Friday, August 7th - Almost to Dalton, Massachusetts

I had a lengthy conversation with Jonathan late tonight from the October Mountain lean-to where they are settled for the night. He couldn't sleep and every other hiker in the shelter area, Madeline included, had shut down for the night. They are picking up their next mail drop in Dalton, Mass and had intended to do so tomorrow. The post office, however, is open only till noon and they have 12 miles to go, so they will be forced to wait till Monday for their drop. Jonathan had stomach pains and had to lie down for several hours today which is what put them behind schedule. He's feeling fine now. They will head on into Dalton tomorrow and investigate some interesting possibilities the town has to offer. There are a couple of homes in Dalton where hikers are welcome to sleep on their porches and use their facilities; they may even be fed.

Some people/places in trail towns offer hikers slack packing service. When slack packing, you hike a day, liberated from your pack, which is driven to your prearranged destination. It gives you a chance to cover a lot of ground without the added burden. The hikers are going to look into a variation of that so their weekend isn't a total loss mileage-wise. They are thinking they could get dropped off 20 miles or so up the trail on Sunday (leaving their packs in Dalton) and then hike back to Dalton in order to pick up their mail drop Monday morning. They could then beg a ride back to the place they began their hike Sunday and be 20 miles ahead.

They have met up with a very interesting retired couple, trail names - Smoke Stack and Mother Nature, whose company they are enjoying a lot. These two are section hikers who live near the trail in Georgia. They completed about 1/2 the trail in 2004, another section in 2008, and plan to finish the remaining sections by summer of 2010. They have a lot of wisdom and good trail advice. Mother Nature attributed Jonathan's difficulty today to heat exhaustion.

In addition to Smoke Stack and Mother Nature, they are sharing the shelter tonight with 3 young men who just got on the trail yesterday and will be only hiking for 5 days. Impressively, these guys made pizza from scratch for dinner. They made a yeast dough which they rose in the sun and cooked in a pan.

Last night when they arrived at their intended shelter at Goose Pond, they were very pleasantly surprised to find it to be a cabin - two stories complete with bunk beds and mattresses and a caretaker who provided them with water bottled from a nearby spring and made them coffee and pancakes for breakfast in the morning - 5 star trail accommodations! Jonathan thinks he left his long underwear behind in the cabin. It's proving somewhat challenging to hang on to all their belongings.

They are back to hiking together - Madeline has picked up her pace. They have been hiking through very old and vital hemlock forests. Hemlocks are very slow growing and these are huge. There is still a lot of fungus and something called club moss which looks like tiny evergreen trees sprouting up from the forest floor. Club moss is indicative of really rich, healthy soil. There are also these really cool things that Jonathan describes as looking like ghost flowers which they thought were some kind of a mushroom. They found out they are Indian Pipe which is unique in that it has no chlorophyll. It relies on decaying matter so it lives like a fungus but reproduces through seeds like a plant.

They have also traversed a valley area between the mountains - low, hilly country with farmland, horses and meadows of flowers. They have seen a lot of ponds - some mountain ponds, some lowland wetland ponds, and a beaver pond. They've observed the mating of dragonflies in flight and a hornet devouring another insect.

There's been no rain since Tuesday - it's been beautiful and cool. When it is rainy, slugs are somewhat of a nuisance. They settle on your pack and its contents, cook wear included.

Last night they met a hiker, trail name Lion King, who is on his second thru-hike. He loves how it all feels so familiar. Jonathan can now see the allure of repeating a thru-hike. He is becoming very attached to the trail; there is a human quality to the trail and one begins to feel a part of it.
Lion King was also the first person to hike the Discovery Trail which goes coast to coast. It took 16 months and passes through Cincinnati. Amazingly, he remembered details of passing through Cincinnati, like the "mushroom house" near the bend on Erie Avenue and crossing the bridge into Covington and staying at the Drawbridge Inn.

They came across a Trail Magic Box today that was filled with apples, bananas, pop tarts, granola bars and cookies. Tomorrow when they head to Dalton, Mass, there is a planned detour to a blueberry farm where there lives a woman who allows blueberry picking and provides hikers with blueberry cookies. There are so many wonderfully delightful sweet little acts of kindness and charity shown the hikers; it is a culture unto itself .

So this is what happens when you have a long conversation late at night - there's a lot of little details about which to write. For those of you so dutifully following, I hope this isn't tedious to read. ~Amy