Harper's Heat Wave and Hernia

The span of trail between Front Royal and Harper's Ferry was particularly fruitful. Every day we found some combination of ripe blueberries, black raspberries, blackberries, mulberries, and wine berries.

We didn't have time to pick them all, though. The east coast heat wave has forced us to adapt our behavior. We start hiking at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning to finish by the hottest part of the day. Any time spent dallying is repaid in misery. Shifting to the earlier schedule felt like daylight savings, losing an hour every day until it was locked in.

We met a southbound section hiker called Teamplayer at Mountain Home hostel who gave us a section of PVC pipe destined for a spring we would be passing by. We accepted the challenge and made our hydro engineering contribution to the trail.

Another feature of this section is The Rollercoaster, where the trail is known to oscillate up and down over moderately rocky ground.

Soon after the thrilling conclusion of the ride we were crossing a bridge over the Shenandoah River and into the historic town of Harper's Ferry, WV.

Our first stop in town was the ATC center. Here we sat in the hiker lounge and had our halfway point photos installed in their archives dating back to the 30's. Strider found the photos of her aunt and grandmother in these tomes.

Unfortunately, Harper's Ferry would be another punctuation mark for my trip. I had a curious bulge examined and it turned out to be an inguinal hernia. The PA at the urgent care was a hiker himself and suggested that I could keep hiking and schedule a repair surgery further north to not lose time.

This highlights a phenomenon I've observed among people close to the trail. Even if you are obviously suffering, nobody wants to be the one to tell you that you should stop hiking for any amount of time. When I was limping badly with the knee injury, only one hiker, Turkish Delight, told me to do the right thing and take a break.

And so, knowing that continuing to hike is likely to worsen my condition, that I probably won't make it another 1,000 miles without surgical intervention, and that a worsened condition may impact recovery time, I have chosen to temporarily leave the trail again. Best case is looking like another two weeks of downtime before rejoining the gang, bearing the first scars of my adventure.

I walked with Pickup and Strider down Washington Street to the Potomac River where the trail leaves town to the east. We sang a song and said our goodbyes for now. I watched the sun rise over the river and then walked back to our room at The Halfway Hideaway, alone again.

My motto for the trail is that every day is hard and every day is worth it. One of the lessons of my journey is that, sometimes, nothing in the world is harder than waiting.