Everyone decided to do something incredibly stupid before we left. It was very depressing and made me feel stupefyingly stupid. After 1650 miles, I should know better than to be lulled by the masses, but I fell for it. I expect section hikers to do stupid things, but, by now, I should be beyond such frivolity. We weighed our packs.
My goal has been to keep Bunny’s under 30# to give her some hip relief. She came in at 27#, and that’s even including the latest round of “must have” items she has decided will make life on the trail better. We will be shipping some stuff home in a few weeks once we get into New Hampshire and start carrying some more cold weather gear. But my pack…she-it. I lost in the battle of wills in the grocery store 2 days ago and now I suffer. 51 fricking pounds. My pack only weighed 47# leaving Hot Springs way back in March with all of our winter gear. I’ll show Bunny. I’ll make her drag my body 5 miles to the nearest road crossing once I have a heart attack. (Actually, she should be savvy enough to grab my wallet, iPad, and camera out of my pack and just push my body into a mud puddle in the trail—most of them are deep enough that I won’t be found until someone does trail maintenance…oh my gawd, I’ll never be found. She’s diabolical, I keep telling you.)
Jeff took six of us to the trailhead on the 8:30 shuttle. We said our goodbyes and headed up the trail. We knew we had a bit of a climb up to a ski area to get out of Manchester Center. We have been keeping an eye on Bromley Mountain since we summited Stratton Mountain (this ski area inspired Benton MacKaye’s unrealized dream of commercializing the Appalachian Mountain range).
At a viewpoint below the summit, we ran into a group of locals out for a day hike. We had stopped for a snack and were being bombarded by house flies when the dragonfly brigade showed up. It was amazing to see such a large swarm take out the annoying flies. We now have new friends in Vermont. One dragonfly flew over and landed on his beloved human friend, Dennis.
We continued on up to the summit almost 3/4 of a mile further and 400’ higher. We stopped for another snack and enjoyed the views for a while. My opinion of the V state might be changing a bit but I don’t want to make any rash decisions about liking the state just yet. It does have a big plus for me that Col Sanders little brother, Bernie, is Senator here.
We encountered some more boardwalks descending Bromley Mountain. This is where we discovered Sassy has a propensity to fall. We might need to keep a camera on her at all stream crossings in the future. She was kind enough to recreate her landing position for me since I didn’t know to have my camera ready for the initial fall. Fortunately, she was not hurt. At our advanced ages, every fall has the potential to be a hike ender.
We had another big climb to get over Styles Peak. VT is trying to get us ready for the Whites in NH. It’s been a while since we’ve had to climb so much in a single day. Something else unusual started happening for us today. We encountered streams that were not running down the middle of the trail. It was very enjoyable to hear Falls that were not spilling around our feet.
Mud Bug had told us she was aiming for Peru Peak Shelter tonight. We had thought we were going to go another 5 miles to Lost Pond Shelter, but we decided to stop early enough to enjoy the evening. There was good water flowing next to a pine forest camping area. The privy even had tp in it. We’d struck gold. This gave me time to organize all the food we had bought and I had just thrown in my pack because I was too pissed to deal with it.
A caretaker came by as we were finishing up our dinner. We talked to her a bit and shared our non-favorable impressions of VT south of Stratton Mountain. She told us that made sense because there weren’t any caretakers down there and the trail is maintained by individuals instead of the club as a whole. It was still a very crappy section of trail (almost 40 miles of some of the worst trail we’ve ever encountered), but I’ll ease up a bit on VT. It’s starting to get better the further from the swamp we get. We just need someone that will drain the swamp. Mr Trump, are you having any success with swamp draining?
EFG