People call the Long Trail the MRR (mud, roots and rock) trail, and now I see why. I'm off early uphill over wet rocks, then the MRR becomes more undulating. It's foggy and quite claustrophobic up top; views are rare and the trail is narrow -- not much wider than my shoulders and certainly narrower than my bungee-bulging backpack. It starts raining pretty hard and I put on my rainbow of waterproofs. Up high, the trailsides are super-mossy. I have never seen so much moss packed in and swarming every available inch of ground. It's chilly and I'm working pretty hard but not breaking the 1 m.p.h. barrier, on average, today. I start making better time once I've decided to stop short at Skyline Lodge rather than pushing on further south.
The lodge thermometer reads in the upper 30s Fahrenheit when I roll up in the late afternoon (um, around 4 degrees Celsius, Euro-pals). There's a misty view across Skylight Pond, I have a little gaze and remember that this is where my hiking friends' friend fell and broke her upper arm a couple of days earlier. My upper arm is pretty high on my list of bones I hope never to break. I have a little skid on mud heading down to the pond for water, and cook up a really horrible peanut-butter-ramen sludge alone in the lodge. It's so gross, I pack more than half of it out as heavy trash. I have a little food-fantasy about an unlimited salad and chicken-wing bar, and try to get warm. Hopefully hanging up my soggies in the chill:
I'm making this day sound miserable; it wasn't, just kind of "routine", and cold and wet. Just after dark, a couple hiked in with headlights. It was an uncomfortably cold night. I'd packed a scarf in my sleeping bag for this second leg of the trip -- it was a lifesaver, allowing me to grab some little patches of just-warm-enough-to-sleep-a-bit.
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