Date: 2009-08-20
From: Long Pond Tote Road, Maine

To: Third Mountain Trail
Miles today: 7.7

Back in the North Woods of Maine after a week of work at home. We are now based at Shaws in Monson and loving it! Sue, Dawn and staff are wonderful and how they remember everyone's names and destinations is beyond us. We have a room with a double bed/shared shower/AYCE breakfast and the companionship of all of the thru/day/ and section hikers. What could be better? Access:South--Long Pond Tote Road can be accessed from the north by way of Greenville or the south by way of Monson. If you access it by Monson, the road is impassable (for most vehicles) and you must hike 1.6 miles into the AT. We chose to access through Greenville via the Katahdin Ironworks Road. This is almost an hour drive but it brings you right to the trail and works with our northern access.North--We planted our car here yesterday. Since we drove up from Portland, it was easier to go into Katahdin Ironworks via Rt 15, 1 mile past the Gulf Hagas Parking lot, turn left on Chairback Mt. Road and go 2 mi to the new parking area and new trail put in by AMC. We then exited Katahdin Ironworks by going north into Greenville. The Hike:We started hiking north and immediately came to Long Pond Stream. The water was still high enough here that we had to ford the river. The stream was moving fast, but only about knee-high. The rocks were so slippery you can not imagine how you would do this in deep water! We (Bugsy) had the bright idea that we would ford the stream wearing old sneakers and throw them back over to the southern bank to retreive when we went to pick up our car this afternoon...the plastic bag broke and one of the sneakers is now bobbing out in the Atlantic Ocean! It would have been quite comical to watch us chase it downstream, but the current was faster than our rock-hopping. The hike started following Long Pond Stream upstream and then after a while we started climbing the spine of Barren Mountain. We climbed about 1000' over the next mile to get to the Barren Ledges! The view was great...down onto Lake Onawa and beyond. We have a friend whose cousin has a camp there, so we took several 'aerial' photos of the lake. We went relatively level for the next mile and then an easy 500'/mile climb up to Barren Mt. There were 360 degree views if you walked around the top. It was great looking back to Barren Ledges and over to Chairback Mt. where we had been last week. We talked to a lot of thru hikers. They were trying to see the first glimpse of Katahdin via the old fire tower (as listed in the book), but no luck from this peak. We met Dennis Quinn/Flex whom we have been following since he left Springer in March (he is from the same PA town as Burly Girl's sister and has a great trailjournals site). We also came across a thru hiker who sprained her knee and it looks like she will be leaving the trail...after over 2000 miles...very sad...gave her an ace bandage and tried to wait up for her at our lunch break to tell her that we could drive her out. Turns out she spent the night in the shelter and turned around the next day and went back down Barren Mt to be picked up by Shaws.The trail after Barren Mt was very rough...down steep/up steep and through a bog that was listed in our book as a home for some rare species of 'carnivorous' plants.Went on forever and finally came to the Third Mt. Trail, a blue blaze that went back down 1.4 miles to the logging road. This was a tough day!