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.