Mushroom Photographer

It’s July 23rd today, and my friend Jon and I are at the Pine Swamp Brook shelter. We covered about 10 miles today, and they were fairly challenging miles.

We spent last night at the Stuart Hollow Brook shelter, and it rained quite a bit overnight. When we got up, everything was sopping wet, the air was very humid — I think it was at least 94% humidity — and it was still raining. We didn't get out of camp very early, because we were waiting a while in hopes that the rain would stop. We ate breakfast in our tents and then decided to just pack everything up anyway and get on the trail. Unfortunately, as you can probably expect, whenever you pack your stuff up while it’s wet, your backpack feels like it weighs a million pounds more than usual.

The good news, though, was that the first couple miles of the day were quite flat, and once the rain stopped, other than it being incredibly humid, the weather seemed to be largely cooperating. So we had that going for us. We eventually finished with the nice, flat area and headed back into the hills, and after that, it didn't take long for Jon and I to be completely sweaty from head to toe.

But Jon found a way to make what maybe wasn’t the most pleasant hiking day a lot more interesting. As I’ve said, he lives in Idaho and isn't used to this kind of wet climate. And he was intrigued by the wide variety of mushrooms that thrive in it. So he decided that he was going to photograph every single kind of mushroom he saw along the way. That technically slowed us down a bit, but it was a very welcome distraction from the humidity and the rocks.

After Jon had taken probably a good 20 mushroom pictures, his phone got wet and developed kind of a mind of its own. While it was in his pocket, it kept trying to log in, which eventually locked him out completely. So then I took over as the mushroom photographer.

Probably about halfway through the day, we hiked down to a large stream. There were some signs warning us that the water might be a little bit too high to cross — or that we’d probably get our feet wet, at least. There was a road walk suggested as a way to get around the stream, but we went down to check it out for ourselves first. The two of us put our heads together and picked a route across the stream using some rocks and downed trees, and we managed to get across without getting our feet wet, which was great.

We had a nice steep climb after that, but then we came across the dregs of some Trail Magic. A hiker named Broccoli was getting picked up by her mom, and her mom had brought some things to give out while she was waiting. By the time Jon and I got there, though, the only thing she had left was a packet of Oreos. So we ate a few of those, thanked Broccoli's mom, and moved on.

Before long, we started discussing how much we regretted having eaten those Oreos. It was basically the only thing either one of us could taste, and it was making our mouths pasty. I guess eating Oreos when you're hot and sweaty and have a very steep climb ahead of you isn't necessarily the best idea.

Luckily, a little further on, we came across a stretch of literally miles of blueberry bushes. So Jon and I were grazing on all the blueberries as we hiked our way through, which helped get the Oreo taste out of our mouths and was also just nice and refreshing when we were so thirsty and hot.

Toward the top of the climb, we came to a rock feature that's a little bit like the Lemon Squeezer in New York, called Roger’s Ramp.

After we made our way through that, it wasn’t too much further till we got here to the Pine Swamp Brook shelter, where we set up camp and tried to dry things out a bit.