Today was my final walk along a part of Skyline Drive. Tomorrow morning, I'm checking out of this hotel, saying goodbye to its intrepid roaches (which still try to come out despite my spraying; walking through the bug-spray barrier ensures they end up on their backs), and moving my base camp to my buddy Mike's place in Fredericksburg, where a Friday dinner is being planned for me. My buddy Mike and his daughter Emma won't be there until very late: they'll be out watching a hockey game (season passes; the kids apparently take turns). I'll be at Mike's place until April 13th, my departure date.
The walk was my longest one yet: starting at Elkwallow/Mile 24 again (it kind of became my base of operations), I walked out to Mile 28 and turned around—eight miles (12.9 km) total. As I walked south, two kind drivers stopped next to me and asked whether everything was all right. I guess they didn't see the many other people who regularly walk along the Drive. I smiled and told both sets of folks that I was fine, and they drove off. In Korea, I've had cabbies stop next to me to offer a ride, but there was always a financial motive.
It was a much warmer, much less windy day than the previous two had been, with temps starting at 60ºF/15.6ºC and rising to 78ºF/25.6ºC by the time I finished. As a result, the bugs were out in force—bugs that had evolved to assail the many deer (and maybe the bears, too) along the Drive. I was just a weirdly shaped deer to them, leaving a huge infrared signature and billowing clouds of carbon dioxide with every exhalation. Primarily, though, the bugs seemed attracted to my left ear and to the back of my head. My right ear might have felt a little envious. I used my bandanna like a horse's tail, swishing it periodically through the air to make the bugs fly away. With their short memories, though, they always came back. I once again found myself wishing I had the Jedi power of telekinesis to form a cocoon of force around myself. Alas, that is just a fantasy.
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| lichen! |
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| It must've rained in the morning. The road was dry by the time I got back to my car. |
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| overlook |
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| All the dead trees are getting stubbier as they lose the ends of their branches. |
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| heading south but looking down and back (north) |
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| looking up, forward, and south |
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| Click to enlarge. |
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| Oh, that ol' Heraclitus. Buddhists and Taoists nod vigorously. |
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| These paragraphs eloquently explain why I can walk the same route again and again without getting bored. |
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| ...and here comes the marketing. |
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| frazzled after a night of partying with the Ents |
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| overlook: Thornton Hollow |
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| the south end of Thornton Hollow Overlook |
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| a familiar trope |
On my walks in Korea, I often photograph both living and dead nature. In Korea, you get a lot of bike-crushed snakes, dramatically squished frogs, dead mice, and so on. We do things bigger in America, though, so here's a big, fat, dead squirrel for your viewing pleasure, probably run over by a car. The skull looks cracked but not crushed, so I'm guessing it was a car tire and not the car's front bumper that did the animal in.
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| Made it to Mile 28. Four miles up, then turn around and go back through all of those bugs. |
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| wide shot for context |
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| I wish I could've taken a better shot of these little, purple flowers (violets?). |
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| This is definitely not Hadrian's Wall. |
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| Rest assured: that beam-like piece running through the middle is stone, not metal. I checked. |
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| the mystery |
I saw a few fallen trees like the one pictured above, completely denuded of their bark before collapsing. The effect is vaguely cadaverous; now, I'm left to wonder how it is that some trees lose all of their bark when dying, while others keep their bark and get covered in lichen, and still others merely rot on the inside and fall over.
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| Wide shot of the cadaverous tree; there were others. |
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| I successfully photographed the Mile 27 marker, but I somehow missed the Mile 26 marker. Didn't bother with 24. |
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| I did, however, get the Mile 25 marker. |
So this was my final walk on Skyline Drive. I hope it's not my last one ever; I might want to try walking the length of the Drive if I live long enough. Tomorrow, I'm off to the city that Mike sometimes calls "F-burg." There's lots of local walking to be done there, and I've got a few meals (plus a batch or two of cookies) that I'll be prepping while I'm shacked up in F-burg.
