Sunday, August 30, 2009

Poem of the week

Savor this Robert Burns song until I update again later this week. I heard it in song form on NPR's "Thistle and Shamrock" show, and it quickened my steps on the trail.

"Lines Written On a Tumbler"

You're welcome, Willie Stewart;
You're welcome, Willie Stewart;
There's ne'er a flower that blooms in
May,
That's half sae welcome's thou art.

Come, bumpers high, express your joy,
The bowl we maun renew it;
The tappit-hen, gae bring her ben,
To welcome, Willie Stewart.

May foes be strang, and friends be
slack,
Ilk action may he rue it;
May woman on him turn her back,
That wrangs thee, Willie Stewart!

Aug. 26-29

- Aug. 26: Imp shelter to Trident Col campsite, 14.9 trail miles

I read in the registers that I was catching up to people I've been hiked with previously. The hike from Imp shelter to US Rte. 2 rolled me out of the White Mountains. At the road I could have hitched back into Gorham easily, but I opted not to. At night it felt amazing to be in my tent again. The temp dropped to the 40s; It was maybe the first time I zipped up my 20-degree down bag all the way.

- Aug. 27: Trident Col to Full Goose shelter, 14.4 trail miles

I crossed the Maine border in the afternoon and caught up Prairie Dog and Angry Beaver and Gritty McDuff, and a host of other hikers I couldn't recognize in the shelter, or in the several tents set up around it - it was 7:30 p.m. and cold, everybody was laying low in their sleeping bags and boggons.

I cooked noodles and spent a chilly night in my tent.

- Aug. 28: Full Goose to Baldpate lean-to, 12 trail miles

The day started out with the hardest mile on the entire AT: Mahoosuc Notch. My trail book says thus: "Many call this scramble under, around, over, and between the boulders the most difficult mile on the Trail."

Ha. I played Mario - every time you lose your balance and fall, you lose a life. I lost 4 lives. I had a great time navigating the boulders.

Afterwards I ate my last lunch food: Tortillas with Nutella, peanut butter and jelly - pure energy :)

At the Baldpate lean-to a brave mouse flitted around the front of the shelter. He would return in the night...

Aug. 25 and 26: Zero day and reentry to the trail

- Aug. 25: Gorham to Gorham, 0 trail miles

I zeroed in Gorham but foolishly did not go to the Super Wal-Mart to resupply, which I would regret later.

On the good side, my loaner pack arrived in the afternoon. I mailed my broken-down pack [it broke near Lincoln, NH, which I note here] to California with a deliberately-worded letter of complaint tucked inside. Gregory, the company that made it, has told me they will repair the pack damage. I doubt it. The mainstay came completely undone from the bottom of the pack.

The weather alternated between brilliant sunshine and quick downpours all day long.

- Aug. 26: Gorham to Imp Shelter, 13.1 trail miles

I hitched a ride back to the Pinkham Notch visitors center to resume my hike. The center had already stopped serving breakfast so I had an early morning burger. My new earbuds, cheapies from Rite Aid, fell out of my ears repeatedly as I began walking. The third time they got wrapped around one of my trekking poles, and in a fit, I threw the pole down the trail. The earbuds were no more.

The hike took me 1,940 feet straight up Wildcat Mountain immediately. At the top I wrung my shirt out and got some sun while talking to an older hiker who was in the process of making up the miles he'd skipped on a 2002 thru hike.

I checked in at the last of the AMC mountain huts, Carter Notch hut, to drink a bunch of water, read the register and eat some snacks. On my way out I passed Brave Little Toaster and his dog, Pork, and Frank N. Stein.

The trail went up a grueling 1,480 feet and settled into a ridge walk with clear views of the Whites on all sides; the sun fell directly behind Mt. Washington. I was very tempted to stealth camp on Mt. Hight. But I was behind most people I knew, so I hiked.

I was hiking in the dark with my headlamp when Frank N. Stein caught up. The 1,000 feet slab ride down from North Carter Mountain had been fearsome - wet slabs, vertical drops, swinging from young pines and tree roots in the dark - I could only imagine how difficult it must be for Toaster and the dog.

At Imp, the shelter was the only place we could stay; the tent platforms were full. The shelter was crowded and dark. It was 9:15 p.m. I cooked up a double Ramen dinner outside the shelter. I crashed hard.

Aug. 24: Wrong turn to Gorham

- Aug. 24: Madison Spring hut to Gorham, NH, *7.8 trail miles

After the fog rock hike down Mt. Madison, which comprised about 10 hikers, three of us got lost at a trail junction. The trail-maintaining club for the Whites, the AMC, is notoriously bad at marking the AT, and nowhere have they done a poorer job than at the Osgood campsite. The wooden signs there reveal nothing; no white blazes are in evidence on any of the hundreds of trees on which a white blaze could be painted with a couple of brushstrokes.

Three of us forged straight ahead when we should have taken a 90-degree right turn. The trail turned out to be a leisurely ski slope to the highway, and from there, we road walked 1.5 miles to a visitors center, where we ate lunch. Then the three of us - Spaceman Cowboy, Gritty McDuff and myself - stood on the highway shoulder, thumbs out, focusing our attention on trucks.

I've hitched into towns half a dozen times now, and I've never gotten a ride in anything but a truck driven by a dude. And 30 minutes of hitching later, we were in the back of a pickup truck, headed into Gorham.

We got out at a hostel called The Barn, a open-air hostel attached to a B & B that flies both the US and Canadian flags. A woman with an Eastern European accent came out and had us register and pay immediately. I asked if she had Internet.

"Yes, but you can't use it," she said. Not sure what effect she was going for, but my reaction was to laugh.

That also kind of set the tone for Gorham as a trail town. But at least I got to shower away a week's worth of mountain and to sleep on a bed instead of a table. That was sooo refreshing.

For an unknowable number of hours, a group of us hikers sat mesmerized by MTV's "Nitro Circus," a Jackass-type of show [Johnny Knoxville produces it and makes cameos] involving professional Xtreme athletes and absurd stunts.


*not actually that many miles. More than half of that I blue-blazed or road walked or outright didn't do.

Recap, Aug. 24-30 [Gorham, NH to Andover, ME]

There aren't enough USB ports on this comp for me to use the Internets, the mouse and upload photos, so I'm going to put just the words down for now and do a photo dump later this week, in Rangeley or Stratton. Please read above and bear with!

Saturday, August 29, 2009

What's ahead on the AT

For starters, 256.6 miles of trail. Some bogs. Some logs that, when you step on them, make you slide into the bogs. Two must-stay hostels: Shaws' Lodging in Monson [114.6 miles from Katahdin] and White House Landing [47.5 miles from K]. The "100-mile Wilderness."

And Katahdin, otherwise known as The End. Katahdin is a mountain 5,268 feet high in the middle of nowhere. A climb of more than 5,000 [no, scratch that; it's 4,000] feet 5.3 miles from the nearest shelter is necessary to summit it.

At an average of 10 miles of hiking per day, the end is 25 days away [Sept. 22 - my birthday]. I supposed when I started this hike, on June 10, that I would summit on or about Sept. 10. But I actually began my hike 100 miles behind the halfway point, which would make Sept. 17 the logical summit date for me. And if I average 15 miles a day, I will be summiting on Sept. 14. So sometime between Sept. 10 and 22 I'll be up on that mountain posing for the camera.

After that remains the question of getting home. Hitching 17 miles to Millinocket has to be done. Then it's a bus to Portland or Bangor, and hopefully a train down the coast. If no train, then a bus to Boston and I'm riding the Acela to good old, comfy Washington, D.C.

Maine ain't no joke, brah

I'm finally in Maine!

It's the 10th state I've hiked through on this journey. The other four - Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia - wait for me in the future.

The past several days of hiking have turned my legs into beaten sticks. It's like every day is another Lemon Squeezer day. It's not just me: This hostel, the Pine Ellis hikers hostel in Andover, ME, is full of hikers washed out of the mountains by today's rain.

In fact, today's 8-mile hike taught me to respect the whims of a powerful Mother Nature.

I had the unpleasant sensation last night of waking up to a mouse scurrying all over my sleeping bag. When I shook it off and looked up, I could see, and feel, a windy rain blowing all around the Baldpate lean-to. It was 1 a.m. When I got up at 6-something it was still raining.

I whiled away the early morning reading the book I just picked up, Jack London's "The Sea Wolf," and the three other hikers in the shelter, whom I'd only met the night before, did much the same. They were content to wait out the rain. That wasn't an option for me, because I had no food other than peanut butter. So I hiked out at 9:40 a.m. in my pants and rain jacket and soon summited Baldpate Mountain, elevation 3,810 ft., in a hard, chilly wind whipped up by Hurricane Bill [actually, it was Tropical Storm Danny].

No trees grow on the summit of the aptly-named Baldpate: It's all rock and alpine plants. I'd look up every few steps and peel back the hood of my rain jacket to see where the next cairn was, then put my head down and work my shoes into the rock in an effort to head in the cairn's direction.

It was the first time of my trip that I actually worried about getting stranded. So I did what any movie fan would do: I challenged the mountain to a duel, Gandalf-style: "You can't beat me!" I shouted at the wind.

So that was my day. Oh, and when I hitched a ride into Andover four miles later, the driver gave me a Budweiser "Clamato" a can of Bud flavored with clam juice, tomato, lime and salt.

Only in Maine!

Monday, August 24, 2009

Fog rock hike day














[Early Bear hiking down Mt. Madison. Ahead of him are Gritty and Wispee, morning of Aug. 23. Very treacherous trail, but cool thing to do.]

Aug. 22 continued: The migrant worker experience

I reached Madison Spring hut at about 4:30 p.m. Normally it's best to arrive between 5:30 and 6 p.m. to ask for work-for-stay, but a hiker named Gritty McDuff and two European hikers, a couple, named Rock Lobster and Walkabout, were already slaving away in the kitchen.

Early Bear and Lil' Dipper sat at a table. When Gritty was finished working, we got a game of Jenga going, which was a freaking blast.

Hikers kept rolling in. We had to wait outside like migrant workers while the paying guests had dinner. We had a lot of laughs, though. It was raining so we smooshed into the vestibule.














[Gritty McDuff, Early Bear, Spaceman Cowboy, Rock Lobster, Lil'Dipper and Wispee, on the threshold of Madison Spring hut, Aug. 22.]

Aug. 22: The Presidential Range

As soon as I reached the top of the Tuckerman Ravine trail, which goes straight up - straight up - Mt. Washington from Hermit Lake shelter, a group of upstate New Yorkers wearing farm clothes and bonnets asked me where I was hiking from.

"West Virginia," was my response :)

It's getting very common for me to find myself explaining hiking the Appalachian Trail to tourists.

From there, it was a short day of hiking, 5.7 trail miles, to Madison Spring hut, over the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, where I saw the most spectacular views I've seen during my entire hike. It's 25 miles of above-treeline, alpine hiking. You can see exactly where you're going to go and you know how far that is. It's as though you have been dropped into a role-playing video game, somehow. Time actually flies while hiking, for once.














[The Presidential Range, Aug. 22, 2009]














[Looking back up to Mt. Washington, with summit building on top, across the Cog Railway. The railway is a short old-timey passenger train for tourists. It was once an AT tradition to moon it as it went by, but there was a crackdown in 2007 and nobody does it any more.]














[Approaching the mountains. The AT actually skirts all the peaks, but the views are still breathtaking.]

Aug. 21: Stranded on Washington

Man, it was foggy on the way to Mt. Washington. A weather bulletin interrupted the NPR program I was listening to to talk about a severe T-storm heading NE through Vermont at the moment.














[Hiking to Mt. Washington, elev. 6,288 ft., Aug. 21, 2009]

When I reached the summit, big objects began materializing out of the wall of white. A radio tower here, an ancient stone building there; I found my way into the crowded summit building. While I was walking around, Early Bear and Lil Dipper walked in through the front door. They'd gotten a mile down the trail when they realized they'd left Dip's camera battery charger plugged into the wall.

I had some food, two slices of pizza, a chili dog and an ice cream sandwich. It started raining:














[Wet entrance to the summit building]

The fog clung to the windows. On the computer screens they have set up showing the weather radar, a big patch of green, yellow and red rushed our way at 40 mph. We waited for it in safety. Sure enough, while I browsed the gift shop lightning bolts started illuminating the fog.














[Lil' Dipper, Early Bear and me, stranded on the summit of Mt. Washington]

Two former hikers calling themselves "The Brothers" approached us, bought us coffee and snack cakes and were very interested to hear about our hikes. The Brothers, two young dudes from Mass., started the trail southbound last September, which is a late start for southbounders, and finished in February this year. They saw hardly a soul along the way, they said, and they took Sundays off to watch Pats football games.

The trail magic gave Early Bear a chance to retell his skunk attack story. The story is without a doubt the most compelling trail tale of the year, and I heard it again, in greater detail. You'll either have to wait for it to come out in his book or maybe I can get it on the record here. In a nutshell, it involves a night of camping in Virginia with Prairie Dog and Angry Beaver that goes awry because of a rabid skunk :)

The Brothers were impressed.

EB also retold his bee sting rescue op story from Vermont, which I blog here.

My contribution was about a double trail magic that happened to me last Thursday. After a long, flat hike from Zealand Falls hut, I had a leiserely lunch in the parking lot with a veteran hiker named Rock Dancer, who said he's been doing trail magic there for 8 years. He had folding chairs and bologna sandwiches. Then I got my pack on, put my hands through the wrist straps on my trekking poles and was headed out when a car pulled in and the driver, a young guy, goes, "You a thru hiker?" as he's parking. I said I was, and he said, "Want a beer? Of course you do." So he popped his trunk and I had a lunchtime beer not 20 steps away from my most recent trail magic. And it had been a while since I'd received any trail magic before that!

So because the park rangers at the summit building are unfriendly to hikers, having been accustomed to dealing with far too many ignorant city-slicker types, and they don't let people stay in the building when it storms, I was convinced to join Early Bear and Dip in taking the shuttle off the mountain. It cost $29 - a ransomly price.

The long shuttle ride down was interesting. Two weekenders said they'd thrown off their packs and run for it once the lightning started, and they had no plans to go back and get them. Two other weekenders said their response to the lightning was to cower, in the cold, driving rain, for 30 minutes before making a run for shelter.

No wonder rangers charge an arm and a leg for mountaintop rescues these days.

When we reached the bottom of the hill we decided to hike about two miles back up the mountain and stay at Hermit Lake shelter, resuming the walk in the morning in order to start over at the summit.

My Mizpah

In a post before I entered the Whites, I explained the deal with the shelters and huts. I also said I'd maybe try to work-for-stay at one hut. That's turned into three successful work-for-stays, and I think I've actually gained weight from all the home cookin' :)

I still have one last hut to go. If I get out of Gorham in time, that will be tonight. Only a steep 2,000-ft climb up Wildcat Mountain stands in my way.

The day after Zealand Falls hut I hiked with the goal of making it to the biggest hut, Lakes of the Clouds, but only managed to reach Mizpah Spring hut in time for dinner, which is went you want to arrive if you're going to ask the croo to stay there.

A group of three hikers put on an hour-long, overcooked presentation as part of their work-for-stay. The gist of it was that they started in May, two months later than most northbounders, wake up at 5 a.m. and average more than 20 miles a day while fighting off hordes of bears. They have a Web site, too.

Hikers of that sort - the before-sunrise wakers who write in trail journals about feeling guilty for only doing 15 miles, or for not being able to get out of a town before 9 a.m. - and they're uncommon, have their own category. They're not in it to experience the culture of the trail, or to find something while letting the adventure take shape under their feet. They're in it for the math. The miles hiked, the packs' weight, the pounds lost. All that stuff I've come to think is inessential.

Anyway, mornings at the huts start before 6 a.m. when the croo - the six or so young people doing summer jobs in the mountains - starts cooking breakfast. Hikers sleep on the dining room tables or on the floor. At Mizpah, I killed time until breakfast and then I swept the hell out of the six bunk rooms and the main room for my work-for-stay.

Before that, though, the croo put on a performance about what guests should do...














[Two croo members do a "Hanz and Franz" skit that teaches guests at Mizpah Spring hut to pack out their trash, make their beds and exercise their heart muscles by leaving generous tips, Aug. 21, 2009]

I hiked out, got about half a mile before I realized I'd left my Thermarest at the hut, dropped my pack, turned around, hiked back, got it, turned around, hiked back and then hiked on towards a date with Mt. Washington, the biggest mountain [though not the biggest climb] of the entire northern half of the AT. The advertisements about the summit having "the world's worst weather" would prove accurate...

Photo blogging the Whites

When I have more time I'll add narrative. But for now, sit back, relax and travel the AT through New Hampshire National Geographic style...















[Looking north towards Mt. Lafayette, Aug. 18, 2009]














[Participating in a Q & A panel with two other hikers, Brave Little Toaster and Frank N. Stein, about thru-hiking at Zealand Falls hut, Aug. 19]














[Frank N. Stein, Toaster and me, breakfast at Zealand Falls hut, Aug. 20. As part of our work-for-stay, we talked about the trail with the hut's paying guests, did dishes and swept the floor. We had a huge dinner and homemade pancakes for breakfast.]














[Mt. Washington, the tallest mountain on the northern half of the AT, in the distance.]

Aug. 24: Still in the Hampsh

I'm coffee wired at the moment, sitting at one of two terminals in the Gorham, NH public library, incredibly antsy to hike today but also full of blog updates. It's going to be hard!

Since my last update eight [!] days ago I've hiked most of the Whites. More mountains remain. The first one up is the Wildcat, a 4,422-ft mountain that requires a very steep 2,000-ft climb to reach.

To hurry things along I'm going to photo blog a bit.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Aug. 16: Summer hits with a fierceness

It's freaking hot today. I'm in Lincoln, NH staying at "Chet's Place," aka the One Step At a Time hostel. I'm a big fan of Chet West. Today I did my first work-for-stay for real: I bleached down the shower and reorganized the shelves of hiker stuff in the hikers room.

I'm waiting for my mail drops at the PO tomorrow. In the meantime, I replaced the tips on my Leki trekking poles. They were worn down to nubs - the guy at the local outfitter, where, incidentally, Chet used to work, and I teamed up to knock the old tips off with a wrench and brute force.

I'm also supergluing my pack. No, that isn't good. I'm going to contact Gregory tomorrow to see how I can get it replaced and when and where.

The mountains have been beautiful and difficult.

On Thursday, I summitted Moosilauke with Col. Mustard, strolling through the scraggly, mossy pines that formed low hedgerows on either side of a narrow trail. A heavy fog rolled over our luncheon. Little black flies or gnats swarmed rocks, the orange Moosilauke sign and invaded my can of peanut butter.

I've found my mileage dropping and my calorie intake upping.

Gotta go, internet cafe is closing,

-JH

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Next up, the Whites

Soon I'll be on Moosilauke, elevation 4,802 feet, the highest of my hike so far. Yesterday it was cloud shrouded:














[Mt. Moosilauke, NH, the first of the White Mountains, Aug. 12]

My companion book tells me that snow, sleet and ice can strike the peaks in any season. After Moosilauke, we've got Mount Wolf [elev. 3,478 ft], North and South Kinsman Mountain [4,293 and 4,358, respectively] and the Presidential Range: Mt. Lincoln [5,089], Mt. Garfield [4,500], South Twin Mountain [4,902], Mt. Webster [3,910], Mt. Jackson [4,052], Mt. Pierce [4,312], Mt. Franklin [5,004] and the biggie, Mt. Washington [6,288]. Then Mt. Madison [5,366], Carter Dome [4,832] and Mt. Moriah [4,049].

All in all, it's 90 miles of mountain climbing bliss.

Unlike previous sections of the AT, camping in the Whites isn't as simple as picking from any shelter you come across.

Most shelters and campsites cost $8 per night. Caretakers stay in residence at each of them. And a lot of the Whites area has "forest protection areas" with a lot of rules about camping that include a] no camping above treeline [where trees are smaller than 8 feet tall], b] no camping within .25 miles of huts, shelters or campsites except at those places, and c] no camping within 200 feet of the trail.

Then there are the "huts."

The Appalachian Mountain Club has 8 mountaintop huts modeled after huts in the Alps. Each costs a lot of money - $74 to $90 - because there are tourists who will pay that much to stay in bunk beds, without showers.

The huts serve cheap bean soup and have water for thru-hikers during the day.

At all pay sites in the Whites, hikers can offer to work off their stays. It's very limited, though. I'm not sure how it's going to work when I roll through because, as you can see in the hostel posts below, there is a raft of northbound hikers entering the mountains this week.

To start off, there are a couple of free shelters. Some southbounders have passed the word along that stealth camping can be had at the "notches," or the valleys with road crossings between the mountains. I'd like to do work-for-stay at one of the huts.

Off to mountaineer,

JH

Aug. 12: Hosteling, cont.

Yesterday was fun. Rain paranoia kept us all here at the hostel. It's widely said that if you have to wait to get sunny days to hike the Whites, it's worth doing.

I started reading Steinbeck's "In Dubious Battle" and got about 30 pages in before I realized I've already read it.

I played some Euchre [Nutmeg and I beat Col. Mustard and Prairie Dog], read the Times, played Monopoly and grilled some little steaks. I added too much water to the camp potatoes I was cooking so I called them grits instead.














[Behind the Welcome Hikers hostel, Aug. 12, 2009]

Moose? Check.

The hostel shuttle took a group of us hikers into Warren yesterday to resupply. On the way back, we spotted us a moose.














[Moose next to NH Rte. 25, between Glencliff and Warren, Aug. 12, 2009]

The driver pulled over. A couple of us went up to it. It stepped out of the muck with a swarm of bugs around it and studied us.

I think that completes the animal checklist.

Moose: 1.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Aug 11: hosteling

I'm at the tail end of a long "Family Guy" marathon here at Hikers Welcome Hostel.

We hikers are spoiled for choices here...














[The media wall, Hikers Welcome Hostel, Glencliff, NH, Aug. 11, 2009]

Today I hiked roughly 8 miles of AT. I got laundry done, finally, after a week of wearing the same socks and shirt over and over again. Another hot shower, always good. I resupplied at a mini mart in Warren, NH, which I normally don't like to do because marts are more expensive and have smaller selections than grocery stores. My bill was about $50, but that included all my food and drink for today.

At the PO I found that my phone has yet to catch up with me :( Apparently they lost the slip of paper in Hanover where I said to forward my packages to Glencliff.

A man who is working on the hostel here broke out the guitar at the fire ring this evening and we had a bit of a singalong to Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" and some Bowie.

If you haven't tried Ben and Jerry's Key Lime Pie ice cream, you must do so today.

Off to my bunk...

Aug. 10: The two month anniversary!

In the morning I realized, in my groggy stupor on the wood floor of the Firewarden's Cabin, that it was August 10: Two full months on the AT.

In the month since my one-month anniversary, I have hiked 355 miles through New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire to get within 406 miles of Katahdin.

I had lunch sitting on the side of the trail itself with the Divas group and Mustard joined us. There it was decided that a lot of us would go that evening to the Dancing Bones village, a place my guide book calls "an independent community" that is hiker friendly, located a mile off the trail. We got a lot of mileage out of speculating on what kind of cult we'd find.

The hike went up, gradually, over nice trail.














[Rocky slope going up, Aug. 10, 2009]

In the afternoon everyone met up again on the rocky top of Mt. Cube for snacking and gazing around at the mountains. Personally, I wrung my shirt of sweat.














[Me, Nutmeg, O.G., Col. Mustard, Prairie Dog and Angry Beaver on Mt. Cube, Aug. 10, 2009. Four people in the photo are from Ohio.]

I lost the Divas when I stopped for a lake swim with the other hikers. The beach was otherwise deserted but for a father who read Popular Science while his young daughter swam alone. I waded out. The girl was like, "Can you do a handstand? Do a handstand!"

I was relieved as hell to see the Divas clustered in an outdoor kitchen at the Dancing Bones village. I thought they might have chickened out.

We ate a bunch of the food from the help-yourself fridge on the front porch. Daal, cous cous, rice, beans, salsa and cheese sauce - we ate it right next to the porch.

The woman in the house came out to chat with us, after two other guests left, and that's when we got an idea of what the commune is all about: PanEuRythmy.

Basically, it's a circle dance that's part hippie, part moving Tai Chi that hails from Bulgaria. Nutmeg asked for a dance lesson that night, and the woman, Bekah, headed up the drive to fetch the music.

Meanwhile, I had the first shower I'd had since Rutland, nearly a week earlier. A row of shower stalls lined the back porch. The hot water never ran out.

The woman taught a few of the girls in a dancing pavilion where we later camped out. They circled a vase of sunflowers doing slow arm movements.














[Bekah teaching Billyhoot, Nutmeg, Rocket and Storm to do PanEurythmy moves, Aug. 10, 2009]

I slept in my tent under the pavilion. Later, the acorns made a lot of noise falling on the shelter. It rained hard early in the morning.

Aug. 8 & 9: Hiking the Hampsh

The short and dirty version.

- August 8

I woke up in my tent at the edge of a Dartmouth athletics field in Hanover. A curious dog's snout poked under my rain cover before its owner called it back.

I stretched outside and looked around me. To the north was the swampy woods where I'd sloshed around in my sandals the night before, looking futilely for a tent site. Drops of water hung on the top of all the blades of grass.

In the parking lot of the Hanover Co-op I ran into Billyhoot and Nutmeg, the Georgia Girls, and inside I ran into Gromet, Rocket and Storm [the Packadivas] and Katchup and Miss Muster [the Condiments]. My brunch was two donuts, a raspberry pastry, a deli sandwich, a bag of Doritoes, a coke and a coffee. Plus the Times.

When I rolled up to Moose Mountain shelter 11 miles later, I was shocked - shocked - to see Prairie Dog and Angry Beaver playing Euchre with O.G. and Colonel Mustard, all sprawled out on their Thermarests in the shelter, burning incense. I thought they'd all be way ahead of me. A pleasant surprise.

I cooked up some noodles and finished the rest of the chapters of "Almayer's Folly" in my tent.

- Aug. 9

I start hiking relatively late. Not for me, but for the general hiking population, around 10 a.m.

It's another easy day of hiking, 12.4 miles. All the same people end up at a place called the Firewarden's Cabin, at the summit of Smarts Mountain, elevation 3,230 feet.














[Billyhoot and Nutmeg, Firewarden's Cabin, Aug. 9]

I picked up the second half of a new book, "The Scarlet Ruse," an airport novel. Col. Mustard has the first half. So far we are finding the story radically different.

This time, I partnered Prairie Dog in a game of Euchre against Angry Beaver and Col. Mustard. It came down to the wire; we lost on a knife's edge.

Now playing: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

It's a classic.

"Damn! We're in a tight spot!"

Another:

"I don't want FOP, goddamnit! I'm a Dapper Dan man!"

This computer appears to be from the 1990s, which means no USB ports for my camera. Which started working again [*sigh of relief*]. So you'll be seeing what I've been seeing in no time.

Check back later, yeah?

Update, August 11: The rain falls outdoors

I'm at Welcome Hikers Hostel in Glencliff, NH. The rain just exploded out of the sky and snuffed out a backyard fire in a fire ring. A lot of hikers rushed in. We are now watching CNN about the health care town halls. Knowledge is funn! I'm staying here tonight and hiking Moosilauke, the first of the White Mountains, tomorrow, so I'll have time to update again after we get me sorted out.

400 miles to go!

Friday, August 7, 2009

Looking back at Vermud


















[Vermont trail, Aug. 5, 2009]

You'll see in registers at the borderlines of states hikers writing farewells to the state they've just finished, usually written in the second person. Usually they start with something like, "Vermont, it was great hiking you," and go on to talk about the rocks [Pennsylvania], the mosquitoes [NJ, NY, CT, MA] or the mud [VT], and how it's time to move on.

Not me. I like stats.

I got into Vermont on July 22 and left it yesterday, Aug. 6. That's 150 miles of Appalachian Trail in 15 days - 10 miles per day. If you take out all the zeroing I did, my hiking average comes to 15 miles per day.

My last three days of hiking have been sweet. It was like my first week, walking the friendly trail through southern Pennsylvania, again.

The mud shrank to secluded sections like the one above, as opposed to occupying much of the trail, as it had done. The trail wound in and out of spectacular beech-maple forests, orderly conifer forests and sunny meadows.














[The AT through Vermont, August 5, 2009.]

For my 17.3-mile Thursday, I didn't even need the food in my pack.

Just two miles after I left the Inn at Long Trail on Tuesday, I got to the hiker-friendly Mountain Meadows Lodge, where I had some ice cream and soda and was able to update this blog. I ended up doing 10 miles to get to the Stony Brook shelter.

The next day was a killer. I was looking at the elevation profile of the upcoming trail the night before and thought, "No problem. Three miles an hour, I'll make 20 miles before dinner." The hills looked short and doable.

In real life, they were steep as sh*t and I spent half the day - hours and hours, it felt - going up. At a little farmers market called On the Edge Farm, just .2 off the trail, I had ice cream, soda and a peach and rested for an hour and half around dinnertime. The soda was a Vermont Maple Soda. Not bad!

I ended up stealth camping [for the first time] just off the trail, on a cleared hill, 18.4 miles from Stony Brook.

Breakfast on Thursday I had at a working farm with a farmers market just off the trail, called Cloudland Farm. Ice cream and Vermont soda again. It's a trail thing. Lunch was hot dogs and mac and cheese at deli seven miles later. Everything was delicious.

That last two miles of Vermont trail took me on a road walk through Norwich, VT, where every other house is a New England manse. And then I was in Hanover.

Privy example No. 2

This is another example of a trail privy. The first example, a very primitive privy, is here.














[Privy at the Bromley shelter, Vermont, July 28.]

This privy is one of the biggest, airiest and best maintained on the AT that I've seen so far. Its proximity to Vt. Routes 11 & 30 [near Manchester Center] probably contributes to that fact.

It is a composting privy. It has its own set of rules:



















[Typical thing you see on a privy wall.]

The Animals

The moose remains elusive, but I saw this guy the other day between the Wintturi shelter and Cloudland Road in Vermont:














[Porcupine in the woods, Aug. 5, 2009. It climbed five feet up a tree, watched me for a while, came down and ambled in the opposite direction.]

I was close to a moose on Tuesday. Very close:














[Moose print, Aug. 4, before the Stony Brook shelter.]

My animal sightings so far:

- spiky woods dog: 1
- moose: 0
- deer: a few
- silent night deer: 2, in Massachusetts
- bears: 2, in New Jersey
- snakes: about 10; 6 regular, 4 poisonous
- eerie black vultures: 1, which perched in a branch overhead and watched me while I climbed around some rocks in New York














- grouse: too many. These game birds tend to explode noisily out of the bushes around you as you walk past them and fly horizontally away from you.
- squiggly gecko things: quite a few. These orange reptiles wriggle hopelessly on their bellies. They wriggle so much that they are impossible to bring into focus with a camera:














- chipmunks: still infinite :)

Aug. 7: Greetings from the land of plenty

It's a gorgeous day here in Hanover, New Hampshire. It's sunny and in the 70s. The forecast is for more of the same until Wednesday. That's a good start to a state that has the White Mountains - the biggest on the trail since the Smoky Mountains, in "Appalatcha" - waiting for northbound hikers. That means the leafy tunnel portion of the AT is about to come to an end. Soon, I'll be hiking above treeline, tasting clouds and bundling up against the wind, and possibly, snow.

Hanover is home to Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school founded in 1769 that costs about $39K per year in undergrad tuition. It counts Timothy Geithner, Dr. Seuss and the late Bud Shulberg ["On The Waterfront" writer] among its alumni.

The downtown here looks to have no buildings older than 10 years old, however. It's very small. There's a Gap and a Talbots; it looks like a less-urban Georgetown, basically.

I'm sitting now in the lobby of Dartmouth's Robinson Hall. It's where the Dartmouth Outing Club is located. The club maintains about 70 miles of the Appalachian Trail in eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire. A room in the lower level is open to thru hikers. The downside is that there's no laundry or shower.

I'm happy to say that my water filter issue has been resolved.

I wrote more than two weeks ago about my expensive filter shutting down. Since then I've heard complaints about the system from other hikers using it. I backflushed it according to a tutorial on the company's Web site and consulted an outfitter or two along the way, but I wasn't able to get it working like it was supposed to again.

The company Web site had a notice posted today:

We have recently identified a flow performance issue with some of the hollow fiber filter cartridges contained in MSR HyperFlow microfilters currently on the market. The performance issue DOES NOT effect the product’s ability to filter safe drinking water but can be frustrating as the flow rate of the filter may not perform to product specifications. The issue has been rectified and all filter cartridges currently in production for the MSR HyperFlow microfilter perform to flow specifications.

The Mountain Goat outfitter here in town took my old, malfunctioning filter and handed me a brand new system, with a filter cartridge that works, over the counter today. Nice!

My camera is a different story. It relapsed into rain damage disease and no longer lets me take new pictures. Unless I engineer it back to health, you won't be seeing any New Hampshire with your own eyes. It is what it is.

I don't know whether I'm hiking out tonight or not. Last night I camped out at the edge of town, about .3 miles away from this spot. I had a pizza dinner with another northbounder who is named Strider because he's like six five and has a stride probably double that of your average hiker. He's on the 4-month completion track, which means he's one of those people you see once or twice and that's it. He estimates he eats about 5,000 calories a day, and then described what he typically eats. As I was almost through my 10th slice of pizza, I almost hurled when he said he starts every day with a half pound of granola and ends it with 2L of noodles mixed with a bit of mashed potatoes, with an outrageous collection of pantry food between.

There's a shelter less than a mile from the soccer fields. I'll play it by ear.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Aug. 5 [I meant 4]: Into the woods again


















[Me + my new shoes, on Deer Leap overlook above the Inn at Long Trail, Aug. 4, 2009]

I'm on the trail again after a nice little vacay at the Inn at Long Trail. When I got there on Friday, after virtually swimming down the mountain, a lot of hikers who were previously ahead of me were there on their third night.

Saturday and Sunday, the place was very quiet. Not "The Shining" quiet, but quiet.

The Packadivas showed up Monday night, and then Early Bear and Lil Dipper arrived - finally - today, along with Goof and Mr. Buffalo Man. I thought I had been going slow. Apparently they had all participated in a trail rescue op over the weekend when a teenage girl in a summer camp thing got stung by a bee. The girl had an allergic reaction, and the thru hikers helped a 20-year-old counselor get the girl three miles down the mountain, but not before bees attacked again and stung pretty much everybody. Then the hikers walked back up the mountain to retrieve the other day campers' day packs, which they'd abandoned in a panic.

Early Bear said he didn't get to bed until after 11 p.m.

Bees. Not a fun creature to encounter on the trail.

On Thursday I was hiking up a hill when I looked down and saw a hole in the trail from which issued bees every second, just a moment before my shoe landed right on it. A number of bees swarmed around my leg as I ran. Thankfully, only one got the stinger in.

At the next shelter, the Clarendon, I read numerous entries about hikers getting stung in the register, so I left a message for the trail maintainers imploring them to bomb the hive.

Anyway, it was good to see everybody again and rest up and fatten up [I've been told I've definitely lost weight]. I got caught up on movies. "Funny People" I saw on Saturday. I liked seeing Adam Sandler play a rich, jaded Adam Sandler-esque character, but some of the melodrama involving Leslie Mann and Seth Rogen was awkward to watch, a lot like parts of "Knocked Up".

With regards to my phone, the woman at the Verizon store in Rutland yesterday gave me a deal I found easy to refuse. My phone, she said, was no longer usable. There's no sim card, no way to salvage my contacts, photos, anything. I could sign up for two more years of Verizon and get a free phone, or a least a heavily discounted phone, or I could not renew and just buy a phone, starting at $200.

I'd like to get an iPhone in the fall, so a new contract didn't interest me, nor did splurging on another Samsung or LG.

The third option: I could wait and see if I can get an old phone, pay a $10 fee to switch my number to it and go from there. Which is what I'm doing. A replacement is coming next week, and I'll need everybody's number again.

I feel a little better about losing a phone to rain after hearing from at least three hikers who have done the same thing. Early Bear said he even dropped his iPod in a hot tub while on the trail.

See you in Hanover, NH, the home of Dartmouth. There's a campsite next to the soccer fields there. I'm going to see if I can get into a pickup game. It's been a while :)

-Ink

p.s. do you realize how good Ben and Jerry's is?!?

Monday, August 3, 2009

Augustland

Good news and bad news.

First, the bad. My phone is inoperable at the moment. Hiking last week through two days of downpours has killed it. So that's why all the texts go unanswered and the calls go to voicemail. I'm going to a Verizon store today to see about fixing it.

Second, the good. My camera and radio recovered from their bouts with rain sickness. I put them in a Ziploc bag full of rice, a trick several hikers told me about, and it worked!

I'm spending my third full day in the Rutland, Vermont area, which is kickass. The Inn at Long Trail, where I'm staying, experienced a hiker compression on Friday. I first heard about the inn in New Jersey, where I circled it in my companion book as a must-do.

I rode the nearby "Alpine slide" the other day with Johnny Thunder and Freefall, a couple who met at Trail Days this year [JT is the one looking back in this photo from week and a half ago, Freefall took the shot] and a good friend I met in Pennsylvania.















[Getting ready to ride the Alpine slide. You take the slide on a like plastic bobsled thing. You lean forward to lower a wheel to make you go fast, and you let up to brake]














[My friend, Ashley, in front of the gondola to the top of Killington Peak [see below]]














[The top of Killington Peak, elevation 4,235 feet. Killington is a major ski resort, but in the summer, people ride the gondola to the top and either hike or mountain bike down the slopes.]