Wild Life, June 18th

My back is really starting to heal up. All of this slack packing that I've been doing is really starting to pay off. It feels so much better now. It took awhile to get back to the trail where we had left off, it was actually a pretty long drive resulting in us getting back on trail at 11:30 am. I spent the whole day trying to play catch up to Sun, Scout, and Dirty Duck. At least without my pack on I was able to go a lot faster!

I got to see an unbelievable amount of animals today! They just kept on coming and it was wonderful. My mom hiked a smaller section with me today as well. Blue did about half of the miles I did today. It was just so hot that he stayed with my mom after she left to bike back to the car. He had been getting a ton of ticks as well. With his tick preventative pill, topical tick repellant, and doggy bug spray he still got loaded. They were all dead and attached to him though. They died shortly after latching on. It was still a pain to pick them all off and not fun for him but he handled it very well.

Dung Beetle. 

I got so close to so many deer in the Shenandoahs. They let you just walk right on up to them, I got within feet of many of them.

We also saw large flocks of turkeys, they went by so fast I couldn't get any photos of them

My mom and I ran into Black Bear and Short Cake while hiking along with Black Bears husband Batman who was visiting for the weekend. They had just back tracked the trail back to the road because they had encountered a black bear and her 3 cubs. They slowly backed off and retreated. All 5 of us hiked back in hoping they had moved on. We saw the cubs up high in a tree on the side of the trail but the mom was nowhere in sight. I was able to get a decent picture of one of the cubs!

Right outside of the Skyland Resort there was a large corral of horses which I was not expecting to see in the middle of the woods.

The group of us!

We had missed eating dinner with Dirty Duck, Sun, and Scout, we arrived right as they were finishing but my goal for the day had been accomplished I caught up to them!

My mom and I split a blackberry cheesecake.

After Dinner we drove over to the next town, Luray to spend the night, much closer now than Waynesboro. 

Today I got to mile 932.3 with 1257.5 left to go.