Date: 2015-09-01
From: pinkham Notch

To: just past zeta Pass
Miles today: 9.0

My plan was to hitch to Pinkham Notch after Laurel left yesterday to get my boxes. I had to get them back to Gorham though because I wanted to bounce a couple of things forward to Stratton ME. My ankle was pretty swollen and sore and I really didn't feel like going. Just for giggles, I called the AMC place where the boxes were and asked if it would be possible to put them on the shuttle to town in the morning. To my astonishment, the girl in the other end of the phone said "yeah- we can do that!" I was so happy! We resupplied at Walmart and ate the best calamari I have ever had at Js followed by dinner at Pizza Hut. So this morning, I walked to the convenience store where the shuttle came in. I met the shuttle driver, who I had chatted with before at Crawford Notch while I was waiting for D.No and C.Shell, and he gave me my boxes. What a sweetheart! I saw Soda and Recalc, some of my favorite trail people, also waiting for bus and shuttles. Recalc was going home, his foot problems severe enough to end his hike for now. Big congrats to him for hiking almost 1900 miles on the AT! Soda was heading back to Mt.Washington, where he had been forced to shuttle down because of 80 MPH+ winds the other day. Me and my Gang are heading back to Pinkham Notch to start the Wildcats today, so we are all going in different directions.I brought my boxes back to the room, packed up what I wanted in my bounce box and went to the post office. By the time I got back to the room, my gang was packed and ready to go. We walked to Cumberland farms and got subs for the road, then hiked out with a 5 day resupply. This would turn out to be a big error in strategy and make us feel like major amateurs later in the day.We hitched out to Pinkham, getting two different rides because of space issues. I got there first and waited by the visitor center. This was supposed to be where we got off to go to Gorham before our side trail night hiking incident. We started our hike and it was not bad at first. I was so happy to be back on an actual trail. We got a late start so we didn't plan for more than 12 miles. Ha ha ha! That turned out to be wishful thinking. We passed some day hikers heading down and they wished us luck and told us to be careful. As the trail progressed, it became steeper and steeper and eventually turned into an all out rock climb. My poles won't collapse any more so I had them dangling from my wrist and they were getting very hrs to manage. I literally had to use both hands to climb. There were some handholds here and there. Up and up we went, stopping for breaks pretty often. I was guzzling water. D.No and I were not enjoying the day so much- though the weather was beautiful- but C.Shell was doing great. Her kidney stone either dissolved it is gone and she had a surge of energy that really kicked in. About half way up the first Summit, I was really tired. I was regretting packing enough food to get us to Grafton Notch when we could have just packed 2 days. Someone has reached out to us and offered to slack pack us and is picking us up there. Our reasoning was that we didn't want to get sucked in to more town time. (It can be hard to escape) We continued up to the second summit. There was an observation deck with people on it and of course, the famous gondola. I really wanted to go back down on that gondola but we kept hiking. We had a very steep descent to Carter Notch Hut and stopped for water and bathroom. We had been hiking for hours but had only gone less than 4 miles at this point. We hit the trail again and it continued to be hard! We passed a couple of lakes and resisted the urged to swim- but really, we should have. The next climb was Carter Done and I was just done. It took every bit of energy I had to get to the top. The views were amazing- it was super windy. I had one more climb , less than a half mile up Mt. Hight. The descent was hellish. Really hellish. It was so steep. I really could not hike any more and we started looking for a place to stop. We had passed a stealth site that was already taken but found a spot just past Zeta Pass. I was too tired to try my new beer can stove. All I ate were some cookies and then I crashed in my nearly falling down tent because of the broken tent poles.Some days are better than others.