Day 15: Skyline Lodge to Middlebury College

My eyes and nose were streaming all through the cold night -- I woke up to what I thought was the sound of someone pumping well-water outside. A heavy, rhythmic honking sound. 

"That might be a moose!" said the Vermont-dude half of the hiking couple on the lower bunk. The California-lady half and myself scrambled blearily after him down the rocks to the pond, rubbing our eyes in the misty dawn. Across the little pond, sure enough, a massive bull moose was trundling along and sending out a lonely, insistent bugle call. His dumpster-sized body looked so precarious on spindly legs, rising and falling like a rickety wooden rollercoaster as he picked his way along the rocky shore. The moose moved like a CGI dinosaur -- so ridiculously moose-y and outsized, it seemed like a sarcastically exaggerated dream. Yet totally real, magical and breathtaking. I didn't have a camera on me -- here's someone else's general moose picture: 

I'm going to boast that MY moose was larger.

The moose foghorned slowly off into the woods, looking like a tall ship with frayed beige antler-sails. I came across moose-tracks further down the trail, and was pretty grateful my moose encounter had been across a body of water and not face-to-face on the narrow, narrow LT.

Can you imagine meeting this on a 2ft-wide trail?

The first 45 minutes or so of this morning, and most mornings, I can't feel my feet. I pick my way over rocks slow and unsteady. The only way to warm up is to move -- things will be fine within the hour. I run into a gent from Minnesota on the lodge spur trail, and again at the next shelter where I'm stopping for a boring boring energy bar and some water. He was asking whether there was anywhere in Middlebury to buy down clothing against the cold. He also said, and I proudly quote: "You look like an experienced hiker". Maybe at this point the aura of hiking experience I was truly projecting was more olfactory than visual, but never mind. He talked about the Pacific Crest Trail (apparently, a whopping 6-10ft wide much of the way), and recommended the Continental Divide Trail for great mountain vistas without necessarily summitting each and every one. Especially in the North, the Long Trail is doggedly, um, "efficient" about not missing any of the area's best peaks, so the CDT sounds appealing to my grumbling quadriceps and my sit-n-slide torn waterproofs.

Minnesota and I overtook each other a few times in the next couple of miles, then he was away off ahead on the trail. I was glad of the solitude, as it allowed me to cut off some of my less comfortable clothing sub-layers with a knife and without witnesses. One of my more hearty and macho trail-moments.

The sun broke out a little as I came down into the Middlebury Gap. I was early for my pickup, so I went on to Lake Pleiad and cooked up some ramen and oatmeal and mint tea by the water. 

I waited scruffy in the layby, still layered in waterproofs against the chill. An elderly gent was maintaining the trail registers either side of the road, hiking steadily to each in crisp white running shoes. "Did I see you near Lincoln Peak a few days ago?" he asked me. I mumbled in the affirmative, worried that I'd been caught out on my sneaky storage-hut summit stealth-sleep. I hadn't -- he just wanted to check in that I was OK and had transport onwards. Looking at my pack, he cheerily observed: "I'm not worried -- you look like an experienced... person!"

And then I was zooming towards Middlebury in a low-slung Honda with a laundered and articulate student, and checking into the extremely sumptuous inn the college had booked for me. Last night I slept on a hard wooden platform with no pillow and a mouse. Tonight the plush white bed has no fewer than seven pillows for my delicate bonce. I bath, and put on the dress and ballet-shoes from my resupply box for the walk to the petrol station. I go to bed and funnel a chicken salad sandwich, apple juice, salt&vinegar crisps, and a plastic box of apple crisp/crumble into my face. It's good.