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.