On Burnt Rock Mountain
My husband Nat and I are back from our 91-mile adventure on the Long Trail!
We met some incredibly strong, funny, thoughtful, adventurous people. And trekked for two days with our dear friend and mountain companion Skip. Thanks, Candlelight and Velveeta, Trailspice, Becky and Levi, the Utah couple, Babyface and Stefan, and the Three Remaining Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Famine, War, and Death)! You inspired us. And thanks to the Let’s Go Crew (Allas-y, Konesburg, and Basai), who found my backup alcohol stoves at Cowles Cove and mailed them back to me from Jonesville, Vermont. Finer citizens never lived.
We started where we left off last year, at Lincoln Gap, roughly Mile 151, intending to get to Journey’s End at the Canadian border, but we didn’t know how things would go. It’s been a long time since either of us carried this kind of weight for so many days. I mean, those packs were like l-e-a-d. The great irony was that we weren’t out long enough to get up to really high mileage; our longest day was about 15 miles. But, covering fewer miles a day than we did when we were long-distance hikers for four months meant that we had to carry more food which, of course, slowed us even more.
Day 1: Lincoln Gap to Glen Ellen Lodge.
Day 2: Glen Ellen Lodge to Cowles Cove Shelter.
Day 3: Cowles Cove Shelter to Bamforth Ridge Shelter.
Day 4: Bamforth Ridge Shelter to Buchanan Shelter (including hitching into Jonesville and collecting our box of food for the next several days).
Day 5: Buchanan Shelter to Taylor Lodge in Nebraska Notch, where we met Skip.
Day 6: Taylor Lodge over the formidable Mount Mansfield to Taft Lodge.
Day 7: Taft Lodge to Smugglers Notch and trip into Stowe, Vermont.
Day 8: Took a cab back out to Smugglers Notch. Rain. Stream-fording. Smugglers Notch to Sterling Pond Shelter.
Day 9: Sterling Pond Shelter to Bear Hollow Shelter.
Day 10: Bear Hollow Shelter to Corliss Camp.
Day 11: Corliss Camp to Route 118. See you next time, Trail.
Just 29 more miles to go.
