Date: 2006-08-01
To: Island Pond Outlet
Miles today: 0.0

by RightyTHANK GOODNESS FOR TRAIL ANGELSBefore I expand on the horrors of New York, first I have to tell you about the trail angels who saved our lives. Water is almost non-existent in New York. Many of the shelters have no water near and most of the streams and creeks are dried up. Twice today, at road crossings, we found water that had been left by trail angels. Each time, we were almost out of water. Today was brutal. The hardest day we ever had and the closest I've come to really loosing it. I'm just so happy I was hiking with three other people, Skywalker, Jericho and Possum. The temps were in the high 90's and the humidity as high. With the heat index, the temp was 110 degrees. We were going across rock ridges and boulder climbing all day. I sweated so much there was no way to replenish. On the third mountain accent that had multiple ridges, I thought I couldn't go another step. I was so over heated and so exhausted, I told Skywalker if I had to climb any more rocks, I was going to sit down and cry. Of course, he reminded me that after the cry, I'd still have to get up and climb. We still had one more peak and ridge to get over. New York doesn't have mountains, but the hills are all rocks and you have to hike across the ridges. We spent almost 7 hours mountain climbing across four of them in the blazing sun. Once we reached the top of the fourth ridge, we had a very steep decent on something called "AGONY GRIND". It was worse than the name implied. My legs were so weak and downhills are tough on the knees and this downhill was climbing down boulders. Much, much scarier than going up. Part way down, we ran into a fellow who was "running" up the mountain. Turns out he was a trail angel and had started up to see if there were still hikers trying to get down. Paddy-O was a life saver. Once we got down and to his truck, we drank 2 gator aids and ate candy bars and snacks. That should have hydrated me. We only had a 2.1 mile climb to get to a lake and a campground he told us about. On the way up, I experienced my first bout with heat exhaustion. First, my leg muscles started cramping, then I felt dizzy and light headed and sick. I was lucky to finid a rock on the trail that I didn't have to climb over; so I sat down on it. Even sitting, I was still dizzy and nauseous. I unhooked my pack, and got it off of me...just in case I passed out. What a horrible feeling! Finally (probably only a couple minutes later) Jericho came up the trail and saw me and knew immediately what was wrong. He started squirting water on my head trying to cool me down. It helped and once we started hiking again, he stayed right behind me in case I fell back. I was so weak it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. When we finally got to the campsite at the lake, we found we couldn't get into the water from where we were. The guys did go down and filled my water bottles so I could hydrate. By the time I got my tent set up, I collapsed into it. It was still so hot, that I lay in a pool of sweat on the pad. I was just too sick and weak to do anything about it so I just lay there. I was too sick to eat. Tomorrow was anothe day. I was just glad to have survived this one.