Day 12: Appalachian Gap to Lincoln Peak

A few days at home -- laundry was done, non-Ramen food was eaten, bed was slept in. I did some grinding low-level freelance writing to pay for new boots, and opted for the Mammut Teton GTX lady-boots  that were clearanced at the OGE. They weren't the most comfy, but on the little paving-slab-crumbled fake hill they gripped the best. After my experiences on ole Mansfield, that was what I wanted. 

I wore my new boots to a house concert in Lincoln, where a small and sweet audience gathered to watch me hit flowerpots in the living-room. The phrase "avant-garde" was thrown around a fair bit. The next morning, climbing south away from the Appalachian Gap with a tight roll of banknotes from the house show in my pack, I felt like my own advance guard -- pushing south ready to make the new things I needed out of what I was carrying. 

The trail seems kinder here than in the north -- there's more moss and less jagged rock, and metal rungs are secured in the biggest boulders and cliffs. The rungs sing dull, stingy pitches when I thwack them with a metal hiking pole, a sullen, sturdy gamelan in each cliff face. This is how I steadily climb up to the ridgeline, where the trail flutters over a whole series of peaks before Mount Abraham. Chairlifts are a recurring theme today: 

I meet a group of lady hikers in nice, clean clothes. I take their photo and they are keen to reciprocate. 

Good posture and normal facial expression are mutually exclusive. 

The ladies are planning to camp overnight at a ski warming hut, then go home. The warming huts are not "official" LT shelters, but apparently it's OK for hikers to sleep in the open huts. I stop for lunch at Stark's Nest, a hut that Mike-with-the-dog  had recommended as one of the best sleeps on the trail. I'm planning to go further today, maybe on past Mount Abe, or maybe stop on one of the earlier peaks where the ladies said there was a warming hut. I think they said they were staying on Lincoln Peak.

C. Hump, I'll be coming back to climb ya. 

Mount Ellen has another chairlift:

I just basically piddle along up and over multiple peaks in the ridgeline. My new boots are rigid and the balls of my feet sting. My big toes are numb again, but I'll take that any day over the fractal blisters I  had on the Coast to Coast hike. 

I have my headlamp ready and a surfeit of spare AAA batteries, and I'm thinking I could hike over and down Mount Abe after dark if necessary. Last night, around the post-concert bonfire, a mightily-bearded gent was talking about night-kayaking alone on Lake Champlain, heading across to the New York side for dinner. In the dark, he fell out of the kayak and couldn't get back in. So he swam the kayak to a place on the shore that he'd once seen kids cliff-jumping -- he knew that meant there was a way to scramble out of the water at that point. Buoyed by this story, I wasn't so frightened of hiking in the dark as long it was dry. 

I get to Lincoln Peak just before sunset, and see a massive hare steering in and out of the trees. 

Towards NY.

Despite my massive and sturdy shadow in this photo, I was feeling pretty knackered by this point. I thought I'd just find the warming hut and camp with the ladies for tonight. Poking around the summit, I found a (locked) electrical works hut, an open pine-plank summit platform, the massive hare again, and a chairlift:

No warming hut. I walked a way down some ski trails, no luck. I realized that the warming hut I'd passed a couple of miles north of Lincoln Peak was probably the one the ladies were staying at. Oops. The wind was picking up, and I thought pitching the Megamid on the summit platform would likely make for a chilly night. 

So I did a sort of naughty thing -- I slept in the storage hut under the chairlift. I swept up some of the scattered trash, and moved the little mini-couch over to make a sleeping mat space on the floor between a hard wooden bench and the upended ski-rescue sled. 

Took some summit-sunset pictures that don't capture the blazing glory over the Adirondacks:

Through the window of the storage hut, a massive red full moon rose; at the end of the ski trail lights twinkled in the valley. 

This was perhaps the most solitary I've been on the trail. I was very grateful for the hut's four walls and closing door as the wind picked up and whipped the summit. I nestled down in my sleeping bag and my mittens, and slept until I was woken by the sound of a Massive Creature In The Hut. I'd heard creaturely rustlings outside at dusk, but this rustling and gnawing sound was loud and close. With my pulse up in the pop-punk BPM range  I shone my headlamp gingerly around the dark hut. Table, overflowing trash can, padlocked metal locker askew in the middle of the floor, "No Whining" sign, maps with four-digit codes for the top of each ski run, roll of industrial paper towels... no marauding creature. I laid back down, wide-eyed, until the rustling and gnawing started up again. By now I'd decided it was an evil rabid possum-raccoon-fighting porcupine, chewing through the hut with the express purpose of eating my face. I put my headlight back on. The gnawing didn't stop -- the creature was obviously getting bolder. Behind the locker, I saw the paper towels move. A tiny grey mouse was chewing up the paper to make a nest, and the movement of the stiff paper made the sound. The mouse and I stared each other down for a while, and I felt foolish for being terrified of a creature the size of my thumb. I was in the mouse's house, after all. I went back to sleep and the mouse went back to taking care of its business. In a way, I was glad not to be totally on my tod on top of an inky-dark mountain.