Incommunicado

I woke up this morning (August 1) in the bunkroom at Bascom Lodge, which is on the peak of Mount Greylock. One thing I didn't mention before is that there was just no place to dry anything. The hikers only have one dedicated room, and I couldn't go outside and hang anything, because it was still raining. When I got in yesterday, I just shoved all my wet stuff into a plastic bag, which then felt like it weighed about 10 pounds, because everything was completely saturated. My tent was still wet, too, which made today a heavy pack day.

On the plus side, yesterday was the first time I’d hiked most of the day in the rain, and I’ll give my Hyperlite backpack high marks. It's definitely waterproof and didn't soak up any water, so that was great. I was pretty happy about starting the day today with a dry backpack, even if practically everything in it was soaking wet. The downside to the Hyperlite, though, is that because it doesn't absorb any water, all of the sweat from my back just runs into my pants. So, you know, trade-offs, I guess.

When I got up, my bunkmates were all still sleeping. I’d actually wanted to get up even earlier, but I didn't want to be the guy waking everyone else up. I managed to sleep okay, though it was a little toasty in the room. It's funny, this morning, we were all complaining about having been warm all night, and then we looked at the windows and were like, Why on Earth didn't we open the windows? So, whoops.

Thankfully, it wasn't raining this morning, so for breakfast, I went outside and found the driest picnic table I could and ate there. I also filled up my water bottles from the spigot outside, which was a nice convenience.

All day today, I was just whipped. I guess not having dinner and drinking several high-octane beers last night didn't exactly help. But over the previous six days, I had hiked 97 miles, which for me is a lot. So I decided that tonight, I’d stop at a campsite that was only about 8 miles from the peak of Greylock.

That meant I had plenty of time, but I wanted to get to the campsite early enough to have a chance to dry out my clothes and my tent and get better organized. When I was getting ready to leave Greylock this morning, I just threw everything in my bag kind of haphazardly.

I was on the trail by about 8 o’clock, and it was still very, very cloudy up on the peak. So I unfortunately didn't get any views. Greylock is the highest point in Massachusetts, and there's this beautiful tower up on the peak, but this morning, the fog meant that there just wasn't much to look at.

I started heading down the mountain, and after about 6 miles, I entered the town of North Adams. It’s kind of funny when the trail goes through a town. A few days ago, I walked through Dalton. The day after that, I walked through Cheshire. And today, I walked through the town of North Adams.

By the time I got down to North Adams, the weather was pretty warm but with a decent breeze. And soon after I exited the trail, I saw a little stand with an awning, called the AT Message Center. The local residents put information and such there to help the hikers. There's some shuttle information and where different stores are and places to stay in North Adams. And there were also a couple of coolers. One had bottles of water. One had food. And one had some little resupply items. The whole setup is a really nice gesture by the people of North Adams.

I grabbed a bottle of water and walked over to a picnic table in the shade to relax for a little while and try to get my shirt and shorts to dry a bit, because they were, of course, all sweaty. The trail was pretty wet this morning, too, because of all the rain yesterday — all the vegetation was still wet. So between that and all the sweat, I was just sopping wet.

I spent a little time there, but eventually, I decided that I should get going again. I only had about 2 more miles to the campsite at that point. As I was walking through town, I crossed over Route 2, which is a big road that goes into Boston. If I’d gotten onto Route 2 and hung a right and kept walking, I'd have ended up in Boston, so that was kind of a funny thought. It brought up a lot of memories of when I used to live there.

 As I was leaving the town of North Adams, I had to literally walk up someone's driveway. That's where the trail went. And the kind person who lives there had left out a potable water hose with a sign letting hikers know they were welcome to use it to top up their water bottles if they needed to — which I did. That was really nice.

It was a decent climb out of North Adams — you know, you walk down into a place and then have to go uphill when you leave — and not too long after I’d left town, I crossed over the 1,600 mile marker. That was pretty nice. I've officially got just a shade under 600 miles left to go now.

I made it to the campsite pretty quickly, only to realize that I had no cell reception. There's sort of a cellular Dead Zone here. But I was like, That’s okay. I'll just communicate with S. via my Garmin device. But I forgot to turn it off last night, and when you're inside a pretty well-insulated building, like Bascom Lodge, the Garmin has trouble finding a signal, so it just keeps trying and trying, which drains the battery. I used my power bank to charge it up again, but then the Garmin wouldn't reconnect with my phone. It must have decoupled when it ran out of battery.

So I was trying to type a message to S. into this little device, using these tiny buttons to navigate to and pick out one letter at a time, and it just wasn't working. So I'll have to connect the device to my phone again tomorrow. That was frustrating.

I hung up all my clothes in hopes of drying everything out. After I did that, I just was so tired that I crawled into my tent and took a couple-hour nap, which I have literally never done on the trail before. Normally, I don't get to my campsite early enough. But after the nap, I felt pretty great, and my stuff was at least drier than it had been. I mean, nothing's bone dry, but it’s a definite improvement.

Now I'm about to make some dinner and hopefully get a good night's sleep. I've got a pretty healthy hike planned for tomorrow, and I'll be crossing over into Vermont.