Date: 2022-06-10
From: Morgan Stewart Shelter

To: Stealth Site NY22
Miles today: 12.6
Weather: clear sky

Late Evening. Stealth Tenting about a mile north of NY22. Sharing a tent with Baxter and Jasper. Day 11.Almost as soon as we started hiking at High Point SP we started passing stone walls in the woods. They are all made with rocks as big as could be carried by a man, are no more than 3 feet high, and are most often haphazardly stacked. Their lines have been carefully planned and we¢ve passed only a very few that have been laid by a craftsman - stacked with care creating vertical sides, sharp corners, and flat tops. These walls, which must have taken days, weeks, months of labor are now being reclaimed by the forest within the AT corridor. We¢ve passed several dozen of these walls and there are certainly many more to e trail doesn¢t pass within view of. Robert Frost wrote a poem called ¢The Woodpile¢ about a split cord of maple cut and stacked deep in the woods. It¢s last lines: I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.It is a welcome distraction to imagine the men working to build these walls, perhaps carrying one rock at a time while the plow runs through a newly cleared patch of forest.The Appalachian Trail is sometimes derisively called ¢the green tunnel¢ - a moniker that is a sideways dig at the lack of views and the abundance of forest hiking. Other long distance trails in the US cross peaks twice as high as the AT and spend days of miles above tree line.  Even those who love the AT must nod in agreement since the name is an apt description of the trail.The miles of is morning and those of this afternoon are all a mash of trail and trees. It is a great season for leaf identification. Today was one of our longer days and the first 5 miles took an effort. We stopped before noon for a short lunch break about 6 miles from our dinner destination - NY 22, where there was a rumor of food truck and a ¢hiker friendly¢ plant nursery.  Word of the food truck set the boys alight and we did the next 6 miles in under 3 hours (quite a feat for us). We crossed railroad tracks and set up in the gazebo of the nursery. They sell refreshments so we bought 9 Klondike Bars in various flavors and 5 gatorades. Joni walked to the food truck with Baxter and Grayson and ordered a chicken dish from the Malaysian food truck.The railroad track ran right by the nursery. Grayson and Joni collet ¢pressed pennies¢ from the souvenir machines on our road-trips. So we laid several coins on the railroad tracks and waited. I have done this before with slow-moving freight trains in Oakwood. The train that came by our coins was doing 60+ mph! The coins took awhile to find afterwards and some are still there for future discovery.We cooked dinner (Knorr sides and tuna) about 4:00 and were walking back to the trail at 5:00. A mile or more through fresh cut hay pastures and up the mountainside brought us to two tent sites. We threw down, set up, brushes teeth, hung bear bags, and are sailing down for the night.Two short days to Kent. We need graph paper and ziploc bags.