Date: 2015-07-21
From: Rutland, VT

To: Campsite 1724.4
Miles today: 20.2

Well, our first hike back after our zero day. Guess what the weather does? Yes rain!! We can't get any breaks with the weather. Today's forecast was isolated thunder showers. We now know that isolated means wherever we are at. We didn't get just one thunderstorm but four. Yes, four and not just four little showers of rain but four diwnpours!! Our new boots aren't so new and dry any more! We are thinking we could sell our rain services. Wherever there is a drought, we will just hike for a few hours, the rain will come and the drought will end.    Let us write more about our day. It started off nicely with a trail angel taking us back to the trail head. We started hiking at 7:51. The weather was sunny, no humidity. The sky was blue. A perfect day for hiking. We passed Kent Pond early in the day. It looked so peaceful. It would have been nice to use one of the row boats by the shore. We didn't though as we wanted to make some good miles today.   We hiked on down to Thundering Falls. The falls were beautiful as the water cascaded over the rocks. There was so much water going over the falls. Of course, this was because of all the rain that has been falling. After the falls, we had our bug climb for the day, 1300 feet in just 1.3 miles. It was a really steep climb but the trail was fairly nice. Also, we have come to realize any more, that a nice trail means limited rocks, roots and mud. We made it to the top, sweaty and out of breath.    We came down Quimby Mountain. We passed lots of SoBos as we came down. We chatted with a few. We realized, if we chatted with all of them, we wouldn't get any hiking done. Now, we are only saying "Hi". More importantly, coming down, we saw our second moose. Or as Brian Regan, the comedian calls them, moosen!! This one was a male as it had antlers. It also didn't circle around us like the first moose we saw. This one just stood there looking at us. We watched him for several minutes.   Today's terrain after the one big steep up and down were lots and lots of ups and downs. We hiked through an evergreen forest. The aroma was very nice. It smelled like Christmas. We took our typical breaks - morning, lunch and afternoon. As we took our afternoon break, we heard thunder. We cut our break short.   Just as we started hiking, the heavens opened up and it poured rain. We hunkered down by a tree. We used our ponchos as covers. If we hadn't had done this, we would have been soaked from the rain. We thought it was going to be just a short thunderstorm but it just kept going and going. It was actually 3 storms that passed by us. Each one seemed to be more intense than the other one. The last one had us a bit concerned because the lightening was so close to is and the booms of thunder were crazy loud. Eventually the rained slowed and we continued hiking. We had a long descent down to Vermont route 12 road. It rained off and on while we hiked so now we were pretty much soaked. We made it to the road and were planning on getting water from a nearby stream but the rain had swollen the stream and it was very muddy so we decided to press on. We hiked uphill for about 15 minutes and found a spot to pitch the tent. We soon had everything set up and it was just in time. Another storm is dumping more rain as we write this now.