Descent into the hiker area

Coffee was on the bar at 6:30 and breakfast bagels and watermelon served at 7. We decided to do a 16 mile slackpack today and for logistical reasons we are again walking northbound for a day – a bit weird for us but we were intrigued by the idea of possibly crossing paths with some southbounders!

We started hiking just after 8am and almost immediately saw a sign on the trail “big rattlesnake ahead” – we had been told that as we get further South there are rattlers, but we thought we were still too far north. On cue, there was a long shake sound that came out of the woods, tapering off at the end. We carried on and kept our eyes peeled, but ultimately decided that at least the sound we heard was just some kind of cricket (we think it sounded like a cicada but I don’t think those live here, we’ve both heard them only in South America). So, who knows about the rattler – we didn’t see one but we counted that as a good thing.

The going was a bit up and down but with only water and snacks on our backs we felt pretty light and fast. We considered stopping for lunch but only had 4 miles left to town so just pushed on and finished around 1:30pm. We did see a couple southbounders but they were kind of grumpy and not that excited to chat… Oh well. We also caught up with 2 northbounders and walked with them for a bit, a novelty for us to walk with anyone going the same way as we are. They were telling us about about a place down the trail in Pennsylvania called Duncannon – we’ve gotten mixed reviews so far. One guy said we shouldn’t go near it with a 39.5 foot pole – it’s very seedy and the bar
rents out rooms by the hour. Someone was grossed out enough by the hotel room they set up their whole tent inside the room to sleep. The woman we were going north with today scoffed at that advice, said she’d gone to the strippers in town with some other hikers and it was a lot of fun, good beer, and you can camp in the backyard of the strip club if needed. Duncannon…

We walked the 1/2 mile into Salisbury and picked up a “grinder” (1/2 for me, full for Ryley) – a huge sub from the deli with all the fixings. Ryley also got another pint of Ben and Jerry’s to take back to the hostel. We were picked up after 2 and had the afternoon at the hostel to chill out in the cool basement again, have a shower (2 days of consecutive showers!!), received snail mail from our friends Christy and Meghan from Victoria – they’d baked almond roca and chocolate cookies and sent them to us!, and ate more ice cream while waiting for dinner.

Big Lou makes a mean dinner!

Dinner at Bearded Woods was awesome again – BBQ salmon, herb potatoes, bean rice salad, rosemary bread and butter, and a glass of wine or beer on the house. Dessert was upside down ice cream cones. Yum!

DBB – Ryley – Long Trail Pale Ale (Vermont)
Megan – Glass of Cab Sauv with dinner – I know this isn’t beer, but I thought it was important to note that we are beer-ing well considering this is the first glass of wine either of us has had since hitting the trail! Judy & Jimmy – I apologize for the vagueness of this wine entry. I hope we’re still allowed to come visit you in Virginia…

B&J – Boom Chocolatta (R)

The view from Lions Head

We were woken up by an angry squirrel throwing acorns at our (very fragile) tent. We had to get going to get away, so we were hiking by 6:30am. I managed to sleep reasonably considering I had to wake up a few times for the mattress blow up.  Anyways, the hiking went very quickly and we were drinking Americanos and scarffing croissants by 8:30am in Salisbury. We followed that up with breakfast at a very fancy spot called Chaiwalla. We were way out of place, considering the two cars there when we arrived were a Tesla and a Porsche. Turns out they were the owners’ cars, but still… We were so dirty from 8 days of hiking, I was definitely feeling a bit sheepish, but they were very nice to us. The owner sent us off with a giant piece of poppy seed lemon cake, gratis.

Lots of hikers in town though, so we chatted with some of them to get info on what’s coming up. As soon as possible, we headed up to Bearded Woods Hostel, our home for the next two days.  The hostel is very clean and interesting, all kinds of intricate woodwork and decorated with deer and buffalo skulls (mk: besides all the skulls it reminds me of a swanky ski cottage in the basement – the woodworking is beautiful). The actual bunks are in the thankfully cool basement. We ate a wonderful dinner made by the owners and of course went to bed too late.

Mk: “wonderful dinner” deserves more detail – this is a food blog, after all! We had homemade burgers with all the fixings, green bean salad, corn on the cob, and dill cabbage coleslaw. For dessert – strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. There weren’t seconds of dessert but Ryley still volunteered to eat the leftover whip cream straight out of the bowl. I weighed myself (on a real balance weigh scale) – 132lbs before lunch and dinner, 136 afterwards… Success.

DBB
Berkshire Mountain Brewery Brown Ale, tallboy, shared, solar brewed and very tasty

Ben and Jerry’s blog
Coffee Toffee Crunch (coffee ice cream with skor pieces (Megan – and I put some of it back in the freezer for tomorrow! So much will power…)
Cheesecake Brownie – Ryley

Last night we were treated to much rain, and also my sleeping pad springing a slow leak. I had to blow it up every couple hours all night, resulting in little sleep. We did get moving pretty early, though, and the rain had stopped which always makes breaking camp better.

Our camp was up on a bit of a ridge, and we followed that out of camp, up in the clouds and passing what was likely nice views. Then we dropped down into the Housatonic River valley and had to cross to the other side, about 7 miles away. Unfortunately, the whole valley was rife with mosquitoes so we just flew across as fast as possible. Towards the end of the crossing, it started raining hard again which eased the bug problem 🙂

We climbed out of the valley finally via some pretty steep trail up another ridge. We followed that ridge for the rest of the day, going over 3 mountains and crossing into Connecticut. The clouds and rain cleared while we were doing this and we had some nice miles of ridge walk with views back across the valley. I was pretty tired but Megan pushed us 23 miles so we could have a short day tomorrow into Salisbury, CT, our next resupply.

We had dinner at a shelter and setup our tent, and then thunderstorms rolled in, catching Megan up at the shelter while I was in the tent. She ended up hanging out with the people there for an hour waiting for a break in the rain to zip over to the tent.

Mk: We did see Redfeather’s entry – she’d seen a Bobcat on the trail in May! Keeping my eyes peeled tomorrow…but not expecting a repeat.

Breakfast was wonderful, pancakes with blueberries and raspberries plus coffee is awesome, plus we had a lovely group to share it with. We met another fast, strong northbound woman, Junco, and another cool guy named Michelangelo. We also met a southbounder, Grace, first one in a while! She had gotten hurt early in her trip and ended up going slowly and skipping the Whites. She was pretty lonely, she said. We decided today that a good trail name for her would be Sadness, which only really makes sense if you’ve seen the movie Inside Out (new Pixar film we watched in Hanover, VT). We also decided it was a bit mean, so we didn’t actually try to give it to her.

After breakfast, we zipped off down the trail, mostly flat for the first 7 miles. We had been warned about a bees nest lurking under a boardwalk and when we got to it, a guy was standing there who had just been stung 5 times. It is in the middle of a bog, so you can’t really go around. Megan put on pants and her fleece, then we waited for them to calm down. After a bit Megan sprinted by, jumping the nest. I had to wait another few minutes, then did the same. No harm done but it was a ton of bees!

After that we had to tell everyone we met about the bees, so it was slow going the rest of the day.

We rolled into camp early and were given homemade brownies by a northbounder who had too much food. Tough problems.

Mk: Camp was next to an “ice gulch” – it was cool but a steep 0.3 mile down (and back up) to water – not what I was hoping for after a long day! I did find an entry by Redfeather in the log book from May. The log books at shelters are kind of neat because you can follow people’s entries as they hike ahead of you – however there aren’t many Southbounder’s ahead of us to follow, so most of the entries are from Northbounders we’ve crossed paths with but haven’t really met/don’t know. Redfeather had hiked in from Brassy Brook Shelter 23 miles South – a long day! And our goal for tomorrow, so maybe we’ll see another entry from her there.

We left Tom’s house mid-pack – there were 10+ tents in his back yard at the end of the day yesterday and about half were gone in the morning, while others were slower to get started or heading to grab breakfast in town. We were already on the south side of town so we decided to skip town breakfast today and hike out.

It was another day in mostly woods, relatively flat going. We stopped in after 9 miles to see the  “cookie lady” – famed for giving each thru-hiker 2 homemade cookies (ours were still slightly warm, yum!). She also sells Cokes, Klondike bars, frozen Snickers – we opted to have an early lunch instead of taking advantage of the goodies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ryley turn down a chance for a Coke – he drank 2 refills yesterday at lunch. He’s OK, though – we were both feeling the aftereffects of all the town food we ate yesterday and thought sticking with our trail food was a safer bet. We did advise a northbound not to order pizza from Dalton…

Usually you can pick your own blueberries and if you’re lucky the caretaker at the next campsite will make you pancakes with them, but the blueberries are still a bit scarce and you could buy a pint of raspberries for $5 without any of the work 🙂 I convinced Ryley we could get them 11 miles (without eating them!) to the cabin, so we bought a pint to go.

The 11 miles to Upper Goose Pond cabin were fairly uneventful – we did go over Walling Mountain but we didn’t really notice… We arrived and met the caretakers Paul and Wendy, and their daughter Katrina. The cabin is a 2-story building with a bunk room upstairs for 15 hikers to sleep, a big porch downstairs, a lake/pond to swim in, canoes you can take out on the lake, and spring water, PLUS we were indeed promised pancakes and coffee for breakfast! It’s free to stay here, which is pretty amazing. We got in around 5, had a swim and then chilled out with our feet up 🙂

Awesome after-dinner surprise: Paul walked out of the cabin with 2 plated desserts for us! He teaches a culinary arts baking class and we are benefitting. We got orange cake (complete with orange butter icing and candied orange garnish) and cranberry walnut tart with a dollop or whip cream. Very decadent considering we’re out in the woods, and delicious!!

Memorial on top of Mt Greylock

My uncle recently questioned whether this is a hiking blog or a food blog.  Today it’s definitely on the food side, since we passed through a lot of towns. First, we finished climbing Mt Greylock, and checked out the large, phallic War Memorial on top. Then, lacking other views due to fog, we repaired to the peak-top Bascom Lodge for a quick breakfast. Mostly for the coffee.

We then descended the mountain, which took hours, and rolled into Cheshire, a very small town that the trail goes right through. It was lunchtime… ish, so we dropped by a pub for a couple burgers and beers, including my first taste of the famed Yuengling Lager, which was delicious.

On the way out of town we stopped by the PO and picked up a lighter shirt for Megan and a lighter jacket for me, and sent off my full rain jacket to our trail angels, Jimmy and Judy.  Our packs are getting much lighter. We might not be, because we also stopped by the ice cream shop next door and walked out of town licking some cold cones 🙂

7 more miles of pretty gentle hills got us to Dalton, which we had to walk into on hot roads for 2 miles. Megan was hobbling by the time we got to a trail angel’s house on the other side of town, our stop for the night.  Tom, the owner popped us over to a grocery store to resupply for the next 4 days. Megan could still barely walk. We got back and ordered a pizza while we organized our resupply. By the time we finished pizza, a tall beer, and a few donuts (and a bit of fresh veggies Megan has picked up at the store), we waddled to bed. Megan was walking more easily already, hopefully tomorrow everything is fine.

DBB
Yuengling Brewery (Pottsfield, PA “America’s Oldest Brewery”, 1829) – Yuengling Lager
Berkshire Brewing Company (BBC,  South Deerfield, MA) – Steel Rail Ale
BBC Coffeehouse Porter

Today was much more exciting than yesterday! First we had some nasty, sweaty climbs around Bennington, VT.  We had heard the last few miles of Vermont were particularly muddy, and we were walking along laughing about how whiny northbounders were. Karma quickly struck, as Megan got her pole so stuck in the mud that it pulled apart, although she somewhat fixed it… We’ll see. Soon after, I crashed through a boardwalk, plunging up to my knee in a bog. Finally, I managed to get my other foot soaked in another mud puddle. So, by lunch we had eaten our words.

Trail angels

After lunch though, we crossed the Vermont – Massachusetts border, and quickly descended towards civilization. We crossed paths with a couple out trail running who were out looking for southbounders to feed. We quickly volunteered and met them at the bottom of the hill. Phillip had hiked the AT in 2013 and with the help of his girlfriend, Isabel, fed us sodas, chips, pulled chicken sandwiches, and home made chocolate chip cookies. It was amazing.  They had to leave at 5, so we headed up Mt Greylock, the highest point in Mass. Halfway up, we ran out of chicken-power, and having hiked 23ish miles, we happily camped.

Green Mountain Hostel

A lazy morning, we made blueberry pancakes and coffee and chilled out until 11. Then we got a ride into town from Jeff, the owner of the hostel, and grabbed lunch to go.  We intended to walk out of town, and hitch to the trail, but we figured we’d first walk to a Ben and Jerry’s outlet, trying to hitch on the way, and let fate decide whether we hiked or had ice cream. Jeff saw us walking and very kindly picked us up and drove us the 5 miles to the trailhead.

So, we headed off into the muggy forest, ice-cream-less but happy for the ride. The plan was a 10 mile hike, but we got that done by 4, so decided to press on over Mt Stratton, which was a smooth climb and had a nice fire tower at the top to give us a breezy view of the area.  We ended up another few miles down the other side by a road with 3 northbounders for company.