Day 13: Lincoln Peak to Cooley Glen

I was up and out of my sneaky storage-hut campsite bright and early, stepping outside into a world of windy fog. Mount Abraham has apparently some of the best panoramic views of the entire Long Trail. Not for me, today:

It's OK -- I can come back here another time. I started the descent, and the fog started breaking up into little whizzing clouds. I'm not exaggerating -- they were whipping across the new blue sky about 5ft above my head, as I inched carefully down over massive boulders. It was a bit dizzying to look at the clouds. So I looked at the trail and practiced "the old sit and slide" down the rocks (so said the hearty lady GMC caretakers heading north up the mountain). My pack is still reasonably heavy, and it's like extra gravity at my back. 

I stopped at the next GMC shelter for my Abe Kendal Mint Cake. The sugar had frozen into appropriate little cloud formations.

A couple of hikers from BTV offered me left-over hot choc and I plodded south happy with a warm sweet waterbottle and a belly full of KMC. Lots of dayhikers and dogs were out on the trail, including a barefoot hiker. My boots are still blocky and rigid and I'm having to remind myself that most of my favourite things were not immediately comfortable or amazing. 

I cross the Lincoln Gap in hot sunshine, and head on up to Sunset Ledge. People are sitting with sandwiches and dogs, soaking up the view. I sit on the rock, and a Pointer-Greyhound cross comes over to perch on my lap. I'm absurdly grateful for the quasi dog-hug as I chat to her owner. "Are you alone?" asks this grey-haired lady. "Good for you!" she cheers -- "I camp alone, too. I do what I want. I'm an American woman!" She thinks I'm Canadian. Ha. The dog snuggles to my side, probably hoping for snacks rather than camaraderie. I get going, bumbling off through the trees. "Sweetie!" yells the lady. "I think the trail's the other way -- where there's a white mark". She's right.

Now I'm in the Breadloaf Wilderness. The terrain isn't super tough, but the miles kind of stretch. I snack at the top of Mount Grant and quite quickly arrive at Cooley Glen shelter. It's around 4.30pm, and more than five miles to the next shelter. So I decide to stay put, staking out a corner of the open-face, ground-level lean-to. A couple of ladies show up, older than me. They have all kinds of cool gear solutions -- Urck bear-bags that are somehow impenetrable to bear teeth and claws, and  super-light dehydrated food (eg, hummus flakes). They're a couple of days into a sectional hike, after a false start when their hiking buddy fell and broke her upper arm coming back from the privy at Skylight Pond. Ouch. Apparently she was looking at the view rather than concentrating on her foothold.

"Have you read that book Wild by Cheryl Strayed?" asks one of the ladies. We mutually gush about how totallyACE the book, and Cheryl, are. "Why do you like doing this?" asks the other lady. It's a question I don't have a ready answer for, I'm still working out why I want to do this hike. At this point, though, I'm sure I do like the LT, and that it will somehow be mysteriously beneficial to me this year and beyond.

We line up our sleeping bags with toes to the woods, and wait for the predicted overnight storm. I'm woken up when a northbound hiker headlight-sweeps the shelter and decides to carry on in the rain. The ladies wake up when their corner of the shelter starts leaking.