Date: 2012-08-05
From: Williamstown, MA

To: Dalton, MA; The Birdcage Hostel
Miles today: 23.5
Weather: broken clouds

Today, John Wayne and I were pumped up to do a 23 mile slackpack over Mt Greylock, a mountain significantly taller than anything we had seen since Virginia. I got up early to grab breakfast from a nearby deli. And then a crew of us loaded up into a giant white van, named Casper. Several other hikers were along for the ride to get dropped off at different points. One of those hikers was able to talk Rob into stopping for breakfast. What thru-hiker can deny himself Second Breakfast (think hobbits)? I chowed down on the ride to Williamstown, MA, where John Wayne and I would start our slack pack. Rob has a picture up in his house of a group of three guys who did this 23 mile slack in under 5 hours. John Wayne was dead set on beating their time. I was merely happy if I finished before dark.The initial ascent up the mountain was brutal. It was very, very steep, and my stomach was working very hard to digest all that greasy McDonald¢s food. To top it off, I forgot my bandanas, so the sweat was just pouring down my face and into my eyes. Thankfully I was rewarded with some excellent views on the way up. Approaching the top, off to the side of the trail was what looked like a roofed coffin on stilts, or in my mind, a one man shelter. The bottom was about 5 feet off the ground. The roof of the box had shingles, and it was shaped roughly like a boxy single-man tent. One end of the box had a larger face than the other end, because it contained a door with a latch. Nothing was in this ¢shelter¢, but it looked like a fun place to spend the night. I suspect it¢s a storage shed of some sort used in the winter. The stilts keep it from getting buried in the snow. I don¢t know what it would store other than maybe a rescue stretcher, or maybe a variety of shovels and similarly shaped tools. (Later that night, I found out that one of the female SOBOs staying at the hostel had actually spent the night in there.)Just shy of the top of Mt. Greylock, I found Mango, Sammie, and their car Kermit (a green Honda Element) waiting for Rampage and co. to come by. I spent about 20 minutes eating a snack with her. She graciously offered me a soda, but I had packed a bunch from Rob¢s fridge in my day pack. Soda is the BEST! Feeling the pressure of 20 more miles of hiking I elected not to wait any longer for Rampage to get there so I pushed on. At the very top of Greylock is an interesting tower. However, the sky was completely overcast and visibility was poor so I pushed on. A few minutes later I did pass Rampage and his crew since I last saw them in Connecticut. Apparently there group is moving much faster now that Blah Blah and Franklinstein decided to spend an extra day in Great Barrington, MA. However, they picked up a new groupee, Weezy and his dog Aisha. I had been hearing Weezy¢s name for the past week or so, and I got the impression that he was a rather ¢interesting¢ character. Nothing special about this particular meeting though, except that is when it started to drizzle. Aisha apparently won¢t hike in the rain, and I had forgotten my raincoat and a plastic bag to keep my iPhone dry, so we were both anxious to move on. I began booking it as fast as I could down the mountain, after a bit I came to a perfectly flat section. That¢s when it started to pour, and I started to outright run. I quickly remembered how much I hate to run, but thankfully the rain quickly forgot how much it hated to fall on me, and promptly stopped and stayed that way.The rest of the hike was rather easy and uneventful. I finished in under 9 hours. John Wayne finished in 5.5 hours. At first we was upset about not beating the current record holders¢ time, but then he found out that they were marathon runners. All of us finished the evening off with a 32¢ party pizza and we watched Coming to America, an 80s classic which I had never seen before.