| Mile | 1050.1 |
| Miles Since Last Update | 23.1 |
| Day | 85 |
Ate breakfast at the hotel and walked out of Harper’s, crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. First 10 or so miles today were very flat, which is usually a bad omen but honestly today was quite chill outside of the brief heat and increased bugginess.
Tons and tons and tons of day hikers out today. Some guy was driving an RC car along the trail even, which was kinda cool tbh. Ran into Skillet, who I seem to run into off and on. He started in early January and seems to do crazy huge miles for a stretch and then just disappear for a week. He didn’t remember me but that’s fine.
Schedule had me going to the Dahlgren camp area at 17 miles which was super nice and had showers and outlets and stuff, but I got there just after 3 and decided to push the extra 6 to the next shelter, if for no other reason than to get another 20 in and be halfway through Maryland.
Started to rain in the afternoon but I was able to duck into a Washington monument of some kind and wait it out.
Pine Knob shelter is like, .3 miles from a major highway so there’s tons of road noise but it has solid water, really good cell service, and will be a good start point for tomorrow. Van Gogh, a section hiker named Roady, and a bunch of locals are all here but there’s plenty of space. I loathe having to set my tarp up but it does look like it could continue to rain tonight.
Will see if I can kill the remaining 20 miles of Maryland tomorrow, but the next 10 miles are supposed to be significantly rocky so that might be a tall ask. At least it is going to be colder.
