Date: 2010-09-14
From: Happy Hill Shelter, VT

To: Cloudland Shelter, VT
Miles today: 11.1

Rained hard several times during the night. Glad I didn't need to "go out" during the night. Today we were almost last to start out from the shelter. Others left right around 6 a.m. when light just began to illuminate the trees so they could clip out the miles. A guy we haven't met is tenting next to the shelter. Guess we didn't hear him arrive last night with the rain noises. This morning Messy Garage turned up his weather radio so we could hear the forecast. High of 62, low of 49, partly cloudy. Sounds good for hiking, we'll sweat even with temps around 60. Our plan today is to hike 9 miles. We need to hike about 15 miles daily in order figure out how to make it back to our car & drive the 12 hrs back home in time to catch our plane to CA. But given the more rugged terrain that doesn't seem to have many plateaus(mostly ups and downs) our mph rate is lower than it's been on past sections. The hike day was nice til we crossed a large forest-surrounded meadow that was criss-crossed by trails. What's that sign just over in the woods? Ah hah, a sign with arrow pointing the way to Podunk Rd. which our trailguide shows us going across...so let's go that way. Wrong choice! Blazes changed from white to pale gray, but optimistically we ignored that oddity & marched on and on, intersecting with lots of wide unmarked trails, even walking by a dilapidated red clapboard building smack in the woods. Ended up we were "lost" for 45 minutes in a complex maze of trails. Finally we got back to the base of the first "wrong" trail, retraced our steps uphill(isn't it something how we followed the path of least resistance and now we are paying the price?), then picked the correct path to cross the meadow. It was neat how we could smell that we were getting closer to the flower-filled meadow. Such a sweet warm smell. We were relieved to finally come out of the woods at Podunk Rd., no doubt miles away from wherever that other Podunk Rd trailsign would've brought us. The trail led us now to stroll along the road, passing a former schoolhouse, now a residence. The friendly man who lives there waved and hollered out a greeting to us, telling us he had a nice chat with Zephyr a little earlier when he hiked past. The man's dog was super excited to see us. He wagged himself silly wanting to be petted and paced the high roadside retaining wall on the front yard, but he was too far off the road to reach. Just a few hundred feet further we came to a deli--right at lunchtime! Take It Easy and I ate huge sandwiches and drank large iced teas to conserve our water(in case water is scarce later on). Then we rested in wooden lawn lounge chairs in the sideyard's breezy sunshine... ahhh. My shoulders and Take It Easy's felt better when we put our empty beer bottles in the deli-s recycling bin. Well, time's a wastin' so we geared up, and ploddded onward, mostly uphill thru varying terrain: wonderfully scented meadows, shady fern carpeted woods, tall pine forests, evergreen forests, over soft trail and rooty trail, including a risky-footing 10 foot stone slab section. Walked over 2 barely running streams. Hope water's not going to continue to be a problem. We'd watered up at the deli, so we're good for now. This shelter is 0.2 miles off the trail on the property of a farmer and his wife. Much of it is wooded. We had to go down a winding path that goes thru woods, meadows, and intersects other footpaths, clearings, and tractor paths. Gee, altho there are signs here and there, not every turn is signed. Sure hope we can find our way out in the morning. It's now 6:07 p.m. and we're the only ones here listening to an excited barrred owl chatting loudly. There are empty Long Trail beer bottles in the firepit from previous hikers. Those remind us of the trailmagic beers of last night. Watched darkness rapidly descend after 7 p.m. We could see our breaths earlier in the chilly air, but now all is pitch black. The air is cool enough I put on my turtleneck for sleeping, and Take It Easy put on his camoflauge face/neck hoodie. Things we saw today: one sluggish cold roange newt, the abandoned Jerico School(the red bldg in the wds), the circa 1800 schoolhouse/home near the deli, lots of stone fences and huge stone-lined pits in the woods while we were wandering lost, one large toad, soomeones dropped hardvinyl-case with cigarettes on the forest path, bluejay, lots of mica sparkling the trail dirt, fuzzy dandelions, wild VA strawberry plants without fruit, crabapples dangling from their tree branches.