Date: 2018-08-29
From: Eliza Brook Shelter

To: Chet's House
Miles today: 8.8

The college kids woke up early this morning. They were making a lot of noise. At one point they were doing jumping jacks. I had no idea that you needed that kind of warm up for this hike. I ate raisin brand cereal and some poptarts for breakfast. Maga and I headed out around 8:30 am for the Kinsman mountains.The hike up the Kinsman was a challenge. It was steep. In many spots we needed to pull ourselves up with roots and trees since the trail was so slanted. Many of the rocks were wet which didn't help either. I was constantly worried that I was going to trip. It took us two hours to hike up the South Kinsman. At the top we could see the ever expanding valley below. In the distance was the presidential mountains. We could see Mt Washington jutting up into the clouds. I ate some snacks and made myself a sandwich. We hung out there for an hour taking in the view. Twig shared some of his gummy worms and starburst with us. I wanted to eat the whole bag. I was on a sugar binge. We headed for North Kinsman. It was a pretty short hike to the other mountain. Maga at the summit Maga found that someone defecated and put a rock over it. He used a log to push it off the ledge. It was pretty nasty.  We then hiked down the south side of the mountain. It was the same terrain as climbing the mountain and took us awhile to get down. We checked out the Kinsman pond shelter. The caretaker wasn't there since he was sick. The shelter was built with quality. It was almost like a log cabin. The only problem was that the pond was the water source. We then hiked down to the lost pond hut. The hut had a huge kitchen inside with drinks and snacks. Their dinner menu looked amazing too. The workers had to carry all the food up the mountain to the hut for making breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We saw one woman carrying a heavy pack of veggies for the meals. She had to carry it 1.6 miles . Some hikers had to carry food for 5 miles in other huts. I got a coffee and some coffee cake and hung out for a little bit. We then headed out. We ran into Twig about a mile down the trail taking a bath in the river. He was washing his clothes as well. His plan was to make it on top of Franconia ridge tonight. Maga and I were not feeling that climb and decided to go back into town to stay at Chet's. We threw rocks into the river trying to skip them across. I threw a huge rock in and got Maga pretty wet. We headed out to Franconia Notch to get a ride back into town.  A woman picked us up on route 3 and took us back to Lincoln, NH. She had just finished hiking and saw that we were probably as tired as she was. She dropped us off at the Price Chopper. I got a text from Scissors saying that she wanted to have a get together for Kazi who was jumping ahead to the 100 mile wilderness. I thought that the event would be today but she was going over the section we just did. I'm going to miss it because I need to take less zeros to finish the trail on time. At Chet's Too Sweet, Butters, Griz, 50 cent, Sparrow, and Scatter were there. They were planning on slacking the section we just did. Scatter had been feeling sick and the doctor thought it was Lyme disease. He was on doxy to fight it. I hope he feels better. Maga and I grabbed pizza for dinner. It was pretty tasty. Back at Chet's I took a shower and called it a night.Tonight I'm passing out on a pretty dirty bed but at least it's free.