More pictures

Flex taking a photo of some random rock art on top of a mountain.

Wimbeldon and Smile Train sitting down to breakfast

Why are they here?

We had a mountain house for a few nights, and we ate well.


Why they call me Possum.

Self-portrait

As my camera stopped working somewhere before the Whites, I'm relying on the guys I was hiking with for pictures of the last month. Hopefully I'll have some to share in the near future.

Pictures

Exploring alternate routes in Kent, CT

Crossing the Hudson

Can you guess what song we were singing all day?

Somewhere in New Jersey

View of the Delaware River

Bushwhacking off the trail to find a party on the 4th of July

Trail Angel Mary's shuttle service

Downtime during a hiker parade.


Wheeler and Winston

Up, Over, and Onward

Well, I summited Katahdin on the 24th with my friends Smile Train, Wimbeldon, and Flex. Trail Over. All of us but Smile are happy to be done and headed home. It's been a long trip. It's been one of the best things I've ever done. And I don't know where to start fleshing those last few sentences out, but I'll make some attempt in the week or so to come.

Flex's mom picked us up on the other side of the mountain and took us to a friend's lake house for a few days where we got to relax, swim, and sail around a bit. Right now, I'm writing from Flex's home in Warminster, PA where we are hanging out before parting ways.

More later (with pictures),
-John

Gorham, New Hampshire

You have to pay for internet time in NH, so I'll be brief. We've made it through most of the White Mountains, which were gorgeous, but my camera got wet several days ago. I'll be relying on photos from the guys I'm traveling with. One of them is Flex, who updates a blog at trailjournals.com (search for "flex").

No more easy miles from here out, but the views are great, and the company is good. Wish I had more time to expound.

I'm in Hannover, on the Dartmouth campus, and I might never leave. I miss college? The miles have been going quickly the past bit, but we're about to hit the Whites, and they will slow us down. The terrain has been getting rougher for the past few days and doing 20 miles a day is much harder than it was a little while ago. The spirits are doing well though.

And I think I'm too tired to say much else right now.

The Birdcage

So, I'm in Dalton, Massachussetts right now; the states have been flying by. Walked thirty-four (34) miles yesterday and am taking a break at the Birdcage. A man from Dalton, Ron, started taking in hikers five or six years ago, and he has basically turned his home into a hiker retreat. Free stay, he'll offer to slack pack people, and he often buys the beer. Really great guy, and he gets as much from it as we do (so says he), so it all works out great. Only skeezy thing about it is that he doesn't advertise, so hikers spread news about it by word of mouth. When we were approaching Dalton, we were told to "Go to the Shell station and ask for Ron." I proposed that a couple of us rub some powdered milk in our mustaches and act all whacked out, "Hey, I need to speak to Rob, man." Anyways.

So I've been hiking with three other guys for the past week or so, and we've been making good miles and having a good time. This section of the hike is sometimes referred to as the "deli-to-deli section" as you hit town at least once every day. So, there has been much gorging and much beer and still lots of hiking. The AT is not a wilderness experience. But it is an adventure.

Several nights ago, we slept on the porch of a garden center. Then, in Kent, we met a guy about our age in a supermarket who offered to let us stay at his dad's place. He showed us around his place, showed us his woodworking projects, made us a big pot of pasta, and let us burn a bunch of scrap wood for a campfire. By the way, this is not a good trail for recovering alcoholics. Next day we woke up late and decided to hike up the road instead of hitching back to the trail where we left it. Found out the railroad tracks paralleled the road, so we walked those until a guy drove up and threatened legal action unless we bushwhacked our way back to the road immediately. Then hiked along the road to a deli, split a half gallon of ice cream and then walked up mountains for a while. That night, we were along a road and a couple offered to go get pizza for us, so we sat, listened to the Postal Service and Arcade Fire, ate pizza, and hung out for a while. There was more, but memory fades. I need to get better at journaling more often.

The terrain further north is getting much better...in the sense of more interesting, challenging, fun to hike. Big mountains are coming up, and everyone is getting excited for it. There are only (?) 600 miles left, so things are winding down. At times, I wish there were fewer, as I'm somewhat ready to go home, see old friends, fall into the old routine, to really rest for a while, but I have a feeling I might have gotten a bug that will be hard to cure. Watching TV is a really weird experience for us thru-hikers; I feel even more estranged from the target audience that is our society than before. Time will tell, as they say.

Also, the guys I am hiking with have taken to calling me "Possum" as, apparently, I am disgusting and somewhate rodent-like?

Anyways, as Bertie Wooster might say, Tinkerty-tonk!

Hoowwwdeee from Palmerston, PA

Well, I've crossed the Mason-Dixon line a little over a week ago, and I haven't had sweet tea in that same time. Nor a shower. Nor have I updated the blog in a while. Well, we all do without.

I'm sitting here in the library in Palmerston, PA...the PERFECT hiker town. Absolutely wonderful. It's a nice quiet town without much traffic and just one main strip with all the shops, so everything is walkable. The town center lets hikers stay and shower for free!! Well, I guess you can tell that I'm excited to be here. I've been in a funk for the past few days. I think the excitement of crossing the halfway point has worn into the realization...dear god, I've got a thousand more miles to hike. Am trying to push on. Soon enough, I'll hit the point where sheer stubborness will win through. But, as always, it's not all bad. I picked up a free book here at the library...A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek by Annie Dillard. I happened to cross over Tinker's Creek a few hundred miles ago, so it will be interesting reading about it, plus she's a pretty good writer. Also, Sarah Marcum, if you happen to read this, she mentions a book that I thought you would like, "Space and Sight" by Marius von Senden who describes the experiences of people who gained sight after cataract surgery became a possibility. I think an obscure book, but it looks fascinating.

Right, so, I have 60 days left to hike if I am going to get done by the first of September and 940ish miles to go. That's about 16 miles a day without taking any days off. Hopefully, I'll average about 20 miles a day and earn a day off every four days. That, I think, will be key to keeping the spirits up. I'm going to try not to do the math very often, though and just run with it, take it as it comes, else It'll dominate my hike, my mood, etc.

A brief recap? Why not...

So, since I last wrote, I've gotten in to DC. I pushed rather hard to get there and get there before the 10:30 train left, and I had a mini breakdown as I was night hiking to Harper's Ferry. It was about eleven, and I thought I'd been making good time and passed Crescent Rock early on, only to discover that, about an hour later, I was just then passing Crescent Rock, and I still had 17 miles to go to town. Not only that, I had left one of the neatest hostels on the trail, stocked with a couple of friends, to get into town. Well, already sleep deprived, I was about to give up, and I lay down for a nap. But woke up two hours later and decided to give it another go and get seven miles out of the way. I ended up getting about 11 miles from H. Ferry before passing out again for another three hours, then making a death march into town from 6-9:30 that morning. About the hardest thing I've ever done. And the train was late by like an hour and a half. Bah.

But getting in to DC was great, as was seeing Andres and Veronica, who were both gracious hosts. I only wish I had come on a weekend. Besides the city, it was neat to see their relationship...it's really the first functional, adult relationship I've gotten to see among my friends (I sure hope I'm not unintentionally offending anyone with that remark). Anyway, they are both looking after each other, struggling a little with life after school, maybe, but building a life for themselves in the city. Neat.

Alright, so my manic writing mood/muse has departed, so I'm going to fill in a bit more later. After some food. Lots of food.