Date: 2008-06-07
From: Glen Brook Lean-to MA 

To: Tom Leonard Lean-to MA 
Miles today: 14.3

Day 111 ¢ Saturday June 7 ¢ Tom Leonard Lean-to MA ¢ Miles Today: 14.3 Total Miles: 1514.9Boy did we hit a record with the heat, but more on that later. We started off the day pretty fast - up at 5:00 and on the trail at 5:30, as we had a hitch and knew the day was going to be hot and wanted to get rolling early. The ridge runner also wanted to get an early start and asked us last night to make sure he was up at 5:00 as well. As Grasshopper was heading down to the shelter to make sure he was up, she saw him coming up to the bear locker. He¢s motivated to head to town and a shower after his first week on the trail. The first part of our day brought us more rocks and ledges and they were still very wet from yesterday but we made it through those with no falls. However, later in the day on some wet slippery leaves, Grasshopper went down again. I'm not sure what the tally count is now - perhaps 13 or so. The game is over. She's won! Our ridge walking this morning took us, of course, out to the end of the cliffs on these nice wet slippery boulders, to see some views. We did not see any views. Why? Well, it was very hazy above us and 500' below us was a very heavy fog, which looked like clouds. So in other words, we had no view. We went up and over all those cliffs for a couple hours or so and had no view. After the rocks we entered about 4 miles of flat terrain, through fields and marshlands, which you would think would be great hiking conditions but unfortunately it was the worst mosquito infested area that we have yet had on the trail. They were just vicious. We would attempt to swat one and end up hitting three! Swat ¢¦flick the dead bugger off our skin. Swat ¢¦flick the dead bugger off our skin. Eventually we just swatted and stopped doing the ¢flick the dead bugger off our skin¢ because it slowed us down. As Grasshopper headed down the trail, Brakeman hollered several times, ¢there are dozens and dozens trailing you¢¦run!¢ And occasionally he would holler "There's 2 on the right side of your head. Smash 'em!"   It was just worse than we have ever seen and we were even wearing Deet! Someone's guidebook actually mentioned this was a bad area for mosquitoes. Hopefully it's the worst that we'll see and we'll be back down to normal levels of the pesky things for the rest of the trip. It was a little before 10:00 when we got to the road for our hitch and per our great guidebook of incomplete and inaccurate data, we started hitching east. We immediately scored a ride and said we needed to get to the Great Barrington post office. The man told us we were headed in the wrong direction. Not a surprise for us with this book. We crossed the road, stuck out our thumb and 2 seconds later we scored a hitch with the first vehicle to pass us. As the pickup truck pulled onto the berm, the passenger got out of the cab and said, "If you don't mind riding in the back (it was a covered cab), we can take you into the post office. I know it can be tough to hitch. I have a hard time hitching to my AA meetings." Our hearts stopped. Are we getting a ride with someone who has been drinking? Then we realized, he was the passenger. We never saw the driver until we got to town. We had a 3-mile drive into town - another nice quaint little New England town. When we arrived to town, both the driver and the passenger got out of the truck and the driver gave us a verbal tour of Great Barrington ¢ all the restaurants, etc. The whole time Grasshopper was getting more and more antsy as we just wanted to hit the post office before it closed and get back on the trail. We weren¢t planning on any restaurant stops, but we did not want to interrupt our kind Angels.Just when the verbal tour finished and we thought we¢d be on our way, the AA guy started talking and oh my gosh, did he have diarrhea of the mouth. He told us about a Grateful Dead concert he went to in Alaska, hitching the entire way! He hasn't had a drivers license for 8 years. Grasshopper was about to say that she was glad he wasn't driving then and realized that probably wouldn't be an appropriate thing to say so luckily she kept her mouth shut. The Grateful Dead concert was on the longest day of the year and of course being out in Alaska at that point in time, it would probably have been light for 23 hours ¢ very cool! Can't believe, though, that he hitched all the way across the country to Alaska. What an adventure that must have been! Luckily being Saturday, the post office was open until 12:30, not 12:00 per our book of inaccurate data, and not 10:30 as we feared. Boy were there a bunch of surprises waiting for us - from work friends and from family! And then, of course, we got our normal food drop. However, about 5-10 minutes up the trail, we realized that the food drop did not contain any breakfasts. I'm getting the feeling we didn't fill out the form right, or we¢ve made too many changes to our drop lists. Not a problem thanks to the wonderful care packages and the fact that we already had one breakfast left over from our previous segment. We'll split the remaining oatmeal breakfast into 2 meals and fill in the voids with a whole bunch of snacks and homemade oatmeal bars. We're going to be just fine but in the future, we need to go over our drop list with our shippers to make sure it's appropriate. And as we are packaging our food in the Post Office we need to review it more carefully so that we can hit a grocery store to fill in any void.   After sorting through all of our goodies at the Post Office, we walked just past the end of Main Street to get our hitch back out of town. Near where we stood was a bus stop where a young girl was getting ready to head off to tour the world via backpacking. We were too busy hitching to catch her whole story, but I think she had said, Africa, and perhaps, Istanbul Turkey were on her list of places to go. Within 5 minutes, a young gal in a red VW bug stopped and picked us up. She had no idea where the trail was located but luckily we paid enough attention as we were coming into town to direct her. She hopes someday to do the trail. Her VW bug gets the award for the smallest car for one of our hitches.   It was a tight squeeze, but we did it ¢ 2 hikers, 2 full backpacks, and 2 sets of hiking sticks plus the driver ¢ all in one VW bug!   The thermometer in town read about 82 degrees but we could tell as we began our hike around 11:30 that it was definitely getting hotter. As we were just getting ready to duck back into the woods, Grasshopper had her normal panic attack of ¢Do we have enough water?¢ We weren't quite sure if the intermittent stream that was listed in our book would be flowing. We thought it might be with the rain but we also knew that 6 miles in 90-degree temperatures with only 3 liters of water between the 2 of us would be a stretch. There were a couple houses just off the trail and she decided to head over to one to request some water. It turned out the building we approached, was a T-shirt manufacturer. The gentleman let us fill our water bottle from his water cooler. It was a real sweet deal to have cool water when we headed up the trail.   He mentioned that other hikers have stopped by his place asking for water. We weren¢t the only ones!Of course, not too far up the trail, perhaps a couple miles, there was a stream that was flowing nicely where we could have filtered. Oh well. We stopped, filtered and drank a whole bunch more water. We were sweating pretty hard. It was 90 degrees per our thermometer We got to camp about 3:30 and after pitching the tent, we went down a steep ravine to freshen up and filter water. Unfortunately just when we arrived, we heard huge thunder, so we skipped all of our tasks and boogied back up the huge ravine. We quickly threw the rain fly on the tent and got everything secured for a storm that never arrived! We gave up on going back down to that water source and went to the water source beside the shelter instead, which unfortunately is showing a lot of iron in the water. It¢s sort of discomforting to drink yellow or red water but we definitely were not going back down that steep decline. We've got the most awesome tent site that we've had on this entire trip. We're on an old wood tent platform with boards that are splintered and loose, but we¢re overlooking a valley with several ridges in the distance. It's been quite some time since we have seen wonderful views of mountain ranges. The shelter¢s register had a note to us from Strides - "keep on trucking to those behind me, like Bare Fodder, Grasshopper and Brakeman." It's real neat and encouraging to see that the folks who have passed us are thinking of us still. Although we're pokey, they are cheering us on! A great feeling to see that. Chris mentioned us the other day and now Strides has mentioned us. All the storm clouds and thunder that we had earlier have passed, but the heat has not. Its 7:30 and still 85 degrees! We can see the heat rash on our thighs and lower legs from today¢s exertion. We're hoping it cools soon so we can go to bed. We have the rain fly off the tent to get as much air circulation as possible. We're sitting on our mats with our sleeping bags stuck at the end of the tent so they're not touching us. We¢re wearing wet T-shirts with a wet bandana on our foreheads to help cool us. Despite the uncomfortable temperatures, we are enjoying our view over the valley and ridges and the cloud formations. Quite a cool view ¢ just not literally.Tomorrow is going to be a short day. We have a Plan A and a Plan B itinerary laid out - one more aggressive than the other, but on both plans, tomorrow is an 11.2-mile day because there's really no other option. It¢s supposed to be in the 90s again tomorrow so we'll probably head out of here as soon as possible. Then the next day after that we'll probably go back to the more aggressive plan which will be an 18.7-mile day. The other plan only had a 9.9 and then a 17.6-mile day. By doing the longer day, we can then get back into some reasonable miles rather than 2 days of short miles. Goodnight from 2 toasted and heat-rashed individuals hoping that it cools real soon!