Day 54

04/23/12 - Jenny Knob Shelter - 599 miles

SNOW!  Trail magic breakfast by super nice church people (A.T.O.M.) in their warm basement.  Then hiked in a winter wonderland.  My knee is feeling completely fine.  Are there any coincidences with God in the equation?  Coldest day yet.  Longest day yet.  19 miles after 11am.

***

Hands down, one of the most unbelievable and perfectly timed Trail Magic experiences.

As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, we were planning on hitting at least 20 miles for the day.  First 10 were great.  Then out of nowhere, unprovoked and unexpected, I experience excruciating pain in my knee.  Causing us to greatly slow our pace and eventually cut our mileage short, stopping at a roadside campsite.  I go to bed sad and disappointed.

Then came the morning.

A thick, wet snow is falling to the earth.  We begin to meander out of our tents, dreading the cold and difficult climb just ahead of us.  My hands are absolutely freezing from putting away my tent and frozen poles.  Anna's hands even colder since she selflessly volunteered to fill up our water for the morning... dipping her hands into the frigid mountain stream.

Then a man appears out of nowhere, standing in the snow... staring at us.  He has no pack.  No gloves.  Snow is falling upon him, and he literally just appeared out of the bowels of winter.

My first thought: Oh god, murder.

"You guys want a warm breakfast?"

 My second thought:  "Um... YES!"

I look to Anna for her thoughts, and she smiles and nods her head.  At this point the snow that has fallen on us is melting and turning into globs of ice cold water.  Whatever he means by "warm breakfast"... it sounds amazing.

The gentleman smiles and says he's from the church a few miles down the road.  "You guys would be crazy to turn this down.  Well... you guys are crazy anyways.  Hiking around in this kinda weather."

He drives us to the church a few miles down the road, and waiting for us in their warm, HEATED church basement is an army of friendly faces and the pastor playing his guitar.  They have prepared pancakes, biscuits, pudding, coffee, orange juice, fresh fruit and vegetables and every essential hiker granola bar and snack.

After talking with all of them while they served us our breakfast, they took our pictures to add to their scrapbook.  They have been serving thru-hikers for over ten years thanks to Pastor Alan Ashworth and his Appalachian Trail Outreach Ministry (ATOM).  Anna and I were the only hikers that morning for a while until a few others showed up from the snow.  We enjoyed browsing through their hiker scrapbook while the pastor played his guitar.  They even gave us greeting cards to send back home to friends and family and offered to mail them for us.  I remember beginning to cry as I wrote in my card... trying to explain the kindness I was experiencing from these loving people.

The reason I go into some detail with this part of our journey is because I truly do not think we would have been able to experience this had my leg not been hurting the day before.  We would have put in our 20 miles and camped beyond the road where the gentleman found us.  There was absolutely no reason why my knee should have been hurting that day.  We didn't do anything out of the ordinary nor did we experience any truly difficult terrain.  My knee just randomly began to kill me.

I have to believe everything happens for a reason.

That day was the coldest day we had on the trail... the only day we had snow on the ground.  And yet, it was also the warmest I had ever felt on the Trail.

Here is a brief article on Pastor Ashworth and his outreach to the AT.