George Steffanos
A
thread 1/10
June 17, 1983: No sooner had I begun the three miles of ridge walking on Pearis Mountain, than the sky, which had been darkening all day, turned truly ominous.
#backpacking #hiking #outdoors #landscapephotography #virginia #mountains #storm #forest #trails #adventure #appalachiantrail
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
Avatar Avatar
0
0
2
George Steffanos
A
thread 2/10
Thunder boomed in the distance. I quickly threw my rain cover over my backpack just before the sky opened up and poured down upon me. I have never seen rain like that in my life. It was like a waterfall.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 3/10
I was drenched to the skin in the few seconds it took to put on my rain suit. I released my pent-up frustration with a primal scream and started to make tracks.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 4/10
Soon, tremendous bursts of thunder were exploding all around me. For a time, I could almost hear the thunder before I saw the lightning. I was on ground zero on the top of a mountain with a metal pack frame projecting up over my head.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 5/10
The only sensible thing for me to do was stop and find shelter.

So, I kept going. Hey, if I was sensible, would I even be on this stupid quest? For the better part of an hour, I struggled through a universe that had suddenly become mostly water.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 6/10
I could hardly breathe. The ground quickly became a quagmire. Within moments, three or four inches of standing water covered the trail and stayed there as the slow minutes dragged past. The ground was a shallow lake in the flat stretches and a raging river everywhere else.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 7/10
My feet were just swimming around in my socks and what was left of my boots. In many places, the clay earth beneath my feet had become a soft, sticky slurry of water and soil particles, creating an amorphous shifting boundary between the land and the water flooding it.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 8/10
Daytime had become dim twilight. Every time I thought I would never again see it rain so hard as long as I lived, lightning would crackle all around me and rain would pour down even harder. I was shaking with cold even though I was hiking flat out.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 9/10
It was a race between lightning and hypothermia to see which would drop me first. I thought, “If I can just get through this, I’ll be all right. This is the worst moment I will ever experience in my entire life.”
Then the hail came. Marble-sized pellets of ice pelting off me by the hundreds.
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0
George Steffanos
A
thread 10/10
They stung like cold fire — especially the ones which caught skin on my hands and face.

From my book Then the Hail Came (A Humorous and Truthful Account of a 1983 #AppalachianTrail Thru-hike). Available in paperback and eBook: https://amazon.com/dp/B09Q...
08:23 AM - Feb 03, 2024
0
0

 

{{ notificationModalContent }} {{ promptModalMessage }}