35.4 mi / 11.9 mph / 943 ft. climbing
Home: Quality Inn & Suites

Campgrounds without water, electric, or bathrooms don’t exactly draw the party crowds, so the humans at Rocky Springs were plenty quiet. But while we were trying to sleep, some creatures (owls?) were hooting at each other at high volume, and later on a pack of coyotes celebrated a kill. Overall the Trace has felt relatively free of wildlife (maybe park workers clean up any roadkill?), so it was actually sort of nice to know that the animals are out there somewhere.

Leaving the rainfly off the tent was a gamble that paid off; even though it was only 50°F when we woke up, water had neither fallen nor condensed on us, so it was a perfectly comfortable morning in our sleeping bag. Less comfortable was the morning pooping routine. Even though the septic tank was pumped yesterday afternoon, the bathrooms had still not been opened, so when Rett had to go, she had to go, in a quickly-dug hole (better than dripping down the brick on the backside of the bathhouse that a past camper had targeted).

Then, literally two minutes before we were ready to roll out, a park worker drove up and unlocked the bathroom doors. Of the two of us, I’m the one who has trained myself into a consistent post-breakfast routine (for better or worse), so the ironic twist was that I actually felt like I would have been fine “holding it” for the rest of the day, but hey, now that a toilet is a available, I might as well use it! They were perfectly clean and functional bathrooms, it sure would have made our lives more-comfortable if they had been open yesterday!

The peaceful Trace riding continued immediately, though at some point my phone happened to show me a radar image, and I was shocked to see a train of rain paralleling us just off to our left, and converging on our route. None of the many forecasts I look at had predicted it, but now we needed to bag up our panniers and alter lunch timing to avoid getting dumped on at the worst possible moment. In the end, it was much more of a blessing than a curse, because we only felt a few drops throughout the day, but the constant clouds and nearby precipitation kept the high temperature some 10 degrees below the predicted 82-degree high.

To reach our motel in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, we had options similar to our unorthodox entrance to the trail yesterday. We could exit the Trace six miles early, and ride roads of unknown traffic, or, we could continue to I-20. There, we could hope that we could find a path to descend to the I-20 frontage road (there is no official connection), and if that failed, continue onto I-20, and (reasonably!) play dumb if any law enforcement happened upon us riding the Interstate shoulder for a quarter-mile before the next exit. The risk we chose was the I-20 option, and thankfully, there was a wide completely-cleared path through the trees down the southwest slope to the frontage road (I’d been observing earlier bridges, and most of them didn’t have any reasonable options. Here, the northwest slope was pretty hairy, and both eastern slopes were blocked at the bottom by a fence.)

We then just had to make it through a “Private Property – No Trespassing” business park (the booths at each end were unmanned), and those shenanigans got us to our motel before 2pm, with water to spare. The friendly clerk (unusually from Vietnam, rather than the Indian subcontinent) put us in an accessible room to make life even easier with our bikes. When I went to Taco Bell for a long-absent dinner treat, my route over an I-20 interchange drove deeper the pleasantness of the Trace: of course the traffic was much more chaotic, but the amount of tire-slashing debris littering the shoulder made me wonder how we’ll even survive back out here once we’re done with the Trace for the long-term!