Mapping the Sheltowee

[I.B.Me]

Day 6 Thursday 7/5/07
I left Jack at the house at 9:42am. With steady rain falling I was not in a hurry to get started. I dropped my truck at I-75 and drove the car to Heidelberg. I was back on the trail at 2:23pm and enduring another long road walk. Due to the hot weather, I did add another liter to my water supply (four liters total) so I would not have to stop as often to pump water.
It is hard to imagine how far navigation has progressed in just 8 short years. When Ryan and I hiked the trail, we only had the large topo maps and a compass to guide us. The maps needed to thru-hike the trail might weigh five pounds. We had to follow the map closely and estimate mileages and make corrections at road crossings. This trip I have the maps that I ripped out of a Kentucky road atlas (four pages total), a partial copy of the trail guide that Mr. Molloy wrote going from South to North (the opposite direction of travel) and I have a GPS unit with some waypoints and pieces of tracks that I downloaded from the web. This particular section was not on the GPS because the file was too large to fit into my Garmin unit. I vaguely remember some of the trail but I found myself bewildered from time to time due to poor navigation. After an uneventful day, I kept looking for the good camping spot that Johnny Molloy mentions in his trail guide but I never did find it. I don’t like hiking at night but it’s not foreign to me either. When the lightning bugs start glowing, I get desperate to find a home for the night. Finally at 9:35pm, nearing Turkey Foot Campground, I made dry camp on a steep hillside. Thank God for the Hennessy hammock tent. It allows any two trees approximately 16 feet apart to be a level campsite.
This was the first day that I can remember my left knee giving me problems. It had a burning sensation just above the kneecap for a couple of hours. When I was 13, I was run over by the rear wheel of a 72’ Chevy station wagon. It crushed my left foot and my knee has ever since ached after extended use. I prayed for the strength to finish the trail and it stopped hurting almost immediately. Data for day six: 18.6 trail miles hiked, 0.0 extra miles hiked, moving time 6:29, stopped time 1:02, average moving speed 2.9 mph, total average speed 2.5 mph.