Rusty’s Hard Time Hollow

After the descent came the climb up what’s called Three Ridges, an arid stretch of trail on this hot and humid day with more views of the same old green, forested slopes.

Three Ridges was best-known for its potential shortcut – there’s a blue blazed cutoff called the Mau-Har Trail. It’s a shorter route and boasts of waterfalls and swimming holes. B-Man took the shortcut, and when I caught up with him later he was sure to brag about how much he enjoyed basking in the running water.

Together B-Man and I decided to go check out Rusty’s Hard Time Hollow. Rusty had been taking in taking in hikers for years at a backwoods location on a small farm that’s completely off the grid. Better yet, there was an air of intrigue surrounding the place as it wasn’t listed in any of the guidebooks – you could only find it through word of mouth from other hikers.

Baltimore Jack penned an entry in one of the registers about how he’d be pushing on for the town of Waynesborough. There was rumor and controversy surrounding Rusty’s, that he could be opinionated and flat-out weird (Both basically true), but their were scores of hikers that loved the place and ended up staying there for weeks at a time.

Rusty seemed to be a “love him or hate him” sort of guy, and it all had an intriguing allure to me. I was in.

B-Man and I had acquired the directions.

We turned off of the AT, onto a fire road that led to the Blue Ridge Parkway. I remember walking with B-Man along this double track, keeping up with his fast pace as the tall grasses of the overgrown road tickled my knees. I remember being worried about ticks in the brush.

Then we walked the Blue Ridge Parkway until we passed a particular mile-marker. We kept our eyes open for a gated driveway and stepped onto Rusty’s property.

The gravel driveway led downhill off the ridge – the loose rock was hard on my knees and feet. The trees were adorned with well-made signs that stated all kinds of silly phrases and “rules,” basically of the redneck bumpersticker variety.

We turned the corner and saw the main building, constructed of wood. The lot in front of it was covered in aluminum cans that were flattened by Rusty’s truck – hundreds of them.

Rusty wasn’t around, but there were several hikers that had been staying there for some time. One of them showed us around the property – to the fire hydrant, for example, the outdoor urination station. To the privy, to the outdoor bunkhouse, and the so-called hot-tub (Basically a kettle with a fire ring underneath it), to the donation box (There was no nightly fee or minimum donation), and to the springhouse – a genuine cold, dark room of stone with a pool of chilly water. Cheese, hot dogs, and generic-brand sodas floated in the water.

One of the many signs at Rusty’s stated that he didn’t want any pictures or anything about his place showing up on the internet, and I intended to honor that. Unfortunately I never wrote anything about my stay here, even for my own posterity. I didn’t take any pictures, either. In my original journal, these days weren’t even labelled as Rusty’s, they said “secret hostel” or something to that effect.

Later in 2006 on by bicycling trip across America I stopped by Rusty’s once again, and on that visit I did take several photos. You can see them here.

On one day he made us some absolutely amazing blueberry pancakes, but it felt as though he did it almost begrudgingly. I got the impression that his hospitality and generosity were steadily waning as more and more hikers began to take advantage of it. The number of entitled folks has surely increased each year – freeloaders and those expecting more facilities and services from a so-called hostel.

Rusty clearly loved having hikers around, but unfortunately the hikers were changing and expenses were growing year by year, and he could only keep things up for so long. Throughout the following decade he’d annually announce that the Hard Time Hollow was officially “closed” to new visitors, but partway through each season folks would begin to turn up anyway.

It seems that things shut down for good sometime around 2010, and I’m unaware of the status of The Hollow. I wonder if Rusty himself is still even above ground, as they say.

I enjoyed my time here. It was completely off the grid, but he did have a gas generator for sparse electricity. The electric lights kept us awake well into the evenings, and there was even a cassette tape player with a good selection of tapes.

The others played a lot of Bob Marley and Grateful Dead while I leaned more for Led Zeppelin and Metallica. B-Man and another hiker were quite the Bob Marley connoisseurs. I remember a conversation they had where B-Man made a blanket ridicule of anyone who says they like Bob Marley but don’t know any songs beyond the Legend album.

“That record is like Bob Marley for white people,” he said.

B-Man, of course, was white. That’s the brand of hippy we had around here, but it was all good.

There was a decent book collection too, and I spent a lot of time reading The Two Towers, as I’d finished The Fellowship of the Ring. I picked it up and started reading random parts that I liked, but before I knew it I was reading the whole book.

Rusty avoided driving folks to town, so I ended up cooking and eating a lot of hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches. I remember being very, very hungry most of the time regardless, but that was okay.

The procedure for disposing of empty soda cans was to place them on a post outside the front door of the hollow. It was a tee, if you will (Like children play tee-ball before pitched baseball). There was a wiffel-ball bat provided to hit the can as hard as you could out into the driveway.

The cans gradually got flattened as Rusty ran over them with his truck. One day Rusty went to town to buy a new generator, and B-Man decided to make himself useful by doing some chores when he was gone. He raked up and collected all the cans from the driveway. When Rusty returned, he looked crestfallen. “What happened to all the cans?” he asked, “I liked them out there.” So B-Man undid all his work and re-spread the cans over the gravel.

One thing I liked most about the place was its sense of hidden history. He’d take a polaroid headshot of nearly every hiker that stayed. The trail name would be written in black marker on the white strip at the bottom of the print, and all the faces of the hikers were hung on the ceiling of the hostel, arranged by year. This system went back only a handful of years, but it was an impressive collection nonetheless.

More impressive were the photo albums that stretched to the 1980s, and maybe beyond. Hikers in tight blue jeans, big aviator sunglasses, and other fashions of the time. Thick mustaches. Naked people doing silly things – apparently football games where the “skins” team was indeed buck-naked were fairly common. Skins vs. Pants, anyone? Pictures of the wood-fired hot tub in action, where clothes were also frowned upon – a skinnier Rusty with a big brown beard, a younger man than the one before us.

There were hundreds of postcards from previous visitors. And unlike the other, “normal” hostels, these were not summit photos. They were photos of hikers in amazing places that were not the Appalachian Trail, places they’d moved on to after their AT hike. There were images from around the world, the desert southwest, glaciers and snowy peaks of the West, even the Great Pyramid of Egypt. These Appalachian Trail alumni sure seemed to get around…

It was an idyllic setting on Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Green and lush in the summer, a sense of being hidden away… going back in time even, to rustic colonial days. Roosters caused a racket before dawn each day, waking every soul in the house.

Rusty’s was a great experience, but I left there feeling famished and craving town more than ever. I holed up in a hotel in Waynesborough and rarely left the room, completely checking out from the thru-hiker culture for about 48 hours. I watched movie after movie on HBO and sat in bed with pizza delivery on my lap and a 2-liter of bottle of Coke within reach.

One morning I went to Weasie’s Kitchen, where there was a famed all-you-can-eat pancake special for thru-hikers. The record was 22 pancakes in one sitting and I didn’t even come close, though I think I managed eight or nine of them.

There were moments where I was so tired of it all, where even the mention of the word “trail” or “shelter” or other common thoughts of the hiker-world struck a stress trigger in my brain.

I knew I’d stalled and was using up too many zero-days, but I didn’t care. It seemed necessary and impossible to go forward without doing so. In retrospect I think I was largely just starving and malnourished – my silly refusal to carry a stove truly limited the amount of calories I could take in on the trail.

On the last night of my stay in Waynesborough I went to camp at the local YMCA. They had free campsites for thru-hikers so it was where folks tended to congregate. I was rejuvenated to see so many hikers still in the neighborhood, so to speak.

My next town stop would be in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, and from there it was an easy ride on public transportation to Washington DC.

A hiker named Fossil was a solo guy from the Netherlands, and part of the “Walking Wounded” crew I’d mentioned earlier in the journal. Being from overseas, Fossil was especially interested in doing the tourist-thing in DC, and Baltimore Jack said that the fireworks there were quite a sight.

To get there in time I’d have to average 23 miles a day, every day including the 4th.