Buzzard Hill Hike

Last Saturday morning Shane, Lauren, Sweeting and I drove out to the Virginia/West Virginia border to hike a part of the Appalachian Trail called Buzzard Hill. It's about a 9.0 mile trek, 4 difficulty, 3,020 feet elevation gain. We went early so we'd beat the weather and were expecting thunderstorms in the late afternoon. So we're hiking along and I'm semi-keeping up. Shane is a speed demon and I'm out of shape soooooooooo that was not the best match up. I was holding my own until a ridiculous grade just zapped my energy. It was hard! The trail was rocky and steep! I kept going, but had the other three go ahead so I could go at my own pace. SO we end up agreeing they will continue and I'll start going back (we were almost to the end and I wanted a head start). Well at about 2:00pm or so I'm guessing, I start hearing thunder... and the woods start getting very very dark... and the wind starts howling. Pretty soon there is incredibly intense lightning, thunder, and ultimately a complete flood of rain. I'm like OH. MY. GOD. Haha it was seriously kind of scary! So I'm just saying to myself... Carrie, keep moving! Meanwhile a few Appalachian Trail hikers are speeding by me with their high tech boots and hiker poles and ponchos and are asking me if I'm okay and have everything I need. I look down at my gym clothes and sneakers and little dinky $10 Reebok backpack (if you can even call it that). Mmm hmm. Yep. Doing just fine! An hour and a half later, the storm subsides and I make it back to the lookout to wait for Shane, Lauren, and Sweeting to catch up. They do a bit later and get this... so Lauren grabbed for a tree to steady herself as she was going down hill. She saw a flash of light go into her hand and her arm went numb for a few minutes! We think that tree was about to get hit by lightning and she took the counter charge out of the tree! CRAZY! We saw a fallen tree on the way down to the parking lot that had a full bolt of lightning go straight through the trunk. It wasn't split or anything, just straight through from the top to bottom. Weird. Anyway we made it home and took long hot showers... we were pretty gross!

Sunday was ANOTHER concert at Nissan. Tim McGraw -- beautiful day, great weather, fun time with friends. We have a couple weeks break now until Brad Paisley.