Literally, we could have kicked this deer in the face

9-10-09 day 100
start: Pass Mountain Hut, VA
end: Rock Springs Hut, VA
daily mileage: 15.3
total mileage: 1260.6

Day 100 on the trail! Woo hoo!

It was a short morning hike to the road into Luray. An easy hitch later, we were at the Post Office picking up Sea Monster's new boots. He shipped them straight home for later use when his current ones really fall apart. We met "Skipper," the husband of a former thru-hiker that told us lots of fun stories and then drove us to Wal-Mart for our resupply. We grabbed lunch at another Taco Bell, and then got a hitch back from this crazy guy who literally drifted off the road several times on the drive back to the trail head.

He regailed us with stories about how his family hates Shenandoah National Park, because they were evicted 80 years ago when the park was established. I'd read about the park formation in the book, and I guess the area housed a lot of people that got "emminent domained" out of there. Unfortunate as that is, it's awesome that only 80 years later, this formerly highly-developed land is now such a lush, wild park.

We stopped in a parking lot to watch some deer and eat snacks, and Sea Monster went to see how close he could get to them. They are incredibly used to humans, and let him get within 10 feet easily. Shortly thereafter, 3 deer came out of the woods right next to where we were snacking and came right up to us! They obviously wanted our food, and were pretty bold about it... one of them got close enough that we easily could have kicked it in the head. People kept pulling off Skyline drive into this parking lot to see us interacting with these crazy deer!

We saw a bunch of wild turkeys as well, and finally got into the shelter where we met up with Plugger and The Professor. Plugger is going quite a bit slower than us, but keeps catching up with us because he "yellow blazes" - hitches up to a new part of the trail, skipping trail miles. Tsk tsk. We're mostly joking in our condescention, though, I guess.