GET - AT Hike

We’re in our last trail town!!

 Let me just say that we had such a great time at the post office in this town… I think we cleaned out an entire shelf when we got our mail!  There’s a photo in the Maine section of our photos that shows the towering stack of packages and letters we got.  Thanks so much to everyone; we feel very loved!

We had a nice, easy day out of Northern Outdoors, up Pleasant Pond Mountain and back down.  We were staying at a shelter about 22 miles out of Monson and decided we’d rather do a long day into town and then take a day off than two short days into town.  So we got up early and hiked our tails off for 9 hours to get to the road to Monson at 3:30 (the P.O. closes at 4).  We were nervous about getting a hitch, but after about 10 minutes a nice Maniac (Maine-iac)(ha) picked us up and took us right to the P.O. with seven minutes to spare.  Yay!  So we had a feast with all the food we got - dried fruit, cookies, chocolate, sour patch, snickers and some Nassau Royale to top it off!

We’re staying at the Lake Shore Hotel, which has both a laundromat and restaurant/bar in the same building.  Perfect for hikers!  Rebecca is the owner and she is a wonderful, hospitable lady, plus a lot of fun.  Tonight is all-you-can-eat Taco night and we’re planning on doing some damage.  Speaking of, it starts at four and I’m ready so off I go!

Thanks to Tammy, Claire, Whitney, Crystal and Bahama for the packages, and Courtney, Vanessa, Cory and Tonie for the letters!!  Y’all are some great friends for sure.

See y’all on the other side of the wilderness!

susan, andy (and corley)

ps. Corley decided he likes doing nothing with the Phair’s more than hiking so we’ll pick him up in just over a week to drive around Maine with us.  They don’t want to give him up so it might be a fight to get him back!  Thanks so much for watching him Mark & Julie!

pps. Our buddy Sampson had to undergo surgery for an abcess on his back in New Hampshire (yikes!) so we wish him a speedy recovery to get his skinny butt back on the trail to Katadhin!  Bondi, Rocksteady, Butters, Superchunk…. we miss you guys!

Hello from a rafting outpost in nowhere, Maine!

We’ve gotten through the toughest part of Maine, we think…  It’s been big climbs and big decents for a week and a half, but the past two days have been low and easy.  We saw some incredible views of the Maine mountains and valleys, hopefully I’ll be able to upload some in the next few days.

We crossed the Kennebec River today!  The official AT route is a ferry ride in a canoe, so that’s what we did.  It was raining this morning so we were slow to get out of the tent and get going.  It was a race to get to the river before the ferry closed for lunch at 11, but we made it (10:45!).  Our ferry-man was Dave, aka Hillybilly, a river man through and through.  The last ferry-man did the job for over twenty years.  This is the last operating man-powered ferry in the whole United States.  Andy and I donned our PFDs like pros… almost… Andy had a little trouble with his (and after all those years rafting!  it’s that silly pillow they have on the back for your head– does it even do anything really?!).   Anyway, we hopped in the canoe with Dave in the back, me in the middle, and Andy in front paddling. It took about three minutes to get across the 70 yard wide river.  I’m glad we made it to the ferry though because we probably would have tried to ford the river without knowing that the river was rising… yikes!

We had a food drop in Caratunk, ME and found out that there was a rafting outpost with a restaurant, brewery and camping just down the road… we couldn’t resist.  We figure with only 150 miles, less than two weeks left, we can take a short day and have a brew or two.  So we rented a little cabin tent for the night and have been hanging around the outpost just like old times.

We expect to be in Monson in two and a half days then heading into the Hundred Mile Wilderness, after which is Katadhin.  So close!!

All the best to y’all,

susan, andy (and corley)

ps. we’re hoping corley will get to come through the hundred mile wilderness with us!

Brrrr!

We never thought it could be this cold anywhere in August!  We came into Rangeley, ME yesterday around lunchtime to re-supply with food.  This is the last “big” town we’ll come to on our journey so we bought extra food and sent it forward to Caratunk, ME, 100 miles down the trail, a town with only a post office!  The towns in Maine are actually perfectly spaced out every 3 days or so which means our packs get to be fairly light as we trek over these tough mountains.

We stayed at a motel in town and were excited to take a hot shower, except we couldn’t get the hot water to work! Argh.  Turns out the hotel owner had to turn on the propane to heat the hotel as it was to be in the low 40s last night, and when he tinkered with the propane it somehow turned off the hot water to our room.  An hour later we were washing off all the mud and dirt in a steaming hot shower and it was fabulous.

We’re leaving this afternoon again, never a day off when you get this close to Katadhin!  Less than 220 miles to go now, yippee!

Thanks so much to Erin out in Montana for the package!  No-Bake Cheesecake, what?!

Best,

susan, andy (& corley)

We’ve made it to our last state, less than 300 miles to go! 

The sun came out too, and has stayed out for the few days we’ve been here.  The terrain is rugged, very rocky and steep, and we are more “in the woods” than we’ve been so far.  We are hiking in the Mahoosuc range and got to go through one of the more famous sections of trail yesterday: the Mahoosuc Notch.  It’s a mile long section of car-sized boulders at the junction of two steep mountains that hikers have to pick and choose thier way through.  It took us over an hour to go that mile section, and we got bumped and bruised, but it was exciting!

We ran into our old buddy Slowstepper who lives around this part of Maine.  He finished his section hike of the AT this year by hiking Springer to Harpers Ferry.  We were there the day he finished!  He and his wife have been tracking down all his hiking buddies and bringing them trail magic.  He showed up at the road we hiked to today with some fresh watermelon and candy bars.  It was great to see him and to meet his wife.  Have fun hiking the Mahoosucs!

The latest update with Corley is that he’s getting tons of loving attention from Mark & Julie, he went car camping with them last week and slept a good bit.  Perhaps we’ll be getting him back near Monson, ME.  We still miss him a lot!

We’re in Andover, ME staying at the home of the very generous and fun Scott, aka Gunny Goose, grilling hot dogs and hanging out with some other hikers.  We’ll get back on the trail tomorrow morning and slug and slosh our way up some more tough Maine mountains!

Hope all’s going well with back to school for you kids and the beginning of the end of summer for the rest of y’all!

Best,

susan, andy (and corley)

Hello from the other side of the White Mountains.   We’re glad to be done with them!

It’s been incredibly rainy, I think it’s rained 12 of the last 13 days we’ve been on the trail.  They have record rainfall in New Hampshire and have even seen some mudslides and tornadoes.  We’ve also had some beautiful views though, between rainstorms.

Our first big mountain was Mt. Moosilauke at 4,800 feet, which means that it is above treeline.  Treeline at this latitude is at around 4,500 feet, which means that the environment of mountains above that elevation is alpine, consisting of rocks, shrubs, lichens and little else.  It’s dangerous to be above treeline in thunderstorms because you’re the tallest thing out there, and you’re carrying two aluminum hiking poles.  A walking lightening rod.  It’s often foggy at those elevations in the Whites because the weather changes so quickly, so the trail is marked with rock piles, or cairns, often spaced close enough so that you can see the next in the fog.  Moosilauke was our first experience above treeline and it was rainy, cold and foggy.  We stayed at a shelter at 3,600 feet and caught a fleeting glimpse of the White Mountains at 5am the next morning before the fog rolled in.

The Appalachian Hiking Club runs “huts” and campgrounds throughout the Whites and thru-hikers are allowed to work for stay at these huts.  They’re like very basic hostels in the mountains, often above treeline, that have “croos” of college kids cooking meals and entertaining guests.  We stayed at the first hut, called Lonesome Lake, after a long 15 mile day.  We had to clean the oven and freezer, but got to eat all the lasagna and soup we wanted.  The “croo” that worked there also got us to dress up in costume and have a 20 minute dance party for the guests after breakfast the next morning.  Andy really enjoyed wearing a tutu and I enjoyed my mumu.

We stayed at two other huts, Galehead and Madison, at which we took part in giving a talk about what it means to be a thru-hikers and answered questions from guests for an hour, such as, what do you eat?, and how did you train?.  To which we said hot dogs and ice cream. 

The terrain has not been so kind to Corley, with the rocks and the rain, and we ended up having to send him forward to Maine.  Our buddy Rocksteady’s brothers were visiting him in Lincoln and agreed to take him to their parents home in Maine.  We were so very sad to say goodbye to him and miss his companionship every day out here.  We hope to get him back in the next couple of weeks, but know that until then he is enjoying himself taking long naps and hanging out with the very cool Mark & Julie Phair (thank y’all so much). 

We finished the whites this morning with our eight mile hike into Gorham, NH.  We ran into Karl Meltzer today who is trying to break the record for an AT thru-hike:  47 days.  (www.whereskarl.com) Good luck to him, it’s taken us 151 days to get this far!

We wanted to say thanks so much to Karen, LC, Dave & Diane, Jessica and Courtney for the mail and goodies!  Thanks to Rock Dancer, Stitches and Gold Thumb for the trail magic!  Thanks to Richard and the Crawford Notch Campground for taking such good care of us!

Hope all’s going well with everyone out there and we’ll see y’all in a month!

Best,

susan, andy (and corley)