Date: 2011-08-24
From: Glencliff, NH

To: Hanover, NH
Miles today: 41.9
Weather: clear sky

OK... so by now anyone following my blog has figured out that something happened since I have not updated my entries since August 23rd!!!! Well it's true, something has happened, spoiler alert! (I'm off the trail) It's now December 8th, and I have been off the trail for over two months, a lot has happened since coming home that has occupied my time not typing out my adventure. I'll get to it in due time, but now I am finally coming out of my procrastination state and starting write down everything that happened, I'm sure that my friend Missy will appreciate this since she asked me to update a long time ago.August 24th - Woke up feeling great! I really enjoyed staying at the Hiker Welcome Hostel, I had watched 3 movies with fellow hikers, updated my blog, ate a wonderful BLT from the gas station down the road, and I got to sleep on a mattress! Super Turtle and Serenity decided not to stay at the hostel and hiked down the trail a ways to stealth it out. So in the morning I hiked out with Rickshaw, we were making pretty good time over the few hills out of Glencliff and got to NH 25C and thought that we should have caught Super Turtle and Serenity. Sure enough, once we were in the wood across the road we caught them, as we were talking a man walked down the trail. His name was Cool Breeze and seemed like a pretty free spirited hiker! The next three miles to Ore Hill Shelter were some of the most wonderful walking miles, the trail was essentially carpeted with pine needles, making it incredibly soft to walk on.When we reach Ore Hill Shelter we were the only hikers there, but not for long! One hiker came in and set his pack down (can't remember his name... you'll see why in a second) and said that there were a bunch of people behind him. As we kept eating, more and more hikers came into the shelter site to eat lunch, probably close to 15 nobos had arrived, that day we must have passed at least 40 nobos!!!!!! We had finally hit "The Bubble"... dun dun dun! Something funny also happened that day, the four of us (plus Nola) were walking down the path with Rickshaw leading, then me, Serenity, and then Super Turtle, when we ran into another group of 4 nobos.... hiking exactly boy, girl, girl, boy... it was the northbound version of us!!!!!! (except they didn't have a cute dog with them)We then started the long climb up Mt Cube, which really wasn't anything compared to what we just climbed in northern NH, but it was the end of a hot day, so we stopped at the top and relaxed in the sun for over an hour... I think I even fell asleep on the hard granite summit! We didn't have many more miles to go... just down, less than 2 miles to Hexacuba shelter. This shelter was WICKED cool! Dartmouth kids had designed and built it, and it was basically a really weird math project... a shelter with six sides! They say you can only fit eight people it, but its way bigger than that! It was pretty windy that night too, I was glad to be in the shelter. The funny thing about this place too was the privy was 5 sided... a pentagon, someone silly wrote on the wall (I found that reading things people had written in the privies was actually a highlight of going into some of those nasty places) something about the privy being Satan's home... a pile of poop!August 25th - Woke up in the morning to Nola wanting to climb into my sleeping bag, she also tried Rickshaw, and then even a stranger!!!! I guess she knew it was going to be an icky day for hiking and wanted to stay in bed! Hiking started off okay until we got to the base of Smarts Mountain when we started hiking into the low lying clouds. Rickshaw was wayyyy in front of me (he had decided to get a head start on the day) and I started hiking slightly faster than Serenity and Super Turtle. When I reached the top I couldn't see anything. I found Rickshaw waiting in the fire tower where I climbed up with some snacks, but Rickshaw said he didn't feel safe there... he said that every time the wind blew you could feel the tower move. I was part way through my gummy pack when I felt it too and we immediately went down to the Fire Warden's Cabin where we waited for Serenity and Super Turtle. I was pretty cold and wet, getting to that miserable state where you just want to get in your sleeping bag and stop hiking. Super Turtle and Serenity finally showed up and filled us in on their climb up the mountain... where Super Turtle had run into a tree fallen part way across the trail and slashed open his head and was bleeding pretty good. We decided to try and cut the day shorter than planned and hike only to Trapper John Shelter. In doing this we would also get to stop at the ice cream man's house! As we hiked down Smarts Mountain we were looking for the "technical" climbing sections the nobos had warned us about... there weren't any... that's when we all realized that the nobos that had told us this had not yet gone over Moosilauke (the first 4000 footer of NH on the AT) and we were now the "more experienced sobos"!!!!!!! Hiking down near Lyme Center we were told the day before by the mass of nobos that there were yellow jackets near the concrete milepost..... when we got there someone had left a little note saying "Caution Yellow Jackets", we paused only for a second to read the sign and from the back Rickshaw yells "RUN!!!" Now imagine for a second four hikers (with quite large packs on) running/bouncing down the trail... I started laughing... it was almost so funny that I stopped running, but I couldn't or Super Turtle and Rickshaw would run we over! Then I started thinking... what if I twisted my ankle while we running, then I would be trampled and then stung by the yellow jackets! I stopped laughing and it then became a serious matter. We stopped for a second and found that one was trying to sting Rickshaw through his gators and one had stung Nola! So we kept running for a few more minutes for good measure.When we go to the Lyme Dorchester Rd we made a stop at the ice cream man's house, he lives about 25 yards off the trail! We filled our water bottles waiting for him, weighed our packs on his front porch, bought all the soda cans he had in a cooler, and Rickshaw and I even played a game of croquette... we really wanted ice cream but we had been waiting too long and it looked like it was going to rain. I waited back a few minutes because I wanted to see if I could wait it out a little longer than everyone else, but he still didn't come. I also was a little sick of hiking with everyone in a pack, I always liked hiking easy in the afternoon, I didn't know how much I had given this up until I started hiking with a group (especially one where they like to make slow miles in the morning and race into camp in the afternoon). So the last mile to the shelter I hiked alone, which was nice for a change. When hanging out at camp we had a fire going and in the spare fire pit Nola had sniffed out a mouse and was trying to move the stones out of the fire pit to get at the mouse!Late in the afternoon it started pouring! I turned my phone on to check my messages and make some calls if I needed to. I had 4 messages, one each from my dad, mom, Nate, and my little sister warning me about hurricane Irene approaching and it would hit in a few days. I told everyone about this and the other guy in the shelter said his dad was telling him to get off the trail too. This is when I convinced Super Turtle, Serenity, and Rickshaw that it would be a good idea to come stay at my dad's house, about an hour away from Hanover and wait out the storm. So it became a plan... my dad would pick us up on the 27th and the storm would hit on the night of the 27th.August 26th - We got started hiking up to Holts Ledge with Serenity leading and she was going pretty fast, for some reason I just couldn't keep up that pace. My first climb of the day is never very pretty... Once we started going downhill it got a little better, but they were all still going really fast, I don't know what it was about today, but I just couldn't get my pace up. I struggled going up Moose Mountain, on the way up Serenity and I ran into a few men that were slightly sexist... their comments pissed me off. When we got down into Etna we were planning on staying at a hostel for the night then hiking into Hanover the next day, but they were out of town for the weekend when we called so we were on the side of the road not sure what to do... well we were actually hiding off in the woods just off the road. Etna was only a mile away, but hiking down the road was not really that fun so the first car we heard Serenity ran out to the road and stuck out her thumb. Well the guy didn't think she needed a hitch, she startled him so bad he thought she was in trouble so he stopped quickly (had a big truck). When we saw he had stopped the rest of us ran out of the woods and jumped in the back of his truck! We basically forced the guy to give us a hitch... it was only a mile and he was going in that direction... and we were already in his truck At the Etna general store we all had hot dogs, chips, soda, and Rickshaw and I picked up some Mikes hard lemonade for the shelter we were staying at just another four miles down the trail. While we were eating our lunch outside the general store we met these two guys that had gone for a morning bike ride and were just finishing with a little lunch. They offered to take us back to the trail which was very nice! Within the next mile of trail we came to a sign that pointed one way to the north (the way we came) and then pointed down a "trail" to the south... which was more like an old dirt/grass road... for some reason it didn't feel right and Super Turtle started bragging that he knew the way, but there were no white blazes and all of a sudden we came out into someone's backyard. We walked back to the sign, which was a post with the signs and arrows on it, and realized that someone had lifted the sign out of the hole and turned it 90 degrees so it would send southbounders in the wrong direction and northbounders in the correct direction... what a dirty northbound trick!!!!!! Another issue we ran into was a house that was offering water, we should have taken it because when we got to Velvet Rocks Shelter the water was sooo gross!That night we met Brother Bear(? I think that's his name) who was kind of hiking back and forth around the trail because his family, except for his mother, had all died in a car accident in March, he had been hiking the trail since, and had already done it a few years before. Little bear had also decided that he was going to wait out the storm at that shelter... crazy. While we were at Velvet rocks we also met some high nobos and one of Serenity's friends, Oatmeal and his friend Chill. They told us all about their adventures and some great places to stop and stay down the trail. We stayed up a little late because we knew we only had about a mile to walk the next day into Hanover to wait for my dad to pick us up and wait out the storm.