Jeffrey/Ichabod on the  Hanover Common yesterday  morning.

Ichabod & Crusher.

We had a good visit with Jeffrey, Marriott beds, dinner, laundry, resupply. Doozie and Jeff also  visited the Saint Gaudens – Historic site on Thursday. Jeff has not been on the grounds since he was a toddler.  I had to beat it home early  to get the CSA delivery  in the fridge. This was  a two vehicle operation. I have one more meeting planned before he exits NH  for the wilderness of Maine. He took some time with Doozie’s laptop to complete a post for everyone following  his  AT adventure.

Hello from Hanover, NH!

I’m coming up on my four-month anniversary on the trail. It feels at once like I’ve been hiking forever and that I started in Springer only a couple weeks ago. The woods do funny things to one’s sense of time.

I’m still hiking with the Crusher–my parents are up to visit in Hanover and graciously put us up in a hotel room for the night. His family is coming down from Quebec for the next four days to hike with him, which means a) we’ll be moving a lot slower as we get closer to the White Mountains, and b) I’m going to be hearing a lot of French this week.

Vermont treated us well. Kind of. There was a lot of rain. And mud. But by and large, I had a very positive experience in the Green Mountain state. After leaving North Adams, I joined the Long Trail, which shares the AT’s tread for about 100 miles. The Long Trail runs from the Mass. state line up to the Canadian border–about 300 miles. This year the trail is celebrating its 100th anniversary (it has about 20 years on the AT, making it the country’s oldest long-distance hiking trail), and as a result the AT/LT corridor was very crowded. Northbound AT thru-hikers, southbound AT thru-hikers, AT section hikers, LT section hikers and northbound LT thru-hikers were all sharing the same trail. I don’t think I’ve seen the trail or the shelters so crowded since my first week on the trail back in Georgia.

With all the new faces on the trail, I’ve been getting a lot of comments lately about my tent. I’m carrying a two-person tarp tent, which is not only much larger than the small backpacking tents that most folks seem to carry, but also made with an ultralight fabric. Hikers’ jaws drop when they see how much room I have inside. And at just over two pounds (I save weight by using my walking sticks as tent poles), the tent is about as light as most one-person tents.

All the comments on my tent made me realize I haven’t written much about what all I’m carrying in my pack. Besides the tent, I’m cutting down on weight by using a soda can stove that runs on denatured alcohol or gas-line antifreeze. It weighs next to nothing, and unlike most backpacking canister stoves, I don’t have to depend on finding an outfitter to buy fuel (almost every gas station carries the kind of antifreeze I use). I use my tent stakes as a pot stand when I’m cooking. The other lightweight piece of gear I have is my sleeping pad. I sent home my self-inflating thermarest in exchange for a 3/4-length foam waffle pad. It looks kind of like a yoga mat, and is at least half a pound lighter than my old pad. I can also be tough on it and not worry about popping it on a thorn or rock. I’ll post a full gear list later, but now onto Vermont highlights.

Our second night in the state was on the summit of Glastenbury Mountain. The summit is forested (we don’t really start getting above tree-line until well into NH), but there was an abandoned firetower with an amazing view of Green Mountain Natl. Forest. We stayed up there for sunset, which was an hour-long lightshow that kept getting better. With the 360-degree view, we were constantly spinning around to see new colors and cloud formations. It was without a doubt the best sunset I’ve ever seen. Crusher even woke me up at 5:30 for sunrise (about 3 hours before my usual trail wake-up call), which was equally moving.

Vermont wasn’t all sunsets. We had lots and lots of rain. The next day I descended Stratton Mountain in a downpour, and Crusher and I stayed at our first fee site at Stratton Pond. There are a few high-use shelters in Vermont that the GMC charges a fee to use, and the entire hut and tent site system in the Whites is fee based. Definitely a jarring experience, since we’ve hiked the trail for free at that point for about 1700 miles.

Despite the rain and the ever-present mud, we had some wonderful stays off-trail. In Manchester Center we stayed at the Green Mountain House, a wonderful hostel (home, really) with a free pint of Ben and Jerry’s and a fridge full of sodas. Outside Rutland we spent the night at the Long Trail Inn, a gorgeous lodge with a traditional Irish pub on the grounds (the bartender even drew shamrocks in the head of our Guinness). In West Hartford, we tented in the yard of a sign maker’s workshop. He showed us his antique cars–a 1923 Ford Model T and a 1915 Ford Roadster, both in amazing condition.

Got to go run some errands here in Hanover before hitting the trail head. I’m picking up my fourth pair of trail runners today, which should see me through till Katahdin. The first pair, my two-year-old trail runners that I trained for a half marathon with, lasted me until Damascus (463 miles). I picked up my second set of shoes at an outfitter there, which fared a bit better–744 miles. This last pair got about 530 miles, which is pretty average for a trail runner. Let’s hope this is the last piece of gear I have to buy before summit day!

Happy Trails.

Ichabod