The rain finally stopped sometime early in the morning. We slept in late, until 8a(ish). Our bodies were sore. We were hungry. I had actually dreamt that I was eating cous cous (a standard dinner for us). We laid a bit longer, not wanting to move. Finally, hunger won out. Warthog got up and started making breakfast; cous cous for me, mashed potatoes for him, and our normal Carnation Breakfast Essentials. We got a text from Snow Monkey and Wonder Woman asking what the plan was. They eventually came over to talk about our options. Today is supposed to be 70 degrees and sunny, but tomorrow we are supposed to get more rain. In fact, later this week we have a lot of rain coming. We can handle a day or so, but can’t deal with that much rain. Nothing would be dry. We are getting to the point in the year where wet equals cold. That’s a danger we don’t want to play with.
Photo Above: Both bottles are filtered water. The water from this particular shelter had a nice yellow to it, along with a “well water” taste. In real life, I would probably refuse to drink this. In trail life, I don’t have a choice. It actually wasn’t bad and I haven’t gotten sick. That’s all I can ask for.
We made plans to hike through today, camp tonight, and get picked up tomorrow morning. We will spend the day in town resupplying and drying out. It is time, after all, to get showers in. It’s been nine or ten days since we’ve last been clean.
By the time we were hitting the trail, it was almost 1p. It is unusually late for us, but this morning, was absolutely necessary. We only need to make it nine miles to a “stealth” site. It’s not far, but today we difficult terrain ahead of us. In fact, we have the hardest mile of the AT to hike.
Mahoosuc Notch, considered to be the hardest and most fun mile of the trail, usually takes people two or more hours to complete. It took us two and a half. To give you a comparison, we usually plan on a two miles per hour speed which includes general breaks. Then, we add an hour for lunch. This slowed us down to a fifth of our normal speed. It was difficult and sometimes unnerving. It was also a lot of fun. There were many places where you had to scoot down on your bottom, pull yourself up, or take off your pack to continue on. Sometimes the trail took you under boulders, into cave like surrounds, or squeezed you between rock faces. We knew we would be slow. We worked as a team, pulling each other up, catching one another as you slid down, and general acting as a spot for your group mates. I joked about doing “trust falls”, but essentially, we were doing just that. I will admit, I was a bit sad when we got to the end. But it was 4:30p by the time we were leaving. We still had seven or so miles to go. We needed to be finished.
After completing Mahoosuc Notch, we ate our lunch. Warthog sat his backpack down to rest… right in poop. This time it wasn’t human. We are guessing probably dog. I found myself slightly annoyed at the owner. I always wondered what the etiquette was for disposing of pet waste. I had heard you are supposed to bury it like your own waste. It seemed ridiculous when I read it. Now it doesn’t seem so crazy. To be fair to the pet and the owner, it was a narrow corridor. There was nowhere off of the trail for the poor thing to go. Which is probably why Warthog got into the predicament he did. Luckily it was old, so things cleaned up easily.
After lunch we went up and over more rocky balds. These had bogs too. A girl in a group behind us actually fully fell into one, all the way up to her waist. She said she still hadn’t reached the bottom. She was with a couple of other hikers and was able to pull herself out. We made a joke yesterday about people or things being hidden in those bogs. Now I half believe that there are in fact things you don’t want to know down in there.
We hiked late today, about two and a half to three hours after sunset. It was a gorgeous moon tonight. In just a couple of days it’ll be full. Probably the last full moon we will see while on the trail. As we hiked, the light from our headlamps shined down on the trail. In the soil was a bunch of flecks of muscovite, something you learn about when you are hiking with a geologist. Silver flecks dusted the trail, making it look like you were hiking on stars – something my tired mind enjoyed imagining. It was a really nice night to be hiking. The weather was warm and we went up on top of balds, so the views of the sky above and city below.
Sometimes people get turned around when they are night hiking. We haven’t had that happen to us yet, not until tonight anyways. We should have turned left, but continued straight. Lucky for us, we only went up about a quarter of a mile before the trail ended at a fire tower. We knew we had taken a wrong turn when we got there. No way around it, we had to retrace those steps. It was between 10:30 and 11p when we got to our campsite. We ate dinner fast and went to bed even faster. We were exhausted. But tomorrow we get a day off. So all’s well.
-ansel