Date: 2005-07-05
From: Wildcat Shelter

To: William Brien Memorial Shelter 
Miles today: 19.6
Weather: overcast clouds

We were up and walking at 6:30 and as expected, it was a very physically tough day. I¢m sure there¢ve been harder 20 mile days that we¢ve done, but I sure can¢t remember when.Not a lot of big big uphills. I mean we had I think a 600 and a 1000 footer, but, tons and tons of little ones and they¢re getting bigger. They¢re getting to be 300 and 400 feet. Even when you¢re not climbing, the trail is pretty rough. There¢s lots of rocks. Lots of challenging rocks, actually.I just smashed a bee on the back of my neck.Anyway, New York takes you through a lot. Right from the beginning and going on for quite a while basically, the whole time we¢ve been in New York, takes you through a lot of very challenging, even dangerous, rock formations, and they seem to be mostly all uphill. In fact, today seemed like we were forever walking uphill. I never remember the downhills today. I just remember all the uphills and it seemed like it was always.Luckily it was overcast most of the day. And in fact I¢m waiting to see if it rains tonight because the barometer was falling. But never-the-less, even though the temperature stayed in the lower 80¢s, the humidity was just unbelievable. And walking across the rocks it was still hot because the rocks absorbed a lot of heat and were still radiating it from the day before. When I say rocks, these are not boulders a lot of times though there are a lot of boulders that we go across. It¢s a lot of really big house size formations. Some even bigger. Some stacked a hundred feet high. And the trail just takes you right up straight through them. You¢ve just got to put your trekking poles away sometimes and use both hands to pull yourself up.I went through a good eight liters of fluids today and I am still thirsty as hell.We made a lot of stops for breaks. We stopped at ten o¢clock and I cooked up on the top there where it was shady and there was a breeze. I made some ramen noodles with chicken in it. And around noon time, when we got to the entrance to Harriman State Park there was a man with a red truck there. We asked him where the closest store was and he said around three miles. Vern and I discussed it and we decided we were just going to keep on walking. That¢s what we did. A half hour later he pops out of a parking lot and tells us that if we drop our packs, one of us can go with him, and he will take us to the store, which we readily, very quickly did.I ended up going to the store and bought a couple one liter bottles of Coke, some beer, four slices of pizza. I jumped back in the truck and the guy took me back to where Vern was. We sat there in the middle of the road pigging out and drinking up. We sat there a good piece of time.We started walking again a few miles; five miles I think it was, until about three o¢clock, when we hit Tearotti Lake. There is a swimming area there with bathrooms, a park office and stuff like that. They have Coke machines and ice cream machines. The Coke machine unfortunately was broken. We ate our share out of the ice cream machine. We filled up on water because the shelter we were heading to, the William Brien Memorial Shelter, has a spring there that the book says is unreliable. So, we decided to pack water out.Vern jumped in the shower. I rinsed out my shirt and some other stuff and kind of hung around waiting for a little while to rest up. There was another gal there, obviously hiking, who I talked to. She ended up being a hiker from 2004 that did about half the trail and was coming up to finish the rest of it this time around. There was also a group of teenagers, all with packs on. It turned out that they were all heading to the same shelter that we were, which didn¢t really thrill us that much but, we went ahead and sat there until about four o¢clock. We hauled butt to the shelter. We did pretty good timing. 4.2 miles to the shelter. We were still there by 5:40, beating the group who ended up taking a blue blaze trail that was one mile, compared to the 4.2 mile that we did.Luna also showed up and set up camp here. They all decided to set up tents. Vern and I are the only ones in the shelter. Luna has her Henesey Hammock set up. Everyone basically ate together. The group ends up being a good little group of kids with two counselors. They sat here and cooked up burritos; offered us some. I elected not to take any because I had already cooked up chili mac. Very friendly group. They sat around here and pulled ticks off each other, which means there was a large number of ticks on this group of kids. That means that we really have to start paying attention for them. Good thing I¢ve got my BuzzOff clothing on. So far it seems to have helped out. I haven¢t found anything on me and I do periodically check. Impossible to check my hair, though. I¢ve got to do something about that soon.Anyway, it¢s getting dark. There¢s a deer.I went off into the woods to do my journal and talk and there is a deer about 30 feet from me just kind of wandering around. He doesn¢t care if I am here or not, as long as I¢m not moving. I think he¢s eating the blueberries, which by the way, for the past four days or so we¢ve been walking through wild blueberries. I¢ve wasted a lot of time actually, when I could have been walking, stopping, picking and eating blueberries. Vern isn¢t sure if they¢re raspberries or blackberries, but there are alot of those around, too. They could be black raspberries. There¢ve also been big bushes full of those. There¢s been no shortage of fruit laying around. It¢s been delicious. It¢s been a good pass time. The whole shelter is actually surrounded by them. Usually, they aren¢t ripe unless they¢re up on top of a ridge with the sun hitting them.Goodnight.