Day 3: Clyde Smith Shelter to Cherry Gap Shelter

Just a nine-mile day, but wow is Tim’s knee taking a beating. He’s self-diagnosed it as some form of tendonitis. On Rob’s suggestion, he started out this morning with his knee tightly – and I do mean tightly – wrapped in an ace bandage. And just under the bandage, he cleverly slipped a smooth stone right where the problem seemed to be the worst – the idea being that the stone would put pressure on the offending tendon and keep it from flopping around like an overstretched rubber band. To we three non-medical people, all this seemed like a good idea at the time.

Had a great view from Little Rock Knob, which is where I snapped this shot of Tim. He looks grateful to be sitting down for a moment, no?

About six miles into our hike, we were all getting pretty warm, so we stopped to remove our zip-off pant legs. As Tim examined his gimpy knee, I heard him say, “Uh, I think I’ve got a problem.” I took a look and was more than a little alarmed to see that his shin and calf – that whole area just below the ace bandage and just above the cuff of his sock – had swollen to about twice the normal size. “Dude, looks like you grew a whole new muscle,” Rob said helpfully.

I tried not to be too obvious about it, but I was really worried about Tim's leg. Where was all that swelling coming from? And the bigger question: would it go back down? Not much we could do about it at that moment, however, being several miles from anywhere. So after ruling out the possibility of amputation, we decided to just remove the bandage, rumple Tim’s sock down all the way to his ankle (because then the cuff wouldn’t be so tight around the swollen part), and hope for the best. I also mommed him into taking a megadose of ibuprofen, topped off with a few beads of Arnica Montana. Hey, call it hippie-freak-voodoo medicine if you want, but I think the Arnica was the magic bullet.

A few miles later, when we got to the shelter, he propped his legs up for a while and by bedtime you could hardly tell the swollen knee from the non-swollen one. Reminding him that Cupcake knows best, I made him pinky-swear to not only discontinue the tourniquet-style ace bandages, but also to maintain a steady diet of the ibuprofen/Arnica cocktail. He put the ibuprofen bottle and the tube of Arnica in his shirt pocket.

We were lucky to get to the shelter when we did, because not five minutes after we landed, we experienced more hail – not once, not twice, but three significant stormy downpours. Each wave of the storm was spectacularly loud, on account of the shelter’s metal roof. Over the next couple hours we made room for several more hikers, each of whom had been caught in the hail and arrived covered in icy droplets. Before long we had eight hikers plus a cute little dog named Hank, all crammed into a shelter that supposedly has the capacity of six. And still more people kept coming, huddling under the scant overhang of the roof till the precipitation stopped.

Once the skies dried up at about 6 p.m., all of the overflow people began setting up their tents in the flat areas surrounding the shelter. Within an hour the placed looked like a KOA, with wet gear and clothes hanging from any tree with branches low enough to reach. I counted 10 tents in our line of sight.

The last to arrive in our little makeshift village were a couple of cranky older ladies (yes, you find those even on the AT). They were quite put-out that there wasn’t an inch of room left in the shelter.

Now, before you start thinking that I’m a self-important Gen-X’er with a princess complex and no regard for my elders, let me clarify something. I was totally ready to jump up and give them our spot in the shelter – I even started gathering up my stuff and trying to remember which of us were carrying which pieces of the tent, so that we could mobilize and do a quick set-up. HOWEVAH… as the two ladies approached the shelter, all you could hear was their snarking and complaining,

“Too many damn people on this trail …"
“Yeah, and I see there’s a mangy little dog in that shelter …” (For the record, dear reader, the photo below is evidence that Hank the dog was about as tidy and cute as they come. And clearly too tired to be a nuisance to anyone.)
“Guess we’ve been displaced by a stupid little mutt … “
“You’d think all these damn kids would show a little respect … they’re less than half our age.”

That last comment got Rob’s attention, since he happens to be 55.

“Wow,” he replied, “you two look pretty good for 110.”

I don’t know how old they really were, but they looked to be maybe 70, tops. And we all silently decided they were plenty spry enough to set up their own tent.

So none of us in the shelter had much of a problem with staying put and allowing the old biddies to make their way past the shelter and on to a tent site. An entitlement mindset is such a disagreeable thing, at any age. Hey ladies, this is the AT. You get what you get.

I think Rob’s five-dollar bottle of scotch is starting to taste better. Toward nightfall, it again made the rounds in the shelter as we all tried to shake the chill of the damp evening air.