Trail camp to Chestnut Knob

5/18/15 - I had a visitor to camp at Crawfish last night about 2am.  Whatever it was was rustling the leaves and cracking twigs under my hanging food bag.  By the time I'd get the tent open it was gone but it hung around for an hour.  Between that and the whippoorwill I didn't get much sleep.

This morning I woke up to heavy humidity at 6am.  It took quite a while to get going.  As I stepped onto the trail, Coed came around the corner.  He had camped just 0.1 miles back.  Tucson slipped by I'm the rain about 6pm, wanting to make more miles.  He ended up doing almost 20 miles.  I caught up as he was breaking camp around nine thirty. 

Chestnut Knob shelter is 17.1 miles from my camp at Crawfish.  The last five involve a 2100ft climb, the first part of which is very steep.  Today hit 81 degrees with high humidity so I knew there'd be a storm sometime.  Sure enough, as I started the climb, splat!  The rain came down on fat cold marbles for about a half hour.  Everything got soaked, including me.  My pack stayed reasonably dry, everything that matters is in multiple layers of dry bags.  My mood was soaked thru.  I also knew I'd be tenting tonight since I got passed by folks coming out of Trail Days.  Many were near here last week and caught rides back to Damascus.  Since they got late starts today they headed for the first shelter for an easy restart.  There's a front coming tonight, hope it blows through before dawn.

I had dropped my blue bandana shortly after seeing the snake yesterday.  Tucson was kind enough to bring it forward.  Chipmunk has finally caught up, he's here tenting too.  Blackout, Kiki, Wolfbite and Tink came through but didn't stay here.