Date: 2015-08-09
From: Hanover, New Hampshire

To: Hanover, New Hampshire
Miles today: 12.0

Hanover, New Hampshire, Aug 9 at Dartmouth LibraryThis is just a few days after my Rutland Vermont Aug 5th post, so not too much is new. I remain ¢Good Enough¢, with no physical aches, pains or issues. Just sore feet and stiffness at the end of the day, to be expected after 1750 miles. August 9th is the end of our fourth month on the AT. We begin our 5th month.   I continue to now look at the calendar as our friend, in that the months roll along, and I - we are still on the trail, making steady northward progress.   (Oddly, the forward slash key on this computer does not work, even though it is a very fancy and expensive Macintosh, in an expensive library. Oh well.) Sunday Aug 9th is a zero day for Brad-No Worries and I.   We will stay tonight in a motel in Hanover.   We camped last night in the woods 30 yards from the Dartmouth soccer fields.   I am in the Dartmouth library now.   Dartmouth is, of course, one of the Ivy league colleges, and it looks like it. Very picturesque campus. I didn¢t know Dartmouth was in Hanover, New Hampshire.   Seems like we are still way into the woods. Hanover is just into New Hampshire, at AT northbound milepost 1747, 442 miles to go to Kathadin. So we are finally done with Vermont. We took about 12 days to get through the 150 miles of Vermont.   That¢s an average of 12.5 miles a day. So our daily average has dropped.   Vermont had substantial up and down. Not huge, but not much level trail.   As previously mentioned, we have less energy for the last 500 miles than we had for the first 500 miles.   But we still expect to complete the trail by Sept 20-25.   We will surely be done by October 1st, the start of really cold weather in Maine and Kathadin. Kathadin and Baxter State park closes for overnight camping for the winter about Oct 15-20.   That is everybody's northbound absolute deadline. So we have two states to go. About 170 miles of New Hampshire, and then 270 miles in Maine.   Something like that.   New Hampshire has the fearsome White Mountains.   They are White because they are above the treeline, the only time that happens on the AT.   So they have quite the reputation for being tough. A saying is that , by the time you have reached New Hampshire, you have done 75% of the trail distance, but only 25% of the vertical. (The total AT trail vertical is about 90 MILES, or about 15 times climbing from sea level to the top of Mt Everest, 29,000 feet elevation, and back.) I hope that is somewhat of an exaggeration. Yet I am looking forwards to it. For once we will be out of the green tunnel.   I have very much appreciated the AT green tunnel during June and July, for both sun protection and the reduction in effective temperature on us.   Now it is getting cooler so we don¢t need the green tunnel effect.   The green tunnel returns in Maine, however. Today is a zero day primarily because our spouses mailed our colder weather gear to the USPO at Hanover, and the PO is closed on Sunday.   We didn¢t or couldn¢t get to the PO by noon yesterday, Saturday. So we will zero here today. But only spend one night in a motel, not two, as we have typically done when zeroing.   I will get back my down sweater vest, Diane¢s 20 degree sleeping bag (sending home my 32 degree bag), and swapping out the REI sleeping pad, so I will not have to wrestle with the bulge in the middle of my pad.   I will also swap out my clothes, returning to the Rail Riders long-sleeved shirt and long-legged pants I started with in Georgia.   While we welcome and need the cold weather gear, we don¢t relish carrying the extra weight. But it is essential. One interesting thing that is happening is that we continue to both see new northbound hikers, as well as some hikers that we have not seen for months.   By this time most people's hiking speed has stabilized (except maybe ours - slower), so you would expect that we would be hiking more or less with the same group of people.   But we see new northbound thru-hikers that we have never met.   Perhaps no big deal - even 1 mile per day speed difference means that we pass others or they pass us, permanently.      Yesterday we got some trail magic pancakes at person¢s house next to the trail.   I was eating my pancakes, when Brad called out to me ¢You will never guess who is here¢.   It was in fact ¢Simple Soul¢ and his brother ¢Hammertoe¢.   They are from Iowa, about our same age.   I had hiked with them 100 miles or so, but had last seen them way back at the 250 mile mark, in North Carolina. I had not seen them for over 3 months - almost 1500 miles.   But there they were.   They have arranged to ¢slackpack¢ through all of New Hampshire. Lucky them. For personal reasons, they have to be done by Sept 12. So we expect not to see them again.   It is similar with other hikers.   We don¢t see them for several weeks, and we assume they are way past us, then we see them.   Perhaps because hikers take multiple days off the trail and we again cross paths. I also did a post about Baxter State park pushes back on AT Thru hikers.   The future of the northern end of the AT is in doubt. I have no new pictures since my last post at Rutland, Vermont.   The scenery in Vermont was the same as elsewhere on the AT. Nice, but similar to previous. But the White Mountains should be dramatically different.