Drastic Chapters of Crypt

 

Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine is now Tropical Storm Helene and still tracking toward the Yucatán Channel and then northward toward Atlanta, Georgia. Tropical storm-force winds are forecast to arrive here by 6 p.m. Thursday, although local forecasts are concerned more about heavy rainfall than high winds. I live up on a hill with a relatively new roof (2021), so I'm not too worried about rain or flash flooding, but I'm surrounded by tall, tall trees and it's the potential high winds that spook me. Way too many tons of timber high up over my head. Overnight Thursday will be a fun time.

Last Saturday, while I was so proud of myself for hiking 2.1 miles of the Appalachian Trail as a part of my 5.8-mile Jarrard Gap-AT-Slaughter Creek loop, Tara Dower of Virginia completed a north-to-south through-hike of the trail in 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes, reaching Springer Mountain at 11:53 p.m. Saturday night and setting a new record for the fastest known time for hiking the 2,197-mile trail.

I was on the trail roughly between 1:00 and 2:00 pm. on Saturday, about 27 miles from Springer. Assuming Dower averaged about 3 mph on the trail, and further assuming she didn't stop or rest as she made her last drive toward the finish, she would have passed the stretch of trail I was on at about 3:00 p.m. In other words, we missed each other by about an hour or less. She probably passed while I was still hiking back to Lake Scott on the Slaughter Creek Trail.

Yesterday, and the Thursday before I hiked on the AT, I hiked the 6-mile Cochran Shoals Trail just outside of Atlanta, All these hiking miles are boosting my cumulative walking distance. Since the beginning of the year, the straight-line distance from my house has now extended across Lake Erie to the Canadian mainland and in the U.S. to Ann Arbor, Michigan. If I were to somehow walk on water or swim in a straight line, my cumulative mileage would extend to West End, the extreme westernmost tip of Grand Bahama Island, a spot I frequently visited while on vacations in the 80s and 90s.

I have managed to walk at least 3.7 miles every other day since I got back from Big Ears on March 27. Some days, I had to time my walks carefully around showers and storms and I only got caught out in the rain once, and it was a gentle rainfall at that. But the forecast for the next three days as Helene passes overhead is 70 to 80% chance of rain, so unless I'm very careful - and lucky - my streak is probably going to come to an end.