Hitting the Hiker Lottery
Today is Wednesday, August 7, and I spent last night at the Spruce Peak shelter. I wanted to start my day a little bit earlier than I did, but when you’re staying in a cabin with other people, you kind of have to navigate around anyone who’s still sleeping. And I didn't really want to wake up Meow Mix and Paladin. It rained really hard last night, and the cabin had a metal roof, so it was kind of like trying to sleep under a drum kit for most of the night. I didn't end up getting much rest, so I was starting out pretty tired.
But I got up, ate some breakfast, and hit the trail probably at about 7:30, or a little later. I headed down the mountain, crossed a road, and then started making my way up Bromley Peak, which was a pretty good climb. About halfway up, I was suddenly passed by a group of young people — probably in their early teens — who were just basically running up the trail with a couple of supervisors in tow. I kind of jumped out of their way and then got back on the trail and continued on. But then another wave came running up behind me, so I had to get out of the way again.
Once they passed, I got back on the trail just in time for a third wave of kids to come charging up the hill past me. So I pulled over to the side again to let them go by. And as I’m standing there, watching these teenagers swarm past me, I couldn't believe my eyes. One of my classmates from business school named Steve Bruner was passing by with all the kids!
So I yelled out, “Steve!” and he stopped and just looked at me funny, because he didn’t recognize me right away. We hadn't seen each other for a good 20 years, and I used to have red hair and no beard, and now I've got this white beard, and I don't even know what color my hair is anymore. Some weird yellowy color. But anyway, I had to jog his memory and remind him who I was, and then the lightbulb went on, and he was like, “Oh my gosh!”
How random is that? He sent the teens on up to the peak, and we talked for a few minutes. It turns out the kids are all from the Stratton Mountain School, and they were out doing some training for cross-country.
We then hiked the rest of the way up together. Steve is an incredibly athletic person. Granted, he didn’t have a pack on, and even though I’m generally a less athletic person than he is, I've been hiking for several months now, so I’ve developed some level of conditioning, but man, I was glad that Steve was doing all the talking, because it was taking everything I had just to keep up with him! He was just charging up the mountain.
We got up to the peak, and Steve and I caught up for a little while. It turns out that he was living in Montana with his family, and his wife got a job as a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, which brought them back to the New England area. Now they kind of split their time between southern Vermont and Amherst, Massachusetts. And that's why Steve was here. He works coaching various cross-country teams. He obviously had other things to do, so we took a quick selfie and exchanged numbers, and he went on his way. That was really crazy.
After that, I crossed paths with a guy who was finishing up his hike in Vermont. He’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail last year, and they’d actually closed portions of Vermont, because there was so much rain. So this hiker, who’s name is Pale Rider, was finishing up the miles he’d had to miss in Vermont.
And then I met another thru-hiker named The Bear, and apparently, he's just a serial thru-hiker. He's got tags from multiple years on his backpack, and he's kind of a curious fellow in that he doesn't look like a hiker. He kind of looks like he should be an extra in a Martin Scorsese mobster movie, and he talks like it, too. But The Bear was shoving his phone in my face, showing me all sorts of videos about the inclement weather he had to tackle last year. And then he pulled up the forecast and realized that Vermont was about ready to get hit with the remnants of Debbie. So he was cautioning me to consider getting off trail for a bit, not just because the trail might be really wet or there could be downed trees, but because it can get so boggy in Vermont sometimes that it makes the trail impassable and can literally trap people in certain sections. So he advised me to kind of pause my hike until the storm had passed. I actually already had plans to spend a night or two off trail soon, because I have another friend coming to visit, but I appreciated his recommendation and will consider adding a day if it looks like I might need to.
After I’d spent a little while on the peak of Bromley, it was definitely time for me to get moving. And the trail was so muddy. About an hour later, I ran across a couple of older ladies who were doing a section hike, and we talked about the weather, of course. One of them asked, “Where the heck is all this rain going to go?” because the trail was already fully saturated.
A little further down the trail, I came to a beaver pond, where beavers had dammed things up, and there was a long boardwalk going past the pond. In some places, the edge of the pond was either equal to the level of the boardwalk or slightly above it. So, you know, another couple inches of rain, and I think that part of the trail is going to be submerged. I tried to take a picture of the boardwalk next to the pond to show how high the water was, but I'm not sure if it translates or not.
After the long boardwalk, I came to a road crossing and decided to stop there to have some lunch. Before long, Pale Rider pulled up and joined me. Some people were getting dropped off to go on a day hike and asked us whether we’d like any fruit or brownies. Of course, I said yes. So one of them handed me this rather large container of beautiful blueberries and a bag of what this nice lady called kitchen sink brownies. They were more like blondies, but they had nuts and dried fruit and butterscotch chips and caramels and a whole bunch of other stuff thrown in, too. They were fantastic, and I absorbed a couple of those along with the big thing of blueberries.
I had originally been planning on hiking about 17.5 miles to the Lost Pond campsite, but when I got there, it was already full. I also had no cell signal there, and I couldn't get my Garmin to send a message, either, which was very frustrating. I hadn’t expected that, so I hadn't alerted S. that I might be out of touch, and I didn’t want to leave her hanging and make her worry. So I checked the map and saw that there was another campsite about a mile and a half away, and I decided to continue on to that one.
By the time I got down to that campsite, I was 19 miles into the day, and I hit the same situation. No cell signal, and my Garmin wouldn’t send a message, either. So I looked on the Far Out app and saw that the forest service road, which was another mile and a half down the trail, supposedly had Verizon reception, and I could set up my tent in the trailhead parking area. There was also a privy there and a stream so I could get water easily. So I was like, All right, fine. I’ll keep going. It was starting to get kind of late, and the sun was setting, so I just got hustling.
The trail went parallel to the forest service road, and it was getting pretty dark in the woods, so I bushwhacked my way over to the forest service road so I could hike on it instead of the trail. As I approached where the trail crosses over the forest service road, I saw a pickup truck with an awning off of the back of it, and I could smell someone cooking hamburgers.
And at this point, you know, I’ve done close to 21 miles of hiking, it's late, I hadn't eaten for probably eight hours, and I am absolutely starving. I just assumed that the person grilling was doing some car camping, but it turned out to be Trail Magic!
As I passed by the truck, I said hello, and this guy just looks at me and says, “Hey, you want a hamburger?” And that was like saying, Hey, do you want a million dollars? So I said, “Yes, please!” and immediately dropped my backpack. He gave me a hamburger, and I think I ate it in about one bite.
The guy’s name is Sir Stops a Lot, and he comes to this location every year to meet up with his friend who lives in Bennington, and they do Trail Magic over the course of two days. So they'll do it all day one day, and then car camp for the night, and then do Trail Magic all day the next day. And when I showed up, they’d actually been cooking themselves dinner, because they didn't think any more hikers would be coming through. But after I dusted the hamburger, Sit Stops a Lot said, “Do you want a quesadilla? I’ve got one left.” That's what they’d been serving the hikers for lunch.
So I ate one of those, too, and drank some soda and talked with Sir Stops a Lot and his buddy from Bennington and really enjoyed their company. And then he was like, “Why don't you just set up your tent right here?”
I happily set up camp next to their cars, and he said, “When you get up tomorrow, I'll have some breakfast for you, too.” So, in the end, not only did I finish the day with a cell signal to call S., a privy, and a water source, but I also got a ton of delicious food from some really great guys.
So geez, what a day. I certainly had no idea this morning that today would be one of the more interesting and rewarding days of my hike so far, but it really did turn out to be pretty magical. I know they can’t all be like that, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was just a wonderful, wonderful day.
