Date: 2011-08-26
From: Carl A. Newhall Lean-to

To: Cooper Brook Falls Lean-to
Miles today: 18.9
Weather: broken clouds

(In which I see my second moose and am warned of the coming storm)I leave the shelter around 8am, after Amanda and Jessie but before Mean Gene and Bum Knee. A few tenths from the shelter the trail passes near a pond -- closer to an actual pond than a lake-pond -- and like I usually do, I stop using my trekking poles and stay quiet as I approach the pond. I stop and peer out, searching for moose, and though at first I don't see anything, a distant black spot that I thought was a stump lifts its head. Without any antlers and viewed from a distance the creature looks like a horse, and only from context can I deduce that it's not.I take a few pictures, though my lens is far from the telephoto that would be required for anything identifiable. ("See that black spot? No, the other one. Yeah, that's a moose.") Though less photographic, this moose sighting is more tranquil, and I spend nearly half an hour watching and listening to the moose nibble on the flora in the pond. I wait for Bum Knee and Mean Gene to show up, recalling how eager Bum Knee was to see his first moose after my first sighting. When twenty-five minutes have passed and they still haven't arrived I gather my gear back up and start walking south to find them and give them a heads up.I only have to go a dozen yards or so before I hear and then see them headed up the trail. I shush their loud conversation and tell them about the moose. Bum Knee hurries quietly to the pond for a look and Mean Gene follows. "Oh yeah, there it is right there," Bum Knee says excitedly as he takes a few photos, but Mean Gene just shrugs. "I can't see that far man." Though in his twenties, Mean Gene's face has the look of someone who usually wears glasses but isn't. He scrunches his eyes up as he tries to make out the distant moose, and eventually says that he can see a black blob. He can hear it just fine though, and together we listen to the soft splashes of the grazing moose.Satisfied that I have repaid my moose sighting debt I continue on, up the last series of mountains before Katahdin. The top is supposed to offer a view of the big K, but with the fog I can hardly see two cairns away, and the mighty mountain remains a mystery.After the mountains the trail levels, goes up and over a couple of hills and then flatlines. Finally I have reached the flat section of the wilderness that I had heard about since Georgia, and it's as smooth and pleasant as I had hoped. I pass a sandy beach by a pond-lake with a nice tent spot and am tempted to stop here for my 30-hour challenge, but am unsure of the weather and would prefer a spot a bit closer to a shelter in case of a storm.I show up at the shelter at 5:30pm. I'm not yet tired after 18.9 miles and think that I could get used to this flat terrain. With more than two hours of daylight I am tempted to hike on, but the next shelter isn't for 9 miles so I decide to stay put. At the shelter I meet Marshall, a guitarist in the band Old Man Brown. He was planning to hike the 100 mile wilderness but started having knee pain and arranged to get picked on a logging road tomorrow. Marshall gets just enough service on his Verizon phone to send and receive texts, and as he texts with his sister he give me updates on the coming storm.I had heard of an advancing hurricane back in Monson, but back then it was a week away and it wasn't clear that it would mean too much to Maine. Marshall tells me that it's supposed to roll in tomorrow evening and that Fish and Game wants everybody off the trail by 6pm, though other than shelters there aren't exactly a lot of places to go in the wilderness. New York City is shutting down all public transportation for the first time ever, Marshall's sister tells us, and a few minutes later we learn that White Mountain National Forest ("The Whites") is also shutting down for the first time ever.Actions like this seem to suggest that there might be more that a wee bit of wind and rain heading our way soon. If nothing else this would seem to put a damper on my plans to zero outside of a shelter, but it does make me glad that I carried more than an extra day's worth of food with me, something few people deliberately do when already forced to carry 100 miles worth of food.Since the weather is supposed to be good until late tomorrow and the terrain looks easy I may try to put in some miles before I have to hunker down and wait out the storm.