Leisurely morning by the leisurely river. Army men glued everywhere around shelter. Mouse turd in shoe, but hanging food is untouched :) 3.5 miles to first A.T. shelter in '100 Mile Wilderness.' After yesterday's 10.5 mile rush, our "easy day" still feels hard. We arrive at Hurd Brook Lean-to at 2:30pm. It's a mosquito paradise and we briefly consider moving on... until were done with lunch... and stand up. We set up our tent and spend the rest of the afternoon hiding in said tent. Writing, talking.
Gather our courage at about 5:30 (lathering up with natural bug repellant, cursing ourselves for not buying Deet at the convenience store before the hundred miles) & head out to cook dinner. As we're standing there, eating lentils and rice to the steady rhythm of mosquito slaps we hear a crack, a groan, and a sixty or seventy foot tree falls in the direction of our tent. I only have time to wonder what I'll do if my tent is crushed before the tree lands, some three feet from the oh-so-delicate nylon and bug-netting that is our home for 6 months. The tree breaks into 15 foot sections on impact and a 'splinter' the size of my arm actually bounces into the tent. This is one of the rare moments in life that Lysandra is as speechless as I am, and we just stand there looking from each other, to the tent, and back again.
Slowly, we finish spooning dinner into our still-agape mouths before hanging my sardine-scented pack from a nail in the lean-to. We've been warned many times about the rampant mice at shelters.
About 9:00pm Lyss hears people at the shelter and wakes me up. We still haven't learned to trust our stuff around random hikers -- horror stories of stolen packs & ruined trips echo in our memories. The realities that no one walks miles into the woods to steal, or that no hiker wants any more weight to carry don't dawn on me in my groggy state & I head out into mosquito-ville to say hello and assess the risk. What I find are two men: smelly, shaggy, shockingly thin, but otherwise featureless behind the glare of red headlamps. This, I will later learn, is the typical northbounder with almost 2000 consecutive miles on the legs. They tell me that today will be a 40 mile day for them after they continue on to the site where we stayed last night. They've just stopped in to jot a quick something in the A.T. register: a notebook that's in most shelters; used mostly to communicate between friendly hikers who've been separated along the way. I joke about the length of their hike and mention how sore I am already after yesterday's 10 miler; they assure me I'll have my trail legs after "700 miles or so."
On this discouraging note I head back to the tent, fully awake now, and try to get back to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment