Burger Manifestation
Okay. I started out today (September 17) at the Antlers campsite. And it’s just a beautiful place, right on a peninsula on a lake. We enjoyed a gorgeous sunrise while we ate breakfast and packed up camp, and we were back on the trail by about 7 o’clock. We would have gotten out earlier, but we were all pretty caught up in watching that sunrise.
Not long after we started hiking, we came up on a lovely view of Katahdin over the lake. It was just spectacular. And it was especially cool to be able to see it from kind of the base, because it stood out so clearly against the sky.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we had about 22 miles to hike today, and I was definitely a bit worried about that, but we seemed to be making good time. And while we were going along, Carolina Sunshine and Salamander and I were all sort of trying to manifest a cheeseburger. Calorie deficits are a real thing these days, and you find yourself thinking about quote-unquote real food quite a lot.
And then, about halfway through the day, we ran into a couple of people who had hiked the trail last year and were doing Trail Magic — and they were making cheeseburgers. [Wife note: The trail provides!] That really saved the day. We all wolfed down cheeseburgers and candy and chips, and I had a beer and a soda, and it was just very, very helpful to get all those calories in, so we could get through the second half of the day.
And something I hadn't realized before we set out was that we had one last hill to climb. People were being pretty grumpy about it in the comments on the Far Out app, but we just kind of knuckled down, got up it, and were rewarded with another incredible view of Katahdin. We soaked that in a bit, but then we really needed to hustle so we could make it to the Rainbow Ledges campsite before it got too late.
Eventually, we had all had to put on our headlamps to see the trail while we were hiking, and by the time we got to the campsite, it was pitch black. We quickly set up out tents and ate dinner, and afterward, Carolina Sunshine went to soak her feet in the water. She had the red light of her headlamp turned on [Wife note: I learned that around camp, hikers tend to use the red light setting so they can still see without constantly blinding everyone around them.], and apparently, crawdads can’t see the red light, so they don’t run away from it. So, Carolina Sunshine was entertaining us by narrating fights between the crawdads in the creek, which was pretty funny.
Tomorrow will be our last day in the 100 Mile Wilderness. We need to cover about 15 miles, which will get us to the Abol Bridge Campground and Store, which has beer and soda and ice cream and all those things that are good motivators.
