Date: 2008-06-08
From: Tom Leonard Lean-to MA 

To: Shaker Campsite MA 
Miles today: 11.2
Weather: few clouds

Day 112 ¢ Sunday June 8 ¢ Shaker Campsite MA ¢ Miles Today: 11.2 Total Miles: 1526.1Today was Wildlife Day. We saw a porcupine, which of course, reminded us of Chris and how much we miss him. Our Orange Alert Days (i.e., lots of newts) continue. But now we have lots of frogs to go with them. The frogs have come out in the past couple days.   Grasshopper has these not so pleasant images of looking at her trekking poles at the end of the day and seeing newt-frog kabobs just ready to be cooked over an open fire for dinner. Hmmm, no thank you!The exciting news is that we saw a black she-bear and her cub. We heard a stick break off to the side of the trail, so we peeked over and sure enough, there was a bear standing up on it's back legs peeking at us! After seeing us, it ran away in the opposite direction. It happened too quickly to get a picture unfortunately. The bear sighting was about 1-2 miles from this evening¢s camp so we have all of our food tucked away safely in the bear locker. Speaking of this evening¢s camp, the good news is that although the guidebook says that mosquitoes are bad at this site, its really not too bad compared to some of the areas we've been in! It¢s all relative! One neat thing that we've noticed as we've walked further north over the past week is that the woodpeckers have a different frequency to their tapping on the trees. It's like slow motion. Perhaps it is because the trees are much harder here. We don't really know; maybe they're just slow workers, or perhaps part of a Union, or perhaps both. We should offshore them to India. And our last wildlife for today was hidden in the little wood register box at camp. Grasshopper unfortunately opened the box, jumped back, squealed and hid behind Brakeman.   Yep, you guessed it ¢ Grasshopper¢s favorite animal ¢ the good ol¢ mouse. A couple decided to set up home in the register box. Yuk, yuk, yuk. The temperature was not too bad today. We heard it was supposed to be 93. We were sweating before 8:00 this morning, but then the cloud cover arrived and the temps only rose to the mid 80s.   We were able to stay pretty cool given the situation. It was a short day - only 11 miles. We departed camp about 6:30 and arrived to this camp around 1:00 - a pokey day. By 3:00 the thunder arrived and we had about 2 hours of rain with some thunder and lightning right over us, but it wasn't a huge long storm so it wasn't bad. We spent several hours in the tent going over the next few weeks on the agenda, trying to figure out how many miles we can do each day, what amount of food we're going to need and whether we're hitting the post offices on days they're closed. We can tell that when we get to New Hampshire we're going to have some challenges with closed post offices. But that's too far out to worry about right now.It is somewhat disappointing for Grasshopper that we're not doing the 20-mile days that we had hoped to be able to do. The feet are not as happy on the long distances as they used to be. It's one thing to do a couple 20-mile days when we¢re on a weeklong hike and a whole different ballgame to do a bunch of 20-mile days on a 5-month hike. So we just have to slow it down and make sure we enjoy our adventure both mentally and physically.We appear to be in a void of northbound thru-hikers again, but on the other hand, most of them go to shelters and we're at a campsite so who really knows. Apparently there's a horde of hikers in Virginia that got bunched up after Trail Days in Damascus.   A southbound section-hiker we ran into the other day was hiking in Virginia a few weeks ago and said that he passed 70 northbound hikers in one day! I cannot imagine having that horde of hikers with us. It's 7:00 and about 80 degrees in the tent - a bit hot and sticky but not nearly as bad as yesterday. We finally have all of our chores done. Tomorrow is a long day - 18.7 miles. We hope we hold up well and we also hope that the afternoon storms don't come but I don't think that's going to happen. It's supposed to be hot for 2 more days - about 20 degrees above normal - so I'm thinking that the afternoon storms will continue. Looks like we're going to have to bypass Upper Goose Pond, which is a place that's quite popular on the trail. It's a half-mile off the trail but has swimming, canoeing and a neat enclosed shelter. It's just not fitting into the schedule and the way things are going, we¢d probably have afternoon storms there, so I don't think there'll be so much swimming or canoeing after all. They serve breakfast there too ¢ blueberry pancakes!!Well, I think that's it for today. Wish us luck for tomorrow. I hope the 18.7 miles are not too big of a deal for us. Goodnight.