Date: 2017-08-17
From: The Cabin hostel

To: The Farmhouse in Rangeley
Miles today: 26.4

I wake up refreshed despite (because of?) my midnight star viewing. It's time to move on. Feels like I'm leaving family. We all sit down to another big wonderful breakfast. Honey and Bear insist I take leftovers for lunch.I had lost my hiking shirt to boulders a couple of days ago. Hopper lets me take one of the cotton loaner shirts they provide hikers when doing laundry as my new sleeping shirt. I will wear my poly sleeping shirt for hiking. She was given the shirt during a hike down south when she needed it, and wants me to pay it forward as well. It has a Celestial Seasonings logo on it. It's the "tea shirt"! Get it? On the back it has another quote from Lao Tze to complement my journal signature: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." So true. How does Nature do it all? Delegation...Hopper drives me out to the South Arm trailhead. I aim to reach Rangeley this evening, 26 miles away. It will be my biggest miles since before the Whites. Multiple folks have told me the first 13 miles are tough - big climbs and descents - but the last 13 are easy. So I figure I'll make up time in the afternoon. The Farmhouse in Rangeley expects me between 7 and 8 this evening. I should beat that.I start up Old Blue mountain, the biggest climb of the day. It goes smoothly, few boulder scrambles and nice if steep trail. It's quiet and I see few people. I pick wild blueberries on the top of Mt Bemis. They're delicious - but can never get enough! Later, between Mt Bemis' two peaks, I pass Floater and OMG from The Cabin, out for their southbound slackpack. Floater seems to be doing well, in fact OMG is struggling to keep up. I also meet a section hiker named David. He's doing Maine this trip to finish the trail. His wife is slackpacking him every day. She tours the small towns then picks him up and they stay at B&B's. Similarly, I met Girl on Fire yesterday. Her husband is slackpacking her out of an RV. He got lonely with her gone so bought the RV to tag along. She loves getting showers and good meals every night. Her husband will even slackpack her through the 100 Mile Wilderness using private logging roads.I pass Grey Eagle near a shelter. He's doing the 13 mile section on a recovering knee. He's in his seventies and shows me how his knee swelled up. He suspects cartilage damage, maybe an ACL tear. This terrain is a real test for knees, but he's moving along surprisingly quickly for his age and injury. After a final very steep 700 foot climb I reach highway 17, my halfway point, and dig into breakfast leftovers and the bottle of Moxie I carried over all those mountains. It's a lot of food. I'm sitting on a bench by the highway with a gorgeous panoramic view of the enormous Mooselookmeguntic Lake with wind whipping through my hair. Two hikers come up from below. Both have blue shirts and red beards. "You together?" I ask, to strike up a conversation. Hikers often bunch up at stopping points so it's not an idle question. "Yeah, how'd you guess?" the taller one says laconically. "You're wearing the same hats," I note. "Very observant," he replies, offering no new information. I offer them the blueberry pancakes that I can't finish. They brush it off, then they move on. Two more hikers appear. I ask if they're hungry and want pancakes. "Do I? That would be fantastic! Trail magic! Thank you so much! This is great!" Turns out it's a father and son out for a few days. Both are "cool" and act like college buddies rather than family. They love the pancakes, and it makes me smile.Nearby there's a lookout turnoff on the road. Girl on Fire is meeting her husband and the RV. Grey Eagle is getting picked up by his hostel. A woman parks and asks if we're thru-hikers. She's here to meet her son Moose, the seventeen-year-old I hiked with yesterday and in Franconia Notch. It's two weeks since she last came to see him. She was raised in Lancaster county next door to my Chester county.I move on to the reportedly easy back half of the day. It's already 2:30 so I'm hoping to do the 13 miles at a three mile-an-hour clip. But there's easy and there's Maine easy. This turns out to be the muddiest stretch since southern Vermont. And there are tons of roots and rocks, plus numerous pointless ups and downs. True, there are no huge climbs or drops, but elevation change isn't the main determinant of easy. I can't imagine how anyone who actually walked this would say it was.Despite the wearying terrain I make decent time and finish by seven. A marathon in eleven hours. Not a Boston qualifier, but then again even the Kenyans would have trouble qualifying in this terrain. It has to get better. Right?Richard picks me up at the trailhead and takes me to the Farmhouse. He lived in Connecticut until February when he and his girlfriend hiked the AT from there to Maine. It was slow and brutal, he tells me. At one point they had a half inch of snow in their tent from their own breath condensing in the air! They were planning to go to Alaska to drive logging trucks, but fell in love with the Maine mountains and he's been working for the hostel since. At the Farmhouse, kids are playing tag in the wide open lawns. Stacy the co-owner has made a mistake and booked me for tomorrow (I suspect when Bear called her yesterday she did not expect me to cover all 26 miles in one day). The bunkhouse is full tonight. Another hiker also wants to stay. It's Blackfoot, a kid I met on my first night on the trail way back in Maryland. He had a shaved head at the time and is now very hairy, but he remembers me as well, probably because I showed up after dark half-dead from doing 39 miles my first day. Small world, the AT. Despite being off trail for five weeks I still run into people I know. I've heard of others nearby but haven't stumbled on them yet.In any case, Stacy makes good on my reservation by putting the two of us up in their suite. We have three queen beds, a TV, a kitchenette, a couch, a private bath, a private entrance, and a direct view of Rangeley Lake for the price of a bunk. Some upgrade!Tomorrow I'll see if I can finagle a handoff to their sister hostel in Stratton. It's going to rain all day. If I'm going to hike in the rain, at least I want a dry place to head for.