wake early, walk far, and travel light
All in all, it was a great and challenging route and one worth doing. My main advice is to make sure that you are comfortable and confident with hiking off trail and with using a GPS and compass to navigate.
It was a nice coincidence when Russ mentioned the Peak as we drove to the trailhead… and that he had the GPS tracks with him… and that we’d be walking very close to where it is located.
Confusion quickly turned to glee and they processed and started deciding between the multitude of goodies we offered, which was really fun to see.
We had some fun rapids, but nothing above Class I. It was just about the perfect intro to packrafting.
It had all of the traditional ingredients: a returning Massanutten finisher (me), a first-time finisher (Max!), a Halfassanutten participant (Sophie), a Mininuttener (Sharon), a trail injury sacrifice (Chris), a new variant finisher we will call the Markanutten (Mark, duh), and lots of trail magic.
