Date: 2013-08-12
From: Start ME 17

To: Little Swift River Pond Campsite
Miles today: 8.4
Weather: clear sky

Just a reminder for our friends...we will write email updates every day, but only send them when we have a signal (none where we are tonight). Brenda, a good friend of ours, will post our updates in Trail Journals when she gets them. If you want to look at all of our trail journals, go to www.trailjournals.com/chipandsue2013.All of our trail journals are there if you look for the year in the column on the left side of the page. We use "Old Goat" and "Check 6" for our entries, and Chip's/Old Goat's will always be first even if I (Sue/Check 6) write mine first. This way if anyone just wants to read his they can stop after his entry, and if anyone just wants to read mine they can skip down to mine. Old Goat's notes:We are now in western Maine almost to the Canadian Border. We spent last night in the town of Stratton and got a ride to the trail this morning. We started hiking at 10:20am with a goal of Sabbath Day Pond Lean-to at 3.9 miles. We made it there by lunchtime and we were very pleased with our progress. We filtered water for lunch from the pond and then sat at the lean-to and ate. As we were eating we decided to hike to the next camping site down the trail for a total of 8.4 miles for the day. Today and tomorrow's hiking is somewhat a warmup for what is to come. The climbing is a bit harder than what we've been doing back home. We climbed about 500 ft as we left the road and then the trail leveled out for the next two miles. When it levels out I mean there is no appreciable gain in elevation but you are constantly gaining and losing small amounts. It is like going through dips in the road. After we had been hiking about 3 miles we had to climb Bates Ledge a sharp 250 ft climb. The back side of Bates Ledge is fairly steep and somewhat tricky, I'm glad it was a dry sunny day because the rocks were not slippery. As I mentioned earlier we moved on after lunch and the hill after we restarted was a 500 ft gain within a mile. We handled it well considering it is our first day. As we hiked today we kept getting passed by thru-hikers. They would pass us and disappear very quickly. I remember doing that when I thru hiked and I was a slow hiker by thru hiker standards. I'm mentioning these elevations to set the story for what is to come. The campsite is very nice with a flat spot to set up our tent, a nice spring for clean cold water and a pond with canoes. We will not be using the canoes but it does add a nice touch. The highlight of this site is I finally saw a moose eating on the edge of the pond. This is the first moose I've seen on the AT. Check 6's notes:We are enjoying the company of a very nice family who hiked in from Rte 4 with their 2 young sons. It's been nice to visit with them. I taught them the Girl Scout game called "Black Magic." I can't leave my GS leader self at home. :-). A great first day. I'm glad we didn't stop at the lean-to...that was WAY to early. Our prep hikes on the Finger Lakes Trail helped us be ready for today.I'm happy Old Goat finally saw his first moose on the AT. It was large, and not very far away. I'm a little worried about the huge mountains we'll be climbing in 2 days, but I'll work hard to keep the "one foot in front of the other gets us there" mindset.