Solo and I came off the trail a couple miles outside of Bland VA in the evening of June 10th. Bland is the county seat of Bland County VA, with a population of 313 people as of the 2020 census. Bland is a scenic rural town nestled up in the mountains. There are not many resupply options in Bland, an IGA grocery store, a Dollar General, and a Circle K with a Dairy Queen attached. The dining room of Dairy Queen remains closed because of Covid concerns, but according to a local resident I was talking to, they’ve never had a case of Covid in Bland so far. We had a room at the only motel in Bland, the Big Walker Hotel. There’s not much going on in Bland, we thought it would be a good place to take a zero. I hadn’t taken a day off from hiking since Watauga Dam on May 28th so I was ready. My legs felt tired even in the mornings when I woke up for the past few days before, I knew I needed to let them rest and recuperate.

I wanted to write a little bit about Crazy Larry, who runs Crazy Larry’s Hostel in Damascus Virginia. When I arrived to Damascus I walked into a convenience store and bought some greasy fried chicken and a Dr. Pepper with ice in it. It was a treat to have a drink with ice in it. Spring water is cold up in the mountains, when we come to springs, we usually dump out any water we’re already carrying and refill our bottles with the cold water coming out of the mountainside. But it’s still not the same as actually having a cold drink with ice in it. It’s a luxury I’ve taken completely for granted for my entire life. I appreciated and savored it that day. I sat on the steps outside the store and watched the people come and go as I ate my fried chicken. I called Crazy Larry’s Hostel. My buddy Casey Duhon, who hiked 900 miles of the AT last year told me I shouldn’t miss staying at Crazy Larry’s if I was able to do it. Larry answered the phone and said he had a room available. He told me to come to his house and he would get me set up.

I walked about a half a mile to Crazy Larry’s, he was sitting on the porch and when I walked up he looked at me and asked, “you that Juanito character that called me?” I answered to the affirmative. “You want some coffee or a coke or something?” I walked up on the porch and told him I would take some black coffee if he had it. He stood up stiffly and limped into the house. Larry must be in his late sixties or maybe early seventies. He looks like what he is, the product of a very hard life. He came back out with an AT mug of steaming hot coffee. “Take off your pack and come sit down”, Larry said. I dropped my pack by the porch and sat down across a wooden table from him. He asked me where I was from, how the trail was treating me, all the usual questions. I asked him if he had hiked the trail and his eyes lit up a little.

Larry stared across the porch at the mountains across the road. “I spent most of my life in prison”, Larry said. “The little time when I wasn’t in prison, I was usually running from the law. I was just mad at the world, I thought I was a victim, I didn’t take credit for anything, I thought nothing was ever my fault. I grew up hard on the streets, I just took what I wanted, I fought a lot, I was always in trouble. I once stole a car that belonged to the TV evangelist Billy Graham’s daughter in North Carolina. Those folks in the Bible belt wanted to hang me for it. Billy Graham himself came to court for my hearing. The judge was going to sentence me to 10 years in prison, but Billy Graham stood up and told the judge to just give me probation. Give the man a chance he told the judge. The judge told Billy Graham that he didn’t understand. This man here has already had a whole bunch of chances Mr. Graham. Billy Graham said, “I don’t care, give him some more chances, give him probation.” The judge turned me loose with two years probation. After that I decided to walk the Appalachian Trail.”

“Like I said, I was mad at the world. I thought the world owed me something. I didn’t care what I had to do or who I had to go through, to get what I wanted. In 2006 I hiked the AT. The trail changed ALL that for me. I understood that I was the problem. I wanted things to be different. When I finished climbing Katadin, I came back here to Damascus to look for work. I liked the little town, and the way everybody was so kind to me, I had never had that in my life before. I met the lady that owns this old house and the building next door where the hostel is. They were both sitting empty. I convinced her to let me open Crazy Larry’s and the rest is history. I live in the house for free, and I run the hostel. She makes good money and I do okay too. Her kids told me I can live here until I die, even when I get too old to run the hostel anymore. Since I’ve been here I’ve been at peace for the first time in my life. I try to talk to the young people that pass through, I just hope maybe I can help some of them not make the same mistakes I did.” Crazy Larry ain’t crazy, he definitely has a PhD from the school of hard knocks, but he’s far from crazy. I ended up talking to Larry several more times that afternoon, he dropped some more “old dude wisdom” on me each time. Staying at Crazy Larry’s is a stop on the trail I won’t ever forget.

Solo and I headed out of Damascus the next day. We resupplied and ate lunch before we got back on the trail. The AT and the Virginia Creeper Trail share the same path out of Damascus for a while. The Virginia Creeper trail is a rails to trails project. These old railroad tracks converted into hiking and biking trails are becoming more and more popular. The walking was easy. As a result we missed the AT turn off from the Creeper trail and ended up hiking about two miles past it before we started missing seeing any white blazes. We stopped and looked at the AWOL guide and figured out where we went wrong. It’s pretty demoralizing to walk two miles in the wrong direction, but we sucked it up and walked the two miles back to the spot where the AT leaves the Virginia Creeper Trail and heads up the side of the mountain.

The AT, unlike the Virginia Creeper Trail, heads straight up the side of the mountain out of Damascus. We climbed for an hour straight before we finally reached the top.

Once we crossed the summit we descended into a bowl on the top of the mountain. The wind started blowing and the air felt colder. We heard thunder rumbling in the distance. “We’re about to get friggin hammered with rain”, I told Solo. “Think we ought to hurry up and pitch our tents so we don’t get soaked?” “Yeah, let’s do it, I can’t stand the thought of getting all our stuff wet right out of town”, Solo replied. We hurriedly found some flattish spots and set up our tents. I was just closing the zipper on my tent when the rain came pouring down in buckets. I blew up my mattress and got in my bag. We had only walked about five miles. The rain continued the rest of the day and through the night until about 4:00AM. We were still dry. We got up the next morning and hiked with dry gear and shoes, we vowed to set up tents to avoid rain more often. There’s little benefit to hiking in the rain when you can avoid it, in my opinion. All of your gear gets wet, your feet get wet, increasing the chance for blisters, the trail is wet, the rocks are slick and muddy, greatly increasing your chances of injuring yourself or worse. We used this technique several more times during this hike to avoid rain. If the storm was relatively short, we would just pack up and continue hiking. On one day we set up, the rain lasted an hour or so, then we packed up and hiked another eight miles in dry shoes.

We were excited to reach the 550 mile mark, it would mean we had completed one quarter of the trail. By then we had hiked enough altitude change to have climbed and descended Mount Everest two times.

The Hippies like to say hiking is a sport for what they call NARPs, an acronym for Non Athletic Regular People. By now most of the NARPs are gone. The people we still see on trail are in it to win it, There were a lot of heavy people on the trail during the early miles. Not anymore, they’ve either quit or lost a lot of weight. It’s amazing how much some people have changed, sometimes it’s hard to recognize them.

We stayed at the Quarter Way Inn near the trail after passing the quarter way mark. It was a really nice place, we were having trouble recovering enough during the night to feel fresh for hiking in the mornings, within an hour or two of hiking our legs would feel spent. We knew needed a zero but thought we would go a couple more days first. The owner of the Quarter Way Inn is a past thru hiker. Your room included laundry, shower, and breakfast in the mornings. It was super nice and the breakfast was awesome. She offered us an option to slack pack 20 miles the next day and stay at the Inn again the next night. She would drop us off 20 miles north of the Inn in the morning, we would hike south back to the Inn, and she would drop us off the following morning the same place, and we would continue north. Toward Bland.

It sounded like a good way to actively rest our legs by not carrying packs while we hiked. We agreed it was a good plan and decided to take her up on it. The next morning she took Solo and I, and another married couple to the road crossing 20 miles up the trail. We headed out, it felt goo to hike with no packs. We carried only one light day pack with snacks and water bottles and filters. We decided not to carry any water, we would just “camel up” at water sources and therefore keep our day pack light. We would just take turns carrying it and one of us or the other would hike with no pack at all.

It was a challenging hike, the terrain was steep and tough, even without packs. It was nice to not have a pack on, but the terrain still made it no picnic. We were beginning the last descent down toward the road that the Quarter Way Inn was located on when a big black bear sow ran across the trail in front of us. She stopped about 50 yards from us just as a cub ran up the side of a tree behind us. The cub had basically placed us between him and his mother by running up that tree. “Hey bear git outta here”, I hollered at the bear. She just stood there looking at us. “Start backing up slowly”, I told Solo. “We need to get from between her and the damn cub.” We backed up slowly always facing her. Two more cubs ran up two trees behind the sow so she had a big litter. Once we were about fifty yards back up the trail, the cubs came down from the trees and the four of them lumbered away. Solo hadn’t seen a bear before that, he had been complaining that everybody was seeing them except him. “You satisfied now bruh?”, I asked him chuckling. He laughed and said, “I was pretty scared there for a minute”, in his strong Maine accent. “Well, I guess I can damn sure say I’ve seen a bear now.” The rest of the hike back to the Inn was uneventful. We were pretty wiped out from the hike, but we were back probably an hour and a half before the other couple made it back.

On June 10th we hiked 15 miles into Bland Virginia. Our legs were weary when we arrived. We decided to zero on the 11th, we needed a day of no hiking and as little town walking as possible.