We had a short hike to Allen Gap that morning. We messed around camp because we weren’t in a hurry, it was cold so we built a fire. We ate breakfast and packed up our tents once the sun dried up the dew.

W were headed to Trail Days in Damascus Virginia. 5.0 had a buddy that lived in Richmond who was going to pick us up at Allen Gap and drive us the two hours to Trail Days. We were excited to get there. Trail Days is a festival held in the little town of Damascus. It is the festival on the trail to celebrate the thru hikers of that year. All the best cottage gear companies would be there. I really didn’t know much about it, only that it was a celebration of AT hikers, and that they offered showers, clothes washing, free meals and other trail magic at every turn. There was a tent city behind the baseball fields where hundreds of hikers would set up their tents. Hikers all along the trail would get shuttles, rent cars, hitchhike, or walk into Damascus for a three day hiking celebration.

5.0, Dundee, Stubz, and I hiked down to Allen Gap pretty quickly, it was mostly downhill and the descents weren’t too bad. 5.0’s buddy Zach was supposed to get there around 2:00PM, we made it down around 12:30PM. There was a pull-off by the trail so we sat around eating lunch from our food bags. The skies were clouding up, the weather can change quickly and without warning up in the mountains. Two other groups of hikers came out of the woods and waited by the pull-off for their own rides. We knew two of the other hikers, an older lady from Russia named Blue, and her similarly aged hiking buddy from California, Geisha Girl. They were being picked up by a friend from Ashton NC, they weren’t going to trail days. Blue said in her strong Russian accent that they were too old for all that “Trail Days” nonsense.

The group we didn’t know were picked up quickly, probably fifteen minutes after they arrived at the gap. We chatted with Blue and Geisha Girl, and then of course it started raining. Their ride showed up about an hour later, the rain continued to fall, and we were getting soaked.

By 4;30PM there was still no Zach. We were all out of water, we didn’t have much food because we hadn’t wanted to carry a lot if we were going to the festival. We decided to walk the .2 miles down the road to a stream noted on the Far Out app as a good water source. We had tried to avoid walking the extra .2 initially, hikers begin to avoid any extra walking they can. But we were getting thirsty and were starting to wonder if something has happened, maybe Zach was lost, maybe he had car trouble, maybe he changed his mind and wasn’t coming after all. We weren’t really worried, we were still on the trail, and there was a shelter only 4.8 miles up the trail after you passed Allen Gap, if nothing else, we could always head there and camp for the night. That’s a great thing about hiking, you can always camp wherever you end up.

We hid our packs in the woods and walked the .2 down to the stream. The rain continued, it wasn’t raining hard, it was just raining steady, and we were getting wetter and wetter. There was very little traffic on the mountain road. When we made it to the stream it was a steep rocky climb down to get to the water’s edge. We were all squatting down filling our dirty water bottles so we could filter the water into our clean water bottles. The water was ice cold. The taste of fresh filtered water from mountain streams or springs is the best tasting water you will ever drink. The taste of town water is hard to take after drinking the cold water in the mountains. We were heading back up the rocky bank back up to the road and a guy came out on his porch across the road from the stream. He started yelling at us that we were trespassing on private property, and that if we didn’t get off his land he was calling the law on us.

I walked out into the middle of the road and said, “hey man, we’re sorry, we were only trying to get a drink of water, we’re just thirsty and we did’t know it was private property.” He stood there looking at me for a minute and his face softened. “Y’all come on over here and get on this porch out of the damn rain, I’m Dalton.”

“I bet y’all are hungry too”, he said. Let me go in here and see if I can find y’all something to eat.” He went inside and came back with a half empty two liter bottle of A&W Root Beer. He handed it to me and said, “this is all I have offer to drink, y’all can just pass it around I reckon.” “I put a frozen pizza in the oven for y’all, it takes about 15 minutes to cook.” It was obvious he had very little, I told him we would be okay, he didn’t need to cook us anything, hell we were just glad to get out of the rain for a minute.

He wouldn’t hear of it though, he told us to sit down and wait for the pizza to get ready. By now it was getting close to 6:00PM, the rain had slowed down but continued to fall lightly. Dalton had a land line, we had no cell service, and therefore no way to get in contact with Zach before. 5.0 called Zach from the land line and luckily Zach had service. He was 20 or 30 minutes out, we were headed to Trail Days after all. We ate the pizza and ran back to the trailhead to retrieve our packs, then we walked back to Dalton’s house to wait for Zach.

Zach showed up around 7:00PM and we piled into his old beat up Blazer. Zach was a tall thin black guy, by tall I mean 6’.6”. He was a super nice guy, he had run into all kinds of trouble finding us, he had a blowout on his front passenger side tire, and he had been lost for quite a while until 5.0 finally got him on the phone.

We arrived in Damascus well after 9:00, set our tents up in the massive tent camp behind the ballpark. The party was in full swing. We saw lots of people from the trail we had not seen in a while. We eventually made it back to our tents and crawled into our damp sleeping bags. We looked forward to showers and dry clothes in the morning.