My arrival in Rutland came on a Friday; I didn't know until I got there was that it was also the first day of the Long Trail Festival. The Long Trail is a very old hiking trail -- older than the AT -- that runs the length of the state of Vermont, from Massachusetts to Canada. The festival is like a much smaller version of Trail Days, with workshops, films, vendor booths ... and for the several dozen AT hikers that were there, a lot of hanging around, chilling.
Also just like Trail Days, at the end there was a work project at the end of it, and I volunteered again. We went back to Clarendon Gorge, where the AT crosses the Mill River. The gorge is about 30 feet high, and is crossed by a suspension bridge. The bridge was paid for by the family of an AT thru-hiker who died trying to cross the river in 1973. The cables are metal, but the deck of the bridge is wood and has to be replaced about every 15 years; so about a dozen of us spent a day doing that. There is something deeply counterintuitive about standing on a bridge over a gorge and taking a saw to the wood underneath your feet (even if you're not afraid of heights, which I am) ...
-- Finished up Vermont, and made it to Hanover, NH. I've reeeally been looking forward to getting here. I've been really dragging with motivation, and I was looking forward to getting to New Hampshire and the White Mountains, which has some of the most spectacular scenery on the whole trail. Hanover itself is a cool town, basically an extension of Dartmouth U. Given the kind of students Dartmouth attracts, the town isn't exactly full of low-priced eateries, but I have managed to find both a Fajita buffet and a Thai buffet ... and eat at both in the same day. I think I put away 10,000 calories that day. It's also a very hiker-freindly place -- there's a pizza place that gives all hikers a free slice, a Ben and Jerry's that gives a hiker discount, and a used bookstore whose owner lets a few hikers stay at her house.
If it sounds like I've been here awhile, I have -- three days now. I was supposed to be getting a maildrop here, but the USPS has not delivered. This is a real problem as this maildrop had all my colder-weather gear that I need for hiking in the Whites (they've been to get snow 12 months a year). So I sit, hope it arrives tomorrow, and start wondering if I have to start looking for an outfitter that can sell me a pair of boots and some thermals ...
Friday, August 22, 2008
Photos
It's been awhile since I posted a link to my photo pages; since New York to be exact. Follow this link and just keep clicking "next" to see them all:
http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=369734
http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=369734
August 10 - August 15
--Rain, rain rain. Muddy mosquito damp with misty cloudy damp mud. Mud rain moss; bog swamp wet, damp. Mosquito muddy wring mossy, squishy mud rain cloud.
--No really. Vermont already had had a very rainy July before we arrived, and I've had at least some rain for nine out of eleven days in North Mass/Vermont. It's kept the temperature down, which is great, but it's still a nasty way to live. The trail is rock, or else thick, pull-your-shoe-off-your-foot mud, or else the trail is basically turned into a stream bed. As someone wrote in a shelter register: "Welcome to Vermont, where the sky is grey, the trees are green, and the trail doesn't take you to a water source because the trail IS the water source."
--Finally, August 13th (my 5 month mark) is cloudless. Of course, one doesn't actually see the sun since the forest here is so thick... (update: heavy rains starting at 7pm on the 13th)
--The rain adds to the mounting exhaustion. I have never felt so mentally and emotionally drained in my life. Physically I am pretty much fine. My feet ache, and I have a pulled muscle (from jumping rock-to-rock trying to avoid mud), but other than that I'm not bad. But between the ears, I'm wiped out.
--The calendar is running out. In order to have some recovery time before getting back to work, I need to finish sometime around October 1, giving me six weeks. Given that I'm averaging about 70-75 miles a week lately (those who care can look up my statistics on trailjournals.com), I'm pushing it awfully close.
--In light of all the above, I'm going to skip some 50 miles of trail from Manchester to Rutland, VT. I want to make sure my last few weeks on the trail are enjoyable, and they won't be if I'm having to constantly worry about making miles everyday. I feel a little bit bad about this; having skipped well over 100 miles of trail, at this point I probably don't even qualify as a thru-hiker anymore - just a 2,000 mile sectioner. But at this point, if it gets me done a few days faster, I'm for it.
--Rain, rain rain. Muddy mosquito damp with misty cloudy damp mud. Mud rain moss; bog swamp wet, damp. Mosquito muddy wring mossy, squishy mud rain cloud.
--No really. Vermont already had had a very rainy July before we arrived, and I've had at least some rain for nine out of eleven days in North Mass/Vermont. It's kept the temperature down, which is great, but it's still a nasty way to live. The trail is rock, or else thick, pull-your-shoe-off-your-foot mud, or else the trail is basically turned into a stream bed. As someone wrote in a shelter register: "Welcome to Vermont, where the sky is grey, the trees are green, and the trail doesn't take you to a water source because the trail IS the water source."
--Finally, August 13th (my 5 month mark) is cloudless. Of course, one doesn't actually see the sun since the forest here is so thick... (update: heavy rains starting at 7pm on the 13th)
--The rain adds to the mounting exhaustion. I have never felt so mentally and emotionally drained in my life. Physically I am pretty much fine. My feet ache, and I have a pulled muscle (from jumping rock-to-rock trying to avoid mud), but other than that I'm not bad. But between the ears, I'm wiped out.
--The calendar is running out. In order to have some recovery time before getting back to work, I need to finish sometime around October 1, giving me six weeks. Given that I'm averaging about 70-75 miles a week lately (those who care can look up my statistics on trailjournals.com), I'm pushing it awfully close.
--In light of all the above, I'm going to skip some 50 miles of trail from Manchester to Rutland, VT. I want to make sure my last few weeks on the trail are enjoyable, and they won't be if I'm having to constantly worry about making miles everyday. I feel a little bit bad about this; having skipped well over 100 miles of trail, at this point I probably don't even qualify as a thru-hiker anymore - just a 2,000 mile sectioner. But at this point, if it gets me done a few days faster, I'm for it.
Political Detox
One of the things I've had to do without while on the trail has been news. At home, I'm pretty much a news junkie; hitting news and political blogs nearly every day, listening to talk radio or NPR in the car, leaving cable news on while walking around the house. I've pretty much been in detox out here, catching a newspaper or getting online once a week or so just to see what I'm missing.
Except that I haven't really missed anything. When you're a news junkie, you follow every little "controversy," every back-and-forth, every point or two of "movement" in the incessant polls as if they actually meant something vitally important. In reality, most of what's happened in the last five months has been fairly predictable, and I don't think many people would change their votes according to all that stuff anyway.
But the thing that sticks out the most when you dip your toe back into the media after being away from it is how hysterical people get. You listen to the TV news or go online, and you get the impression that the election this November is between a socialist demagogue who wants to surrender to the UN on the one hand, and a fascist warmonger who wants to euthanize the poor on the other. It's really absurd, and it certainly drives home the point that the one bias pretty much all media have in common is the bias that whatever they are talking about is IMPORTANT. Not that any of this is new - American politics were rabidly partisan in 1790; in some ways political discourse is more restrained now than it's ever been. But that doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous.
Every election year since I've been teaching, I've told the same story to my students to try to give them perspective. I went to a very conservative College, where probably 80% of the student body were registered Republicans. On the night of the 1992 election, I was walking around campus, and as the results came in, there was a palpable sense of despair; so much so that the next day in chapel, the school president felt the need to reassure people that the election of Bill Clinton did not call into doubt the existence or omnipotence of God.
When I got into my dorm room, I found my roommate listening to George Bush's concession speech on the radio. My roommate was not a US citizen, but a Liberian who had escaped that country's civil war and enrolled in college in the US. Despite (or perhaps because of) that, he was very invested in the election and an ardent Bush supporter. But when I saw him, I was stunned to find him not at all depressed at the result of the election; normally very low-key, he was positively giddy as he listened to his candidate admit defeat and praise his opponent. I was thinking he was misunderstanding what was going on; until I realized that I was the one unclear on the concept.
John was thrilled just to see a peaceful change of power. Having lived his whole life in West Africa, he, like 99% of the people in the history of the planet, had never seen a person in political power willingly give it up. What I took as a given was to him a source of wonder.
The point I make with my students is that, as much as the politicians and the talking heads want to convince us that the apocalypse will come if we elect the wrong guy, the reality is that checks and balances, as well as politicians' desire for re-election, ensure that the vast majority of what happens will be things that the vast majority of us can go along with. No matter what happens in any American election, 99% of us will find our lives 99% unchanged. That's a good thing, one that's easy to forget when you watch TV more than once a month.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
8/6 – 8/9
I’m definitely in New England now. The woods are increasingly full of white-barked birch trees, along with lots of hemlock. The towns all have houses and churches that are a century or two old.
Lots of rain lately. Lots of walking in wet socks. In places, the Berkshires are almost more like a plateau than a mountain range. This leads to a lot of ponds, which are nice, but also to a lot of muddy, swampy spots. Mosquitoes have been pretty nasty.
Hitching back into town from a re-supply, I get picked up by none other that Lipstick, out once again playing taxi driver for her husband Raccoon. The AT continues to be a small world…
Before I left, I put virtually my entire CD collection onto a handful of memory cards that I could put into my MP3 player. The music has been a huge, huge, huge help in keeping myself motivated and staving off boredom from the last 1500 miles. But the last few days I’ve been listening to some audio books that I’d recorded instead. When I decided to go back to the music today, I realized that I lost the canister containing the memory cards. Considering that this is the one item in my pack that can’t possibly be replaced, this is pretty much a disaster. Since I could have lost them any number of places in the last week, there’s no chance of finding them (and, no, I didn’t put my name on the canister; that would have been intelligent of me.) This is a serious bummer going into the last 650 miles
Visited one of the trail institutions, “The cookie Lady.” For over twenty years, Roy and Marilyn Wiley have given free homemade cookies to hikers that stop by their blueberry farm a few hundred yards off the trail. Alas, the cookie Lady is out when I come by, but the Cookie Man hooks me up with some Raisin and Chocolate Chip cookies.
More ridiculous hospitality. Going into Dalton, MA, I’m told by some southbound thru-hikers (who I’ve been running into almost daily for the last 2 weeks.) to go to the Shell station and ask about “The Birdcage.” I do, and get directions to the house of Rob Bird. Rob is the manager of the couple gas stations, and in his spare time, he, like Mayor Dick Ludwick, has turned his house into hikers central. The front porch has several cats, and there’s about a dozen mattresses in the loft of the garage. Like the Mayor, Rob invites you to take a shower (actually, he requires it, which is pretty darn understandable), do your laundry, and hang out in his living room. By this point, it should make sense when I say that it’s both amazing and unsurprising. I probably shouldn’t, but I give into temptation and take a zero day in Dalton. (did I mention that the congregational church was having a $5 blueberry pancake breakfast? Well, they were.)
I’m definitely in New England now. The woods are increasingly full of white-barked birch trees, along with lots of hemlock. The towns all have houses and churches that are a century or two old.
Lots of rain lately. Lots of walking in wet socks. In places, the Berkshires are almost more like a plateau than a mountain range. This leads to a lot of ponds, which are nice, but also to a lot of muddy, swampy spots. Mosquitoes have been pretty nasty.
Hitching back into town from a re-supply, I get picked up by none other that Lipstick, out once again playing taxi driver for her husband Raccoon. The AT continues to be a small world…
Before I left, I put virtually my entire CD collection onto a handful of memory cards that I could put into my MP3 player. The music has been a huge, huge, huge help in keeping myself motivated and staving off boredom from the last 1500 miles. But the last few days I’ve been listening to some audio books that I’d recorded instead. When I decided to go back to the music today, I realized that I lost the canister containing the memory cards. Considering that this is the one item in my pack that can’t possibly be replaced, this is pretty much a disaster. Since I could have lost them any number of places in the last week, there’s no chance of finding them (and, no, I didn’t put my name on the canister; that would have been intelligent of me.) This is a serious bummer going into the last 650 miles
Visited one of the trail institutions, “The cookie Lady.” For over twenty years, Roy and Marilyn Wiley have given free homemade cookies to hikers that stop by their blueberry farm a few hundred yards off the trail. Alas, the cookie Lady is out when I come by, but the Cookie Man hooks me up with some Raisin and Chocolate Chip cookies.
More ridiculous hospitality. Going into Dalton, MA, I’m told by some southbound thru-hikers (who I’ve been running into almost daily for the last 2 weeks.) to go to the Shell station and ask about “The Birdcage.” I do, and get directions to the house of Rob Bird. Rob is the manager of the couple gas stations, and in his spare time, he, like Mayor Dick Ludwick, has turned his house into hikers central. The front porch has several cats, and there’s about a dozen mattresses in the loft of the garage. Like the Mayor, Rob invites you to take a shower (actually, he requires it, which is pretty darn understandable), do your laundry, and hang out in his living room. By this point, it should make sense when I say that it’s both amazing and unsurprising. I probably shouldn’t, but I give into temptation and take a zero day in Dalton. (did I mention that the congregational church was having a $5 blueberry pancake breakfast? Well, they were.)
Historian Rebecca Solnit, reflecting on the autobiographies of people kidnapped and raised among Indians in frontier America:
“Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape… But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche; a readiness to deal with what comes next.
These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it, you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward and uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel for more than others. There are these who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self, and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch.”
-Rebecca Solnit
"A Field Guide to Getting Lost"
“Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape… But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche; a readiness to deal with what comes next.
These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it, you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward and uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel for more than others. There are these who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self, and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch.”
-Rebecca Solnit
"A Field Guide to Getting Lost"
Monday, August 11, 2008
"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in place, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is like a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
-Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July 28
Started my day by going up Bear Mountain, a really nice spot which overlooks the Hudson, then went down through the old park at the bottom of the mountain, through the zoo (where I was one of the species on display - "Look, there's one of those hiker guys"), then walked a mile to the nearest town, Ft. Montgomery to resupply. Except the "grocery" there is really just a mini-mart, so I had to head up two more miles to find a supermarket - walking the whole way because I couldn't get a hitch to save my soul.
I finally made it, got several day's worth of food, ate dinner in the market's deli, and hitched a ride back towards the bridge. My ride-givers turned out to be cadets at West Point; I had been only a few blocks away from the US Military Academy. I more or less knew this from the map, but it wasn't until they asked me if I'd been on campus and taken the tour that I realized the opportunity I'd missed.
When they dropped me off; I hiked up a few miles on the east bank of the Hudson, camped and decided two things. The first was to renew my commitment to hiking my own hike - I didn't want to miss out on any interesting opportunities that come up because I have to hurry up back to the woods. If that means I fall behind schedule - like I already am - and have to skip some portions to catch up, so be it.
The other thing I decided is that if I ever make it back to that supermarket deli, I am not ordering the seafood salad again. Hiking uphill after eating sketchy crab is not a pretty thing.
July 29
After a few miles, I reach Graymour Spiritual Life Center. This is an honest-to-goodness Franciscan Monastery and the AT more-or-less runs right through it. They have a tenting area with a pavilion, a cold shower and a water spigot for hikers. As I understand it, they used to offer meals to hikers, but alas, not anymore. I take an hour or so to walk around the grounds before pressing on.
July 30 - August 1
Finish off New York and enter Connecticut. Weather still hot and humid; terrain still rocky; not much else to say. Struggling a lot with motivation lately. From talking with others, a lot of people are. Everyone is anxious to get to the home stretch - Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Entering Connecticut, at least I'm in New England.
Have started to see south bound thru-hikers every day or two. They typically start in June or July, and finish up around Christmas. Many also run into some flip-floppers somewhere. A flip-flop is some sort of alternative itinerary. The most common is to hike north to Harper's Ferry, then get off, go to Maine, and hike south from there back to Harper's (thereby spending the worst of summer in Maine). It's interesting comparing notes with them and hearing what's ahead.
August 2
Today crossed a covered bridge over the Housatonic River. The bridge is over 100 years old, and there's been a river crossing of one kind or another in that spot since Colonial times - Washington's army used it on several occasions.
Spent most of the day in town at Kent, CT. It's one of the towns that, owing to the way the trail lays, pretty much everyone goes into for resupply. I hate to say it, but it's not a very hiker-friendly town. I hate saying it because I met several people in town that were all very nice, including one lady leading a group of kids who had been dayhiking. I got the full celebrity treatment, including the posed picture at the end. That's happened a couple of times now, and it's a fun, if odd, experience.
Still, Kent as a town, doesn't exactly throw wide it's welcoming arms. Several places have signs telling hikers to leave packs outside, don't wash your hair in the restrooms, etc. All of which is understandable and fair, but frustrating since there is nowhere in town to leave your stuff or wash up (the only lodging in town is over $100 a night). A couple people said they felt unwelcome or at least out of place, and one called it "the worst town on the trail."
But there comes a point where you have to step outside yourself a bit. The unbelievably generous hospitality we've gotten from so many people has a dark side: we come to expect it. We start thinking we are owed a hostel in every town, that we deserve trail magic, that we are entitled to a hiker discount, that an upscale Connecticut town somehow has an obligation to eagerly embrace us smelly, unshaven vagrants. There is among some hikers - especially some of the younger ones - an entitlement mentality.
It's a running joke among thru-hikers that there is a hierarchy on the trail, and that dayhikers and section hikers are "lower." We ignore the fact that the trail was never really meant to be thru-hiked. The people who created it did so with section-hikers in mind, and if anyone "deserves" anything, it's the volunteer trail maintainers, not the few weirdos who have six months to kill wandering in the woods.
Anyway, that's a rant. Resupplied, fed, heading on.
August 3 - August 5
Finished up Connecticut, which included a really nice waterfall (though "Great Falls" might be a bit of an overstatement as a name), then crossed into Massachusetts and went through the very beautiful Sage's Ravine. Spent a couple hours at the latter, feet in cold, cold mountain stream water, reading Last of the Mohicans.
Hit Mass Route 41, decided that three weeks without a hot shower was enough, and hitched a ride into the little town of South Egremont. My guidebook listed an inn built in 1780 that had rooms for $75; the second - most I've paid for a hotel room in my life, I think. But given that even budget motels run about $65 in this area, I figured I'd give it a shot. As it turns out, it's a beautiful old place, fixed up pretty nice with a whirlpool bathtub in every room and a big-screen TV in the common area (which I have to myself since most of the other guests are out antiquing). The usual rate here for a weekday? $165. That's $90 "hiker discount." Not bad at all, especially considering it includes free all-you-can-eat continental breakfast. (Well, it didn't actually say "all-you-can-eat," but they didn't tell me to stop either...
Another thing I should mention - lately I've been running into people I haven't seen for ages. Just this morning I ran into someone who asked "how's the foot" - he hadn't seen me since the Shenandoah's, when I was limping along with a burned foot. Last week, a guy saw me and called me "Nosebleed," my original trail name - I hadn't seen him since early in North Carolina.
-Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July 28
Started my day by going up Bear Mountain, a really nice spot which overlooks the Hudson, then went down through the old park at the bottom of the mountain, through the zoo (where I was one of the species on display - "Look, there's one of those hiker guys"), then walked a mile to the nearest town, Ft. Montgomery to resupply. Except the "grocery" there is really just a mini-mart, so I had to head up two more miles to find a supermarket - walking the whole way because I couldn't get a hitch to save my soul.
I finally made it, got several day's worth of food, ate dinner in the market's deli, and hitched a ride back towards the bridge. My ride-givers turned out to be cadets at West Point; I had been only a few blocks away from the US Military Academy. I more or less knew this from the map, but it wasn't until they asked me if I'd been on campus and taken the tour that I realized the opportunity I'd missed.
When they dropped me off; I hiked up a few miles on the east bank of the Hudson, camped and decided two things. The first was to renew my commitment to hiking my own hike - I didn't want to miss out on any interesting opportunities that come up because I have to hurry up back to the woods. If that means I fall behind schedule - like I already am - and have to skip some portions to catch up, so be it.
The other thing I decided is that if I ever make it back to that supermarket deli, I am not ordering the seafood salad again. Hiking uphill after eating sketchy crab is not a pretty thing.
July 29
After a few miles, I reach Graymour Spiritual Life Center. This is an honest-to-goodness Franciscan Monastery and the AT more-or-less runs right through it. They have a tenting area with a pavilion, a cold shower and a water spigot for hikers. As I understand it, they used to offer meals to hikers, but alas, not anymore. I take an hour or so to walk around the grounds before pressing on.
July 30 - August 1
Finish off New York and enter Connecticut. Weather still hot and humid; terrain still rocky; not much else to say. Struggling a lot with motivation lately. From talking with others, a lot of people are. Everyone is anxious to get to the home stretch - Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Entering Connecticut, at least I'm in New England.
Have started to see south bound thru-hikers every day or two. They typically start in June or July, and finish up around Christmas. Many also run into some flip-floppers somewhere. A flip-flop is some sort of alternative itinerary. The most common is to hike north to Harper's Ferry, then get off, go to Maine, and hike south from there back to Harper's (thereby spending the worst of summer in Maine). It's interesting comparing notes with them and hearing what's ahead.
August 2
Today crossed a covered bridge over the Housatonic River. The bridge is over 100 years old, and there's been a river crossing of one kind or another in that spot since Colonial times - Washington's army used it on several occasions.
Spent most of the day in town at Kent, CT. It's one of the towns that, owing to the way the trail lays, pretty much everyone goes into for resupply. I hate to say it, but it's not a very hiker-friendly town. I hate saying it because I met several people in town that were all very nice, including one lady leading a group of kids who had been dayhiking. I got the full celebrity treatment, including the posed picture at the end. That's happened a couple of times now, and it's a fun, if odd, experience.
Still, Kent as a town, doesn't exactly throw wide it's welcoming arms. Several places have signs telling hikers to leave packs outside, don't wash your hair in the restrooms, etc. All of which is understandable and fair, but frustrating since there is nowhere in town to leave your stuff or wash up (the only lodging in town is over $100 a night). A couple people said they felt unwelcome or at least out of place, and one called it "the worst town on the trail."
But there comes a point where you have to step outside yourself a bit. The unbelievably generous hospitality we've gotten from so many people has a dark side: we come to expect it. We start thinking we are owed a hostel in every town, that we deserve trail magic, that we are entitled to a hiker discount, that an upscale Connecticut town somehow has an obligation to eagerly embrace us smelly, unshaven vagrants. There is among some hikers - especially some of the younger ones - an entitlement mentality.
It's a running joke among thru-hikers that there is a hierarchy on the trail, and that dayhikers and section hikers are "lower." We ignore the fact that the trail was never really meant to be thru-hiked. The people who created it did so with section-hikers in mind, and if anyone "deserves" anything, it's the volunteer trail maintainers, not the few weirdos who have six months to kill wandering in the woods.
Anyway, that's a rant. Resupplied, fed, heading on.
August 3 - August 5
Finished up Connecticut, which included a really nice waterfall (though "Great Falls" might be a bit of an overstatement as a name), then crossed into Massachusetts and went through the very beautiful Sage's Ravine. Spent a couple hours at the latter, feet in cold, cold mountain stream water, reading Last of the Mohicans.
Hit Mass Route 41, decided that three weeks without a hot shower was enough, and hitched a ride into the little town of South Egremont. My guidebook listed an inn built in 1780 that had rooms for $75; the second - most I've paid for a hotel room in my life, I think. But given that even budget motels run about $65 in this area, I figured I'd give it a shot. As it turns out, it's a beautiful old place, fixed up pretty nice with a whirlpool bathtub in every room and a big-screen TV in the common area (which I have to myself since most of the other guests are out antiquing). The usual rate here for a weekday? $165. That's $90 "hiker discount." Not bad at all, especially considering it includes free all-you-can-eat continental breakfast. (Well, it didn't actually say "all-you-can-eat," but they didn't tell me to stop either...
Another thing I should mention - lately I've been running into people I haven't seen for ages. Just this morning I ran into someone who asked "how's the foot" - he hadn't seen me since the Shenandoah's, when I was limping along with a burned foot. Last week, a guy saw me and called me "Nosebleed," my original trail name - I hadn't seen him since early in North Carolina.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
July 24th - July 28th
Last full day in New Jersey featured, appropriately I guess, a mile-long boardwalk. It’s in a swampy area, and it was surprisingly gorgeous. I hit it on a sunny, warm-but-not-hot afternoon following a rainy morning. There were purple wildflowers in the high grasses, a breeze blowing over the meadows like wheat, cardinals building nests in the cattails. Building a boardwalk here was an enormous amount of work – thousands and thousands of volunteer hours over a period of years. I hope some of the volunteers got to come back on days like this.
A mile or so after the boardwalk, the trail cuts through a few fields before hitting a road just a few hundred yards away from a farmers’ market with fresh fruit and ice cream. From there, you can hitch 2 miles into Vernon, NJ, with a church hostel. Not a bad day at all . . . .
— The first few days in NY have been rock, rock, rock. It looks like it’s going to be this way more often than not from here on out. All of this area was covered in glaciers in the last ice age, and when they receded, they took all of the dirt with them, apparently. Went through something called “the Lemon Squeezer” – it’s a rock fissure that’s at most 3 feet wide. To get through you pretty much have to hold your pack over your head and try to get through it like that. Just beyond that is another ledge, about 6’ high, that requires you to throw your pack over and climb after. If this was my first day of the hike, I’m sure I’d find it all exciting; coming on trail day #135, some of the thrill is gone.
— Lots of rain the last few days. It’s been nice to have the temp kept down, but walking around wet isn’t much fun.
— Trail Magic has continued up north, despite the predictions and warnings we heard down south. Big thanks to Paddy-O, who parked his truck next to the trail and spend a day dispensing hot dogs, cookies, brownies, sodas, Gatorade, beer, moonshine and who knows what else.
— Spent this morning up on top of Bear Mountain, drying my gear out and singing Bob Dylan’s “Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre,” which has been in my head for 3 days now. It’s a great song; I think my favorite Dylan tune.
— A couple other important landmarks today: the oldest sections of trail, unchanged since the trail was started in 1923, as well as the lowest point on the trail, on the west end of the Bear Mountain Bridge (just 120 feet above sea level). The trail also goes through a crappy little zoo here – it’s kind of depressing after seeing bears in the wild, to see them penned up in a concrete enclosure.
— Dropping this in the mail from Fort Montgomery; with a little bit of luck, I can get resupplied and get over to a monastery on the east side tonight.
Last full day in New Jersey featured, appropriately I guess, a mile-long boardwalk. It’s in a swampy area, and it was surprisingly gorgeous. I hit it on a sunny, warm-but-not-hot afternoon following a rainy morning. There were purple wildflowers in the high grasses, a breeze blowing over the meadows like wheat, cardinals building nests in the cattails. Building a boardwalk here was an enormous amount of work – thousands and thousands of volunteer hours over a period of years. I hope some of the volunteers got to come back on days like this.
A mile or so after the boardwalk, the trail cuts through a few fields before hitting a road just a few hundred yards away from a farmers’ market with fresh fruit and ice cream. From there, you can hitch 2 miles into Vernon, NJ, with a church hostel. Not a bad day at all . . . .
— The first few days in NY have been rock, rock, rock. It looks like it’s going to be this way more often than not from here on out. All of this area was covered in glaciers in the last ice age, and when they receded, they took all of the dirt with them, apparently. Went through something called “the Lemon Squeezer” – it’s a rock fissure that’s at most 3 feet wide. To get through you pretty much have to hold your pack over your head and try to get through it like that. Just beyond that is another ledge, about 6’ high, that requires you to throw your pack over and climb after. If this was my first day of the hike, I’m sure I’d find it all exciting; coming on trail day #135, some of the thrill is gone.
— Lots of rain the last few days. It’s been nice to have the temp kept down, but walking around wet isn’t much fun.
— Trail Magic has continued up north, despite the predictions and warnings we heard down south. Big thanks to Paddy-O, who parked his truck next to the trail and spend a day dispensing hot dogs, cookies, brownies, sodas, Gatorade, beer, moonshine and who knows what else.
— Spent this morning up on top of Bear Mountain, drying my gear out and singing Bob Dylan’s “Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre,” which has been in my head for 3 days now. It’s a great song; I think my favorite Dylan tune.
— A couple other important landmarks today: the oldest sections of trail, unchanged since the trail was started in 1923, as well as the lowest point on the trail, on the west end of the Bear Mountain Bridge (just 120 feet above sea level). The trail also goes through a crappy little zoo here – it’s kind of depressing after seeing bears in the wild, to see them penned up in a concrete enclosure.
— Dropping this in the mail from Fort Montgomery; with a little bit of luck, I can get resupplied and get over to a monastery on the east side tonight.
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