Date: 2010-07-13
From: High Point Shelter

To: Pochuck Mountain Shelter
Miles today: 12.4
Weather: moderate rain

~~~Second Night Alone in a Shelter~~~Parts of today were so beautiful and so painful. First the beautiful part. A lot of this area is bogs and the maintainers have created these plank trails that you hike over the bogs on. Makes for a lot of mosquitos as well. You learn to spray a little Deet on your comb and run it through your hair to keep them away from your head.The best part of the day was this long walk around the Wallkill Preserve, these ponds created as a marshland for migrating birds and also a swan family (took a photo). It was lightly raining and misty and all the birds were there; very lovely.Then, get back into the woods and I am crossing on these boards, and they are slimy with rain and algae, and even though I'm taking my time, yep, my right foot goes up and my left foot and leg are dragged UNDER a board and scraped all the way up the calf of the very leg I've been nursing the past two days. Down on my back I go, into the bog, into a sticky plant with thorns and I am absolutely screaming from the pain. I cannot begin to tell you how much it hurt. It took several minutes before I could gather myself up and pull myself to a standing position to resume hiking. It was a complete mess.Still had three miles to get to the shelter for the evening and it was the grace of God that I got there. (Another data book moment). In the data book, it says to get water at the spigot from the abandoned house at the bottom of the mountain before you reach the shelter. Since I only had one liter, I needed two more for the evening and the next day, so I pulled myself up the LONG UPHILL driveway to this house to get to a spigot...that had no water. Rats. The house next door looked lived in, so I went BACK down the long driveway and up the road to get to the neighbor's house and up THEIR long uphill driveway to knock on their door and ask to use their outside hose for water. No answer.Going around the side of their house, they had a beautiful vegetable garden and a lovely water hose that I used to fill up all of my bottles' you get desperate enough to get water wherever you can. On the way down, I made a note of their house number (316 on Lake Wallkill Road) so I can send them a postcard to say Thank you for the use of their hose. So, going back up the trail and there is a sign, pointing in the direction of the abandoned house, for water. RATS! Turns out, there IS a working spigot; it's in the BACK of the house and NO WHERE in the data book does it say, hey you dumb hiker, go up the Trail and there is a side trail to all the water you need. How stupid is that ~~~But, I did get the water I needed. Got to the shelter as it was only .5 up the mountain from the road. Did my chores, decided to sleep in the shelter as there were no good trees available for my hammock and it was raining and hunkered down for another night alone. And again, the only visitor I got was Warren Doyle, coming up to read the shelter journal and give me a few words of advice concerning shin splints. And then, he was gone and I had to sleep in my hammock on the floor of the shelter because of the mosquitos and I got virtually no sleep due to pain and bugs. I did, however, appreciate having the shelter to myself as I laid out everything I had to dry. My plan was to go to a local hostel for a few days to heal up and with that, I said my prayers and listened to various animal life trounce all the leaves outside my shelter, too tired to even care if a grizzly came into camp. Hiking is such fun ~~~