Pictures -- Northern Virginia

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The deer in Shenandoah National Park are incredibly tame. If you are real nice, they might even eat out of your hand -- wouldn't recommend it, though, because that would only contribute to their generations-of-panhandlers problem. In the park, deer and other animals are protected from hunters, causing them to lose their fear of humans. That is not such a problem with deer -- they are beatiful creatures and relatively harmless -- as with other mammels, like beers.

A deer decides to visit the shelter and join us for dinner.

Would you hike under that rock?

The view from Blacktop, an out-of-place peak in the otherwise rolling and forested Shenandoahs.

Left: the quinessential trail of the Shenandoahs -- straight and relatively flat, wide enough for a car, protected by a natural archway, and groomed by lawnmowers and weedwackers.
Right: the view from Mary's Rocks, which I am sure on a nice day is beatiful. I passed Mary's on my third of four days in the park. On that day, I hiked 16 miles in wet shoes; on the last day I hiked 27 miles in wet shoes in order to reach Front Royal, where I did my laundry and mulled over my second worst point on the trail -- second only to my day in Caratunk, ME, where my legs looked like hamburg and I had just about had enough.

One more interesting note. I was given a ride into Front Royal by Steve Robinson, the brother of "Flyin' Brian," who in 2001 hiked the Appalachian Trail (2,168 miles), the Continental Divide Trail (about 3,100 miles), and the Pacific Coast Trail (about 2,600 miles) in 10 months -- an average of just under 30 miles per day. Steve was meeting his father, Roy (aka "Trail Dad"), in Front Royal, in order to bring him to his home near Washington D.C. for a week. It was very interesting to hear Steve talk about Brian's trip, which I could relate to in many regards -- as I also was on a different kind of hike, doing the trail in about half the time most people take.

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