Day 40/July 19: Sometimes, the trail eats you

My Sunday of July 19 started nice and slow. I had the cherriest camp spot at which to wake up. Since I was only planning to hike 13 miles, I made oatmeal and dried out my clothes in the sun.

While hiking, my water bladder ran dry, as it does every day I hike, so I got out my filter at a stream and went to work. This time, there was a problem. My filter essentially quit, which it's not supposed to do until well after I finish the northern portion of the entire trail.

A little instruction sheet in the filter's carrying case gives instructions for cleaning the filter canister: Just flip two valves and let it flow in reverse. I worked on it for 30 minutes, gave up and hiked on, then worked on it for 30 minutes more.

No dice. Instead of jetting out of the filter at 3 liters per minute, full of bubbles, the water trickled out and kept the stream's color.
Instantly, I was transformed from a hiker with a range as long as my food lasts to a hiker with the range of a day hiker. It was crushing.

I reached Tyringham, Massachusetts in the late afternoon, where I needed to be on Monday to pick up a package. I had ordered myself a Sony Walkman radio in Salisbury to be sent there.

The town had the PO, a B & B and nothing else - not even a gas station, and I was low on food. Thankfully, I met a hiker named Hitch - from Chicago, doing Damascus, Va. to Maine - who was staying at the B & B and who had already arranged for the owner of the B & B to drive him to the bigger town of Lee nearby.

So we had dinner at Arizona Pizza, and then I resupplied for the short run at Price Chopper. We waited for our cab at a sports bar that had a golf channel on and served a beer with the masculine-sounding name of Steel Rail.

Back in Tyringham, sometime after 9 p.m., I set up my tent literally behind the post office. I woke up sometime very early, and couldn't get back to sleep, so I packed everything up at 6 a.m. and waited the three hours until the post office opened. It was at about 8 a.m. that a crew from Town Hall took a backhoe to the area where my tent had been earlier, so I'm glad I didn't wake up to that hassle.














And I found out my radio wasn't even there when post office opened.

At that point, I was like, "I'm getting to Dalton [the next trail town] even if it kills me." To address my water situache, I packed 208 ounces, or 13 pounds [!!!], of water and headed back to the hills, hoping for some good luck...