"Why do you carry so much water?" asked the other hikers as I iodine-d up my three litres in the morning. I didn't have a ready answer. It's a valid question. I'm very scared of running out of water, but it's a fair point that I'm carrying excess backup, and effectively/inefficiently carrying all the water to the next water source, where I drink some of my stash and then refill. On an uphill this morning I daringly pour out some excess so I'm only carrying two litres -- the water sources in this part of the trail are not that far apart. A couple of days on, and I'll be even more sensible and balanced, with my regular water bottle of just under a litre and the Prudent Reserve on my back probably only half a litre. I don't run out of water and I don't get thirsty -- I can make it between watering-holes. I'd been carrying way too much safety-net because of anxiety and a lack of confidence that I could reach the next well or spring before running dry. Here's an obvious life-metaphor, folks.
the trail looks like a marimba! At least to me.
The moon was still up while I was filling my water bottle at the first spring.
Cooper Lodge is creepy and trashed and more than a little reminiscent of the flats in Trainspotting...
I was going to leave my pack at the lodge while I climbed the side-spur trail to Killington Peak, but I didn't want to leave my companion in Trainspotting land. So I hauled it up the boulders to the top:
Breakfast of champions. A hiking guide gave me two VT apples. Well fed today.
baby chipmunk!
Someone had signed the trail where it wasn't clear. Using apples. Ah, Vermont.
Gov. Clement Shelter -- one of the oldest on the trail, but a Notorious Party Spot for locals -- GMC lit advises hikers not to sleep there. I sit in the sun and eat some jerky instead.
It used to be fields; now all around the shelter is thick forest. It's true -- reforestation does work.
I start seeing juicy massive pinecones. A change from bouldery landscapes. Old dry-stone walls show that this area was inhabited not so long ago.
A bridge is out since Irene, so I dutifully do the road-walk detour (later finding out that the river's fordable and the LT is totally passable).
It's clear how much this area suffered with Irene, though -- lots of trees are down and the landscape's still jumbled up and scarred.
It looks like a wild marimba to my wilderness-addled brain.
A tiny red squirrel is chowing down on a massive pinecone. It's pissed off when I try to video.
extra jovial because a black cat literally crossed my path here.
The last couple of miles to a shelter are always kind of stretchy and tedious. There are a few more annoying and boring peaks and dips between this road and the Clarendon Shelter. It's getting dark and I get a move on with stinging soles. I get to the shelter -- unusually, in a clearing with flower-baskets and a family camping -- just as the last light is squeezing out of the sky.
Oh hey, I hiked more than 14 miles today. Perhaps closer to 15 with the road detour. Boom!
The weird contrast between trail and town continues when my funcy breakfast frittata is served on a plate with a single beautiful orange flower. Makes a change from silvery ramen "flavour" packets and setting fire to oatmeal packets. I check out, and wait for my ride to the college wearing both my concert dress and my backpack and getting a few strange looks.
The college has a 4.3 Adams -- I'm thirsty to play marimba, so of course that becomes central in my presentation for the composition students and then my solo concert in the gorgeous recital hall. I talk about intersecting spectra of articulation, pitch and un-pitch, big and small, and composerly control or chance. I play the James Tenney on suspended cymbal and then as a pitchy-to-chordally improvised marimba solo to close out the concert.
Then it becomes a mad rush to re-pack, change and catch the taxi that's arriving in... 10 minutes. I fling clothes and mallets into a box the college admin will kindly mail ahead for me; I encase myself in summery spandex and discard the food I can't fit in my dry-bags. Strap a banana and the salad-remains of lunch onto the pack and I'm out.
The taxi driver is lovely -- chatty, interesting and kindly. It's a gorgeous clear sunny day heading south (I'm skipping Route 125 to Route 4 -- some to do later and some I've already day-hiked with my sis). The taxi driver talks about his idea of there being two Falls and two Springs in Vermont each year -- there's this glorious bright Fall, then the miserable grey Fall sliding down into winter. He says he loves "a good old-fashioned winter" and he loves Fall mostly because it means winter is coming.
The driver flat-out refuses a tip, and I'm at the trailhead doing the usual messing around with clothing layers, bug repellent, blah blah. Put away the mobile phone, get out the map and the iodine pills, encase everything in plastic just in case. A dude about my age comes over to check in and ask about my hike. He's done the LT in the past, and I can tell he's looking for a kind of hiker-solidarity-fix, in the way I doubtless will after the trail is done. "Are you light on water?" he asks. In fact, I'm very nearly out. He grabs a litre of clear, un-iodiney water from the console of his car, and pours it into my Sierra Mist bottle. Only later do I realise that (very uncharacteristically -- the topic of solo-hiking and trust, um, "issues" will be its own blog post) I hadn't thought twice about accepting unlabelled drink from a stranger.
Characteristically, I had trouble finding the right trail out of the lot. I bumbled to a river and back on an unblazed trail before finding the proper way:
It was a good day to be outside -- I didn't reckon it was going to rain, so I furled my waterproofs optimistically.
GMC "Long Trail" imprint
United States Forestry Service
I climbed up to some views. Ate the rest of my salad. Felt content and energized for being not only on the LT, but also on the magical Appalachian Trail that goes on south to Georgia (the state, not Georgia VT).
I was undecided whether to sleep at Cooper Lodge (the LT's highest shelter, just shy of Killington Peak) or go half a mile off the trail to Pico Camp. Because it was not warm, I opted for Pico's lower elevation (when I saw the pretty trashed Cooper Lodge the next morning, I would be glad of this decision). Before the turnoff for Pico there was a kind of interesting landscape of old blown-down trees and abandoned side trails (one, because the 1938 hurricane brought down too many trees to bother clearing the trail). At "Jungle Junction" I turned off for Pico.
Pico was a sort of dark Wendy-house style camp, unusually complete with glass windows. I got in just before dusk, and started the pre-emptive Let's Make This Normal And Not Awks conversation with the older guy in his sleeping bag on the top bunk. He misheard my "I'm Jane" introduction as "I'm gay!", which threw the not-awks effort off track a bit for a little while [only because that would be a weird opening gambit]. He also didn't sit up or show his face at all -- he was "holed up" trying to recover sufficiently from an ankle injury that he could hike out in a few days. Something about the dynamic, and the gloom of the camp itself, made me think I would have bogged off to camp elsewhere if it hadn't been for the third hiker whose gear was already arrayed on the other top bunk. This guy -- an engineer, which seems a pretty popular vocation among LT hikers -- appeared from a spur trail after watching the sunset, and helped establish a Normal And Not Awks dynamic. He asked about my favourite drummers and I cited Jimmy Chamberlin and Janet Weiss most immediately and enduringly. It was pretty cold again -- I scrawled in my trail journal with my breath making visible clouds under my headlight.
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.
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.
