Mmmm, Slurry!

So today is August 12. I woke up early this morning, around 5:20, at the Stony Brook shelter. It rained a fair amount overnight. So thanks, Vermont, for even more rain. Once again, I had to pack my tent away wet, but on a positive note, I seem to have hit on a breakfast combination that's really been working for me.

So I make sort of a slurry out of protein powder and Carnation Instant Breakfast, and then I add three packets of oatmeal and a handful of granola and let it sit for a little bit. And the reason I just let it sit, rather than actively cooking the oatmeal, is that I got rid of my stove when Jim was here. I’d had S. send some things for me to Jim’s house, and he brought that box with him, and then I used it to mail some stuff back.

I wanted to do that ahead of going into New Hampshire and Maine, because I want to try to keep my pack weight as low as possible. That means that right now, I’m doing what’s called “cold soaking” my food. Just as a sidebar about that — in the mornings, I let my oatmeal sit in my little slurry for a few minutes, and it softens it up just fine. It's fast and easy, and it actually tastes great. For dinners, I can soak Ramen for a while in cold water. Eventually, it softens up enough to eat, but it takes a while.

Lately, I’ve converted over to instant mashed potatoes because they don’t take as long. But anyway, back to breakfast. I ate my little slurry, packed up my wet tent, and was out on the trail a little bit before 7 o’clock. When my tent's not wet, it’s simple to pack up, but when it’s wet, I try to shake it out and wave it back and forth to get as much water off of it as possible, because I don't want to carry that extra weight around. But I don't know, maybe that's just an exercise in futility.

For whatever reason, I was hiking pretty quickly today, even though there were a lot of climbs and descents and everything. By noon, I had hiked 10.3 miles, so my goal of covering 10 miles by 12 noon was definitely achieved. I think that's the first time I’ve done that in Vermont. With the more mountainous terrain, I don't expect to be doing that very often. Nonetheless, it felt pretty good.

Not long after noon, I passed two older gentlemen — older than me, anyway — and struck up a conversation and found out that one of the guys is 70 years old. You'd never know it. He's finishing up his final section of the AT. He decided to try to hike the entire length of the AT over the span of a couple of years by doing large sections. His trail name is Craiger, like a rock craig. I'm not sure that works very well, but his wife said that he's a rockhead, so he was going for something more geologically sophisticated. His partner on this stretch was named Mr. Clean, because everyone remarks that he never looks dirty. And I can attest that Mr. Clean did not look like he had been hiking at all. I have no idea how that's possible, because I always look like a mess.

When I was planning out the next section of my hike back at the hotel, I wasn't expecting to do more than maybe 13 or 14 miles today. I'm not really sure why. When I looked at the terrain on the map, I thought it would be a little challenging and assumed I wouldn’t be able to cover as much ground, but I was actually making good time.

I saw Steady and Highlighter again early on, and then at one point, I bumped into an older hiker who was trying to find the people he’d come out day hiking with. I guess they’d kind of left him behind. So shame on those people.

I pulled up the Far Out app to help him navigate back to where he needed to be. He was heading southbound, though, and I was going northbound, so I didn’t see him again after that. Boy, I hope he was able to reconnect with his party.

Otherwise, I didn't really see that many people on the trail. The weather was nice for the most part. It did rain a couple of times, but just for a few minutes here and there. I was trying to make it to this campsite called Thistle Hill, which would have made for a 22-mile day. But time sort of started getting away from me, and the afternoon definitely had some difficult climbs.

I happened to bump into Paw of Ma and Pa Wampus, who I first met back in the Smokies in Tennessee. They have been staying at the Inn at the Long Trail, which is near Killington. And they’ve worked out quite a system for themselves.

Ma and Pa Wampus [Photo credit: Marc Serra]

So, they rented a car, and every day, they drive to one end of what would constitute a long day hike. One of them gets out there and starts hiking, while the other person drives to the other end of the long day hike, parks the car, and then starts doing the same hike from the opposite direction. So, midway through — or I guess, whenever they cross paths on the trail that day —  the person with the car keys gives them to the other, and they finish their hikes. And when the person with the car keys reaches the car, they drive over and pick up the other one, and they go back to the inn for the night.

They've been doing this for a couple of days now. So I tend to see whichever one of them is hiking south for the day. Today, I saw Paw, and he mentioned that he’d passed by the Thistle Hill shelter, and it was looking pretty darn crowded. So, I was at the top of a little lookout and checked Far Out, which noted that there was a tent spot not far from the lookout. At that point, I decided that I didn't feel like hiking the additional 2.5 miles to Thistle Hill, after all. I’d wanted to stay there in part because Thistle is our dog’s name, so I thought it would be nice to spend a night at a campsite with her name.

But between it starting to get late in the day, Paw letting me know that the campsite was pretty packed, and my being on top of a nice viewpoint, I opted to find the tent spot Far Out indicated instead. It was open when I got there, so I set myself up for the night.

It's sort of a mini Beauty Spot. [Wife note: Reminder, if you need one.] I got to eat dinner with a lovely view of the mountains. There was still a little bit of sunlight, so I tried to take advantage of it and dry out my tent as much as possible. By the time I’d finished dinner and brushed my teeth, I was able to put my tent up mostly dry, so that was nice.

But just as I was getting ready to step into my tent to change clothes, the skies just opened up, and it started raining again. So there went my dry tent. I hiked 19.5 miles today and climbed 5,400 feet in total. I think I did one 5,000-foot day in Virginia, so this was definitely the most climbing I've done in a single day so far.

Oh, two things I forgot to mention! One is that there was an aluminum ladder set up on the trail to help hikers get down a cliff. I've never seen that before. So that was interesting.

The second is that I came to a sort of makeshift memorial at a river crossing for a hiker from a previous year. I’m sure S. will be able to find the story online somewhere. That was definitely sad, but it was nice to see how his fellow hikers were keeping his memory alive and honoring him.  [Wife note: The hiker’s trail name was Steady Eddy, and he passed away in July 2023. He was 67 years old, and the belief is that he was attempting to cross a river that was dangerously high because of the flooding that had occurred in Vermont earlier in the month and got swept away and drowned.]

Oh, one other thing. On one of my final climbs, I noticed these long strings or something up in the tree branches, and at first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But upon further inspection, I determined that it was a series of tubes coming out of the different trees, and I think they’re probably tap lines for maple sap. So whenever the time comes to tap those trees, they’ll be used to collect the sap to make maple syrup. I thought that was pretty interesting. I didn't end up taking a picture of it, though, because it just looked like a bunch of strings up in the branches. [Wife note: I’m not even going to try to recreate that one.]