This is a good day hike if you’re looking for a workout. That’s the consensus of opinion on hiking upward.
Otherwise, there’s nothing special to recommend it. You hike over some ridges and through some hollows, to an Appalachian Trail shelter in the middle of the woods, next to a creek. And you hike back.
It’s slow hiking, with abundant rocks.
The hike
Click this link on hiking upward.com for their profile of the Bear’s Den/Sam Moore hike.
I started from the parking lot on Route 7, for a total of 8 miles/2000 feet of elevation gain, for the round-trip. (You can cut about 1.5 miles off the round-trip by parking at the Bears Den hiking hostel, as shown in the hiking upward writeup.) This took me 6.5 hours car-door-to-car-door, of which 5.5 was spent hiking.
You start at Snickers Gap, about 55 miles west of Washington DC, where Virginia Route 7 crosses the Appalachian Trail. Proceed south from the south side of Route 7, as evidenced by the 7:30 AM shadows in the picture above.
You come to the Bear’s Den overlook early on. Above, that’s looking west, across the Shenandoah Valley. Enjoy it, because that’s the last viewpoint you get on this hike. Everything else is just hiking in the Eastern woods.
A couple of hours and a couple of creek-crossings later, and you arrive at the Sam Moore hiker’s shelter. The shelter looks ancient, but the windows are a giveaway that it’s not. It was built in the 1990s (reference). It’s also not “log cabin” construction, as discussed in a prior post.
The hiker
I corrected two mistakes I made on my last hike (Post #2130), as detailed below. The results were spectacularly better than the last hike, where, for want of food and proper boots, I was pretty much a wreck by the time I was done.
Food: Breakfast yes, snacks yes, “carb loading” no.
I tried “carb loading” the night before by eating a couple of packs of ramen noodles late in the evening. I won’t be doing that again. Eating that much refined carbs, at once, without being in the middle of serious exercise, is just dumb. You get all the bad metabolic effects from eating a big slug of starch. And doing that, then going to bed, is doubly dumb.
And it’s unnecessary for most people. Sure, if you’re going to put in some extended period of exercise, you’d like to start with as much glycogen as possible stored up. This, the body will convert to readily-burned glucose, when the time comes.
But putting aside the copious folklore around this topic — this is, after all, the purview of elite athletes trying to shave seconds off of run times — my reading is that most people are fully “carb loaded” all the time, just from eating the standard American diet. It’s really only skinny runners, and people on calorie-restricted or content-restricted (e.g., keto) diets, that aren’t fully carb-loaded all the time. Those people may need to make changes, days in advance of an event, in order to allow their muscles and liver to store up some gylcogen, in anticipation of a prolonged physical effort. For the rest of us, we’ve been “carb loading” all along, one bag of chips at a time.
And if your body already has about as much glycogen as it needs (which ain’t much, on order of a pound or so), then, to a very close approximation, you just burn any additional carbs, or convert them to fat, as your calorie-balance circumstances dictate.
But, separately, you can burn the energy from food that is actively being digested while you hike. This isn’t “carb loading” in the sense of trying to push up your stores of glycogen. This is burning the sugars produced by digestion of carbs, directly, as they enter the bloodstream.
In my case, between three large peanut-butter sandwiches, fruit, and handfulls of dextrose candies, I ate before, during, and after the hike. And that kept me from “hitting the wall” — running out of glucose, essentially — that happened on my last hike.
The dextrose candy (Smarties, Sweet Tarts) requires a little explanation. Glucose (a.k.a. dextrose) is the sugar that you can burn directly, with no further processing. Fructose, by contrast — fruit sugar — has to be processed by the liver before you can burn it. And the liver is fairly slow at that — which is why it’s not a good idea to eat a huge amount of fruit at a single sitting.
Starch (e.g., bread) breaks down half and half into glucose and fructose. Half of it is immediately available to burn, once digested. Same for ordinary table sugar (sucrose).
If you want the most energy from your food, ASAP, you should eat dextrose (a.k.a., glucose). That’s why they sell diabetics grossly-overpriced dextrose tablets, to aid in blood sugar control. It’s the most efficient way to carry something edible that will provide energy ASAP.
But the whole trick is that you still have to wait for the food to be digested. So you have to start eating, and keep eating, long before you feel hungry.
Few people realize that the “quick energy” you get from a candy bar isn’t from the sugar in the candy bar. Sugar in your food does not pass through the wall of the stomach, directly into the bloodstream. (Practically speaking, only water and salt will do that.) Instead, when you eat carbs, the liver releases already-stored glucose and glycogen, in response to sensing that you’ve eaten something “sugary”. That’s the quick energy you “get from” a candy bar.
The food energy from a candy bar (or starchy carbs) only enters the bloodstream after that candy bar is digested in the small intestine, typically given as one to four hours after you eat it. The more fat in what you eat, the longer it takes to be digested. (So the sugar energy in a high-fat chocolate bar is available later than the sugar energy in (say) hard candy.) Everything that happens in the meantime is, in effect, your body fooling you by releasing previously-stored sugar.
Importantly, note that if you’ve worked yourself into a deeply glycogen-depleted state — you’ve “hit the wall” metabolically — that whole “quick energy” process ceases to function. You should get little or no immediate “sugar hit” from a candy bar. That’s because your liver has no spare sugar to release into the blood. At that point, you’ve got to wait for the food to be digested, before you get any energy boost.
The upshot is that I ate a big starch-heavy breakfast while driving to the trail head, and snacked on handfulls of candy right on up to lunch time. All of that felt very wrong — e.g., gobbling down handfulls of candy. To grasp why it wasn’t wrong, see the next section on calories burned while hiking.
Unlike my last hike, there was no “hitting the wall”, no associated “brain fog” and no loss of balance. Just the normal fatigue you’d expect, from that much exercise. I mark this one as “problem solved”. Eat a big, high-carb breakfast, and keep on eating.
An aside on estimates of calories burned while mountain hiking.
To understand why it was harmless to eat hundreds of calories of candy, this hike plausibly burned about 3500 calories. That’s for a 66 year old man, call it 190 pounds with a light pack, 8 miles, 2100 feet of elevation gain, 5.5 hours of hiking.
That seems like a ridiculously large number. But the size of the calorie burn is mostly due to the length of the exercise session. It works out to about 600 calories an hour, for hard exercise. Which is about right, for me, based on all other estimates I can come across. E.g., that’s not hugely lower than what I can manage on the CV machines at the gym. Which is about how it felt.
(Weirdly, on-line calorie calculators are just about evenly split between that figure, and half that figure. And they are ambiguous about how the mileage is expressed (out and back, or just mileage to destination). So I suspect that about half the on-line calorie calculators do something incorrectly, for this type of exercise. Or I enter incorrect data, for half of them. In any case, I wore a wrist pulse monitor, and the average pulse rate of 110, averaged over 5.5 hours of hiking, suggests about 3500 calories burned, not half of that. As do the recollections of backpacking as a youth, where no matter how much food I brought, I managed to lose about a pound of weight a day, while backpacking.)
The craziest aspect of this? Based on this calculation, a difficult 5-hour mountain hike burns about as much energy as running a marathon. (Marathon runners typically cite 100-150 calories per mile for the average runner, or 2600-3900 calories for a 26+ mile race).
There’s enough uncertainty in the calculation that I wouldn’t swear that’s true. But it’s surely pretty close, based on everything that I’ve observed.
Lowa Renegade boots.
I cannot sing the praises of these boots highly enough.
I took an eight-mile mountain hike in brand-new boots. I’d worn them for a grand total of two miles of walking on the sidewalk, plus around-the-house for a day. Any backpacker will tell you, that’s a fundamentally dumb thing to do. It was better than my next-best alternative (old Walmart work boots), but I fully expected to pay some penalties for wearing boots that hadn’t been broken in.
Results? No blisters. No sore spots. The next day, my feet aren’t even sore.
And, incredibly, no painful hip joints. No aching knee joints.
Edit around 3 PM. I can feel some soreness creeping into hips and knees now. To be expected, I think. So no miracle-in-a-boot, but still, nothing near as bad as the aftermath of the prior (Raven Rocks overlook) hike, done in work boots.
Backpacking without foot and joint pain? That’s a new one on me. That surely didn’t happen with my last hike, done in work boots. The standing joke among long-distance backpackers is that the pain never goes away, it just moves around from time to time. Even backpacking as a youth, stuff hurt all the time. I’ve never gotten off this lightly.
These boots worked just as advertised, and then some. You can, for example, quickly tighten the speed laces for the downhill sections, to keep the foot from sliding forward in the boot, then loosen them for the uphills, to give your ankles a rest.
I’m ditching my sneakers for around-town wear. Whatever magic these worked on a rocky mountain trail, I bet they provide the same benefit on a concrete sidewalk. Running shoes are now for the gym, only.
So I need to change what I said before about these German-made boots. I characterized these top-shelf boots from REI as expensive, but cheaper than a broken ankle. I would now have to say expensive, but cheaper than a hip replacement.
Other observations.
1) Route 7 and Shenandoah Valley commuters. Heading to the trail head, there was a more-than-five-mile-long traffic backup on Route 7. It stretched all the way from the crest of the Appalachians (Snicker’s Gap) to beyond Purcellville. From my perspective, it progressed from a about a mile of traffic at a dead stop, to several miles of stop-and-go, to a steady stream of traffic moving well under the 55 MPH speed limit. The traffic was so intense, it took me the better part of ten minutes to turn left off westbound 7, across the eastbound lanes, at my destination.
All of which is nuts, given that this is quite rural. Basically, it looked like a huge morning-commute traffic jam, in the middle of the boondocks.
Unless something catastrophic happened to the west of where I was, I can only infer that there is now a huge population of people who live in the Shenandoah Valley and car-commute to work in Loudoun, Fairfax, or further-in jurisdictions.
I can’t imagine doing that, and dealing with that amount of traffic every business day. But to each his or her own.
2) Trekking poles. Yes, use them. For this hike, I had the good sense to take them out, set them to length, and keep them in hand for use on the rockiest sections of the trails. If nothing else, on the downhills, I can go faster with poles than without. I even took the time to lengthen them a couple of inches for the downhills, and shorten them for the uphills. In part, this makes up for some loss of fine balance. In part, these ease downhill knee tendon stress when you need to take a big step down, on the downhills. Plant the poles ahead of you, and lower yourself down, rather than step down unaided.
But, these make a lot of noise, between the aluminum poles banking on the rocks, and the carbide tips striking the rocks. I’m going to see what I can do to quiet them down for my next hike.
3: Water. On this hike, I made the rookie mistake of carrying too little water. At the trail head, my full one-quart water bottle seemed like overkill, on a cool spring day, so I poured out half of it, to save weight.
Needless to say, I ended up finishing my water well before I finished my hike. Not a disaster, but unnecessarily unpleasant. If nothing else, eating carbs and candy the whole time makes you thirsty, as those then require considerable water for digestion and storage. Or something.
In any case, there was abundant flowing water throughout the trip. I just couldn’t drink any of it.
These days, you don’t even need to treat raw water chemically to make it safe to drink. And I already own several “life-straw” type devices, where the micro-porous filter material removes bacteria and parasites as the water flows through it. Given that these only weigh a couple of ounces, I think I’ll be taking one along on my next hike. Along with a full water bottle.
4: Getting lost/losing the trail. Dumb as it sounds, as clear as this trail is, I’ve walked right off the trail several times in these hikes.
How, you might reasonably ask, could I get lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail? It’s about as obvious as a sidewalk.
On rocky trails like this, I spend most of my time looking down at my feet. And so I may miss the double-blazes used to mark turns in the trail.
The problem is, I’m clearly not the only one who has done that. And so, you get some short “false trails” in many places. Things that look like the main trail — particularly if you are staring down at your feet. But that slowly peter out after a few yards to tens of yards. That, combined with a network of older trails, means that you can walk right off the AT, while still walking on what appears to be a fairly substantial foot trail.
The trick is to stop before you lose sight of the trail you are on. Look back for a white blaze. None visible? Backtrack on the trail you are on, until you find a white blaze. Turn around, take in the whole view (not just your feet), and it will be obvious where you took a wrong turn.
Never go beyond the visible trail that you ended up on. I’ve done that, and regretted it. You keep going just a bit further, to see if the trail picks back up again. Then just a bit further still. Because nobody likes to backtrack. And when you turn around, because you’ve finally figured out that you’ve lost the trail, you have no idea where the trail is, back to where you started.
I still carry a compass and a paper-copy map whenever I hike, but these days, there’s not much point to it. Even out in the boonies, with my cheap cell phone, Google Maps seemed able to place me within a fraction of my true location. That, and simply the slope of the land, or the direction of the nearest road noise, and I was never truly lost, just off the trail.
But I still take a map and compass. Just in case.
Conclusions
On my last hike, I went looking for some confidence that I could do solo hikes in the Blue Ridge without getting myself into trouble. After correcting some issues with that first hike, I’d say I’ve regained that confidence.
It’s not rocket science. It boils down to:
- Eat lots of carbs.
- Wear quality hiking boots.
- Use trekking poles as needed.
- Bring enough water.
No matter how you slice it, mountain day-hiking is a ton of exercise. It’s not outstandingly intense. Even at its worst, it’s no more strenuous than wind sprints on a treadmill. If nothing else, you pick your pace to match what you can do.
What makes it almost unique among aerobic exercises is the duration. You do it for hours and hours. You do it past the point at which you are tired. And yet, no matter how tired you got getting to your destination, you still have to get back home. So there’s a built-in “stretch your limits” aspect to it. The only other exercise I have access to, that comes close to these characteristics, is long bike rides. And there, the scenery typically is nowhere near as nice.
I’m old. I’m slow. But, with a little attention to the details, that’s no barrier to mountain hiking.