than anything else.  For instance, we could have waited at a road yesterday morning after 4 miles of walking in the snow, but we decided to push on another 10 to the town so we could walk in on our own feet.  Makes the hardships worth it I guess.

This is/has been an amazing journey.  We're excited and anxious to see how the next few days go and what will end up happening.  Thanks to you all for being along for the ride and supporting us all the way!

-P&A (Spartan & DreamCatcher)