Date: 2017-04-20
From: Brink Road Shelter

To: Rutherford Shelter
Miles today: 15.0
Weather: scattered clouds

Well I met the other hiker who was at the Brink Road shelter this morning when we got up at dawn. His name is Arthur and he is a paramedic. His wife is a lawyer with her own practice and they're both in their mid-sixties. Arthur was previously a commercial banker but with a consolidation of the commercial banking market in America, what was in 1970s 17,000 independent commercial banking entities is now about six commercial banks. In the process of consolidation, lots of folks who were at that time making over 6 figures lost their jobs.Having recently come from Pennsylvania, I want to put this down now before I forget it. It's not so much a journal entry for today, but represents thoughts I've been accumulating over the past couple of weeks. It's about rocks. I was remembering the movie Forrest Gump when Forest is in Vietnam and you're hearing him narrate a letter he was writing to his mother or Jenny I can't remember. He said in Vietnam there are lots of kinds of rain: there is light rain and heavy rain and slow rain and fast rain and rain that just drips and sometimes it comes down in buckets and sometimes it even comes up from underneath. Well in my experience here, I've come to appreciate that there are lots of kinds of rocks! There are big boulder rocks and little rocks and round rocks and flat rocks and sharp rocks and rocks that you can hop on and rocks that you can trip on and rocks that are dry and rocks that are slippery when wet and rocks that come up underneath that aren't sharp but because they are smaller than your foot sharply penetrate boots, rocks that are ankle busters and foot fighters and after hiking over these all day long, your feet maintain the memory of them in the way they hurt! So this morning after we got up, Arthur and I both ate breakfast and chatted for awhile. Before getting fully underway on the trail today, I first filled bottles and treated the water from the water source near the Brink Road shelter. So shortly after 7:15 I am off, once again headed north. If I have the stamina for it, my plan is to try to make it to the Rutherford shelter which I think is around 15 miles so not quite as grueling as the last couple of days. I'm currently walking on a damp trail, on wet leaves which seem to be muffling all the sounds. I can hear individual water droplets hitting them in the forest as they fall off the trees, but it is not raining at the moment. The forecast is for 50% chance of rain today, so once again I'm hiking in Gore-Tex. It happens to be cold enough right now so that's not a heat problem, but I might have to adapt.I had a lively texting session with the family biologist, my daughter Jenna about green/blue colored dead wood, chlorophyll and Red Eft Salamanders. I¢ll get back to that later. (see photo)At about 11 o'clock I came across a couple headed southbound on a short 5-day section hike. They warned me about a brown snake in some water ahead on the trail in my direction and I told them about the black snake I saw yesterday (reminder to self ¢ have Jenna help me identify the species of the snakes I encounter). Before I actually got to the water with the brown snake, I came across an observation tower with another old US Army communications shelter on the ground underneath it. I guess they're using the radio shelters to enable the observation towers to talk to each other ¢ perhaps for Emergency Services. There's a sign at the base of the big tower that says no trespassing without permission from NJFFS and there's phone number. I assume that is New Jersey forestry or forest fire service?At about 11:30 am I came to a small creek near the Gren Anderson shelter, and I think this is probably the place where the couple had seen the brown snake; although I looked for it, I couldn't find it. I was on the lookout, though as I stopped to fill another liter of water to replace what I¢ve consumed during the trip here from the Brink Road shelter this morning.At about 2:30 in the afternoon, as the sun started coming out a little, I also felt myself running out of energy and I don't mean just the power in my phone's battery. I took a break and ate another Clif Bar and drank some water and continued on to the Mashipacong shelter. There I took another break, rested my feet and actually removed a thorn from my sock in the heel of my foot where it have been poking me. I sign the log book at the shelter and since at that point it was only a little after 3 o'clock and I had only done about 13 miles I decided to just try to continue on slowly and make it to the next shelter so as to reduce the miles I will have to do tomorrow to get to Unionville New York. It may really be more so tomorrow's story, but the Appalachian Trail penetrates into New York only a couple of times very briefly around Unionville and it is turned back as if by the forces defending the southern border of New York from the invading scourge of thru-hikers. The trail is forced to skirt the border with New York but remain inside New Jersey all the way down to Greenwood Lake south of Belleville and Warwick New York where it is finally allowed to penetrate the southern border and enter southern New York wildlands.