Date: 2017-06-07
From: West Mombasha Rd, NY

To: Stealth, by Seven Lakes Drive, NY
Miles today: 19.6

Today was a lovely day in most respects - good weather for a change and some fun and interesting hiking. Around 7:30, Rich took me to a diner where I had a big omelette and lots of coffee. Then he dropped me back to Mombasha. I hope to see him again in Vermont. Straight away, on entering the woods on the far side of the road, there was a stretch of rocks reminiscent of Pisha*. But it was just New York pulling our legs, as it only lasted twenty yards. Far more upsetting were some stretches of rock that clearly had been transported at great cost from Pisha just to remind us of what we'd been generally spared. I found the climbs easy. My trail legs are definitely back, and that plantars issue, while not history, doesn't seem to be getting worse.I ran into Bald Eagle for the first time. Like me, he does a trail journal. He did about half of the AT last year and is back finishing it off. His wife picks him up from the trail every evening. I enjoyed our chats, as we met several times during the day. I also met Ten Steps, whose wife Marilyn provided trail magic a few days ago; he was with Rocketman. I met Nople and many others. Everybody was looking forward to the Lemon Squeezer, a tight crack in the rocks, reminiscent of the approach to Petra in Jordan, which featured in one of the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies. As it turned out, the real show-stopper was a rock face immediately after the Lemon Squeezer, which put everything technical I'd experienced yesterday in the shade. There was a blue-blazed 'Easy Way' around it. I took three attempts before I finally managed to haul myself and backpack up and over. I had to abandon my usual rule of always having three secure contact points with the rock while moving to a fourth.Having suffered through that hard rock-scaling, I sat down and called REI and ordered a new pair of boots, to be delivered to a post office a few days ahead.The terrain after that was beautiful and very different from anything we'd seen on the AT before. It was like an English park as seen on 'Downton Abbey', with a rolling green landscape and a light scattering of trees. In the late afternoon I was passing by Fingerboard shelter, where there has recently been some bear activity, and I ran into two day hikers who were all excited that a few minutes earlier they had seen a mother bear and three cubs on a trail that intersects with the AT. I was tempted to drop my pack and go look. But with the delays due to rock-climbing and boot-ordering, I was anxious to keep moving. This became very necessary when I saw a text from Rich noting that I'd left my groundsheet in his garage. We arranged for him to drop it to me early tomorrow at a road crossing, so I opted to camp right by that crossing. But to reach it, I had to hike for an hour or so in the dark. It was just after ten when I pitched my tent, but the trail had been so well blazed that even with having to rely on a headlamp, I didn't find the going challenging. Along the way I'd been treated to the sight of the New York City skyline some 52 miles away, and the Hudson River much closer to me. *The Great Satan state; refer to Day 77. Tipperary