Date: 2011-07-19
From: Melville Nauheim Shelter

To: 0.4 miles past Kid Gore Shelter
Miles today: 13.2
Weather: few clouds

(In which Sarah gets a trail name and some night hiking experience)We sleep in until almost 9am, then head up to the shelter for breakfast. Sarah spreads some humus on a tortilla, and when Natty sees the humus he snaps to attention. "You're packing humus?! Genius," he compliments yogiingly. Sarah has plenty so she offers him some, and the new tortilla and humus wrap is passed around the shelter as Fish and Bate notice that Natty has acquired humus. They heap praises upon Sarah for sharing the snack ("Did it hurt? When you fell from heaven?") and decide that she should be called Chickpea. She likes this name, so Chickpea she becomes.Chickpea can't find her glucometer, an important device for checking her blood sugar and managing her diabetes, so we scour the shelter looking for it, eventually finding it on the ground between the tent and shelter. When we are ready to start hiking and Chickpea puts on her pack, she realizes that one half of the buckle for the hip belt has fallen off, so we return to search mode again. The buckle proves more elusive, and half an hour goes by before Mother Goose finally finds it hidden in the mud.When we eventually start hiking it is almost noon, and we have once again burned through our safety buffer of extra time. Our hiking pace is slow -- just a little over a mile an hour -- and flies circle our heads endlessly as we hike. We each carry one trekking pole and alternate between using it to walk with and using it as a fan to wave flies away from our heads. Six hours of hiking brings us to the first shelter where we stop for a break and dinner. We consider stopping for the night, but this would likely mean extending Chickpea's stay and her having to pay for a change to her bus ticket. So after dinner we decide to push forward, headlamps already prepared for some night hiking.Not long after after we leave the shelter we come to a fire tower -- the first I've seen on the trail in New England -- and despite the limited daylight we decide to go up for the view and some pictures. From the top of the tower I can see that, after hundreds of miles of hiking near civilization, the trail has once again returned to the woods, with nothing but trees and a distant lake to be seen.The sky darkens, and in the shade of the green tunnel the light fades even earlier. We keep our headlamps turned off for as long as we can, and when we finally turn them on the world outside our circles of light darkens by comparison into obscurity. With night hiking our pace falls even further, to well under a mile an hour, and only the elevation profile is enough to convince me that we are still miles away from the next shelter when it seems like we should have been there ages ago. When we finally reach the turn off for the shelter it is 10:30pm, so rather than trying to stealthily look for a tent spot and set up without waking the shelter occupants we decide to continue further and look for a tent spot up the trail that Swift mentioned.The tent spot is supposed to be located on the site of an old shelter 0.4 miles down the trail, but it is difficult to judge distances slowly hiking in the dark, and after 45 minutes has gone by it is not entirely clear if we have passed it or not. The terrain is rocky and hilly, without a chance of setting up a tent, so when we finally find a small patch of level ground directly next to the trail we toss our packs down and set up the tent. The spot is too small for the fly to fit, and since it wasn't supposed to rain back when I checked the weather in Bennington, we leave the fly off and get a view of the stars though the tent mesh. We eat a few snacks, brush our teeth, hang a bear bag, and then get in the tent just before midnight. "You're still going to write in your journal?" Chickpea asks as she prepares for bed. Not having skipped a night yet, I say I am, and stay up clicking the keys on my Kindle as Chickpea sleeps.While the hiking day was longer and a lot later than would have been ideal for a beginner hiker, it does at least put us in much better shape for tomorrow. It also brings back my memories of the earlier part of my hike when I would get up early and hike past dark, and I'm glad that Chickpea got a taste of night hiking, and how different it is from hiking during the day, even if it might have been nice to have a slightly smaller serving.