You’ll be tired of reading my woes about not having a keyboard by the time I get back to Rutland to replace it, but that’s where my mind is again this evening. I’m limited to a point of frustration that I have so much I want to write about but know I can’t get it on the page before falling asleep.
What I’ll have to do once I get my keyboard back is write a review of the whole Long Trail and tell the stories that I haven’t had time to elaborate on a daily basis lately.
Losing my keyboard has led me to an interesting observation, although I think I already sort of knew this so perhaps observation isn’t the right word–reminder maybe. It’s that I literally think differently when I’m writing with a keyboard versus when I’m doing it with my thumbs. My thoughts flow so much better with the keyboard and I find my writing to be clunky without it. I wonder if some readers might smugly be observing that my writing is clunky no matter what.
But I digress…
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Stayed with Plinko’s Friend, Alaska last night and watched Dumb & Dumber in the background while I packed my food for this section and tried to write my daily trail journal.
Slept adequately, and wanted to get to trail early, but I needed to get propane before we left town. That ended up being a monumentally difficult prospect, as everywhere that claimed to have “small canisters of propane” in fact only carried big Colman style canisters.
It was a long hunt. But we found them eventually.
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The trail today was wildly steep climbs and descents. Two peaks.
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I need to tell the story of Plinko’s acid… no way to tell it tonight. But I’ll leave that there as a reminder to myself.
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I’m staying in a shelter tonight but it’s mosquito infested and I may regret my decision.
The trail was steep this morning. The four-thousand foot peaks are all like that in Vermont. Steep and aggressive. And Mount Mansfield was no exception.
I ended up sleeping in later than I’d planned this morning, but man plans and god laughs. The plan was tentatively to catch the sunrise at the mountain peak this morning, but when I woke up to piss last night the sky was heavily overcast and it had started to rain lightly. The sun would rise today, but there would be no “sunrise” as it were.
At least that’s what I decided when I rolled over and ignored several alarms at 4:30, 5:00, and 5:30am. But I was sleeping well and clouds filled the sky. There was no reason for me to be up and in it early today. And my body has been so exhausted by the miles on the Long Trail that I needed the extra rest.
Plinko was up and out of the Taylor Lodge before me. He was out the door just as I was starting to pack up my sleeping pad. We only had about 5 miles to hike today, so we discussed yesterday that he might be out before me and that we’d just meet at the bottom of the Gondola.
So we ended up hiking solo today.
It wasn’t raining heavily, but there was a sprinkle when I started to trail. The first miles were dark, wet, foggy, and steep. Plinko texted me from the top, telling me to watch myself and be careful on those first three miles of climbing. The text was well received and appropriate. It was the first time he’d sent such a warning text in the 800 or so miles that we’ve hiked together.
There were no views up top. The summit of Mansfield was completely clouded out. But the AT got me used to that. You get a view every now and then, but that’s really not what this trail is about. If ya get a view out here, that’s great, but I’ve learned not to count on it.
And as rough as the climb was today, the hardest part was the descent. It was about 2,500 feet of descent from the peak of Mansfield to the parking lot where Alaska had left her car for us. And during that 2,500ft, the trail had some steep drops. At one point it was bad enough that I literally just tossed my hiking poles down the side of a ledge and picked them up once I made it down myself.
On that note, about two or three weeks ago I damaged one of my hiking pole tips and it’s been getting more problematic since then. It’s not something that I think can be repaired. And so when Alaska asked if we needed anything from REI, I bit the bullet and decided it’s time for new pair. I wanted to get this set through the full AT, but after the bend in the one tip, it’s been less and less functional. And on the LT I’ve needed those poles to hold solid when I’m climbing and descending. Honestly, it could have led me to getting hurt if I didn’t replace them. For the last week or so I’ve been using my “good” pole in my dominant right hand and using the bent one as balance in my left. But that’s when failed me a time or two when I needed the one in my left hand to hold but it slipped.
It’ll be good to have new poles! These ones got five or six thousand miles since I purchased them on the CDT in 2019.
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Overcast for most of the day today and then started raining heavy once Plinko and I were settled into Alaska’s place. She works today, so we had the day to resupply, shower, laundry, and repack for the next trail segment.
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We had pizza for dinner and have been resting most of the day.
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We only have 63 miles remaining, but that will take us at minimum 4 days.
Tomorrow is Monday. Two days to our last resupply, and a day and a half from there.
We should finish the Long Trail on Thursday the 25th. Then back to Rutland and the AT. Might take a zero in Rutland.
I ordered more coyote teeth, athletic greens, Kachava, a new water filter, and a few other things to Rutland. My buddy Geoff might join us there for a day or two.
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Tired and distracted this evening. Looking forward to having my new keyboard for these journals once I get back to Rutland.
They must have been Bluebead Lillies that she had confused for blueberries yesterday before arriving at camp and promptly vomiting. Out here it’s impossible to hear mention of someone throwing up without having thoughts of Norovirus come to mind like flashbacks of Vietnam. But then right after she’d finished barfing she said that it must have been from the blueberries that she’d foraged earlier in the day.
I asked Plinko this morning if he’s seen any blueberries in the last 100 miles, and we both agreed that we have not. There are blue berries on trail but they’re not blueberries. This isn’t blueberry season.
I only heard her from inside my tent last night as I was trying to write, but she cursed like a sailor and hated everything about the Long Trail. She also did a commendable job of keeping Plinko and I awake while she listed off her list of woes from the terrible 8-mile day that she’d just completed. I’d reiterate them here for you, but I do enough complaining about the challenges of the trail to satisfy most readers on that front, so there’s no need to list all of hers. But the point is that she came into camp way past dark, promptly barfed, and proceeded to loudly talk shit on the LT for the rest of the night. I wish it could have been in a day where I could find sympathy for her, but like I wrote last night–it had been on the best day that Plinko and I had had on trail for a while.
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I woke up this morning and made no effort to keep quiet for our neighbor. In fact, the moment I remembered that today is my hundredth day, I decided to light a joint at camp and enjoy it with coffee as my breakfast. I rarely smoke flower or joints, but I had a couple of them that I’d purchased in town for special occasions. Today seemed like just such an occasion. And heaven forbid if my weed smoke wafted over to my loud-mouth neighbor’s tent.
I normally don’t behave like that.
I’d like to believe that she doesn’t either.
But it’s unlikely that either of us will ever know, as I don’t expect that our paths are to cross again.
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My body is sore today in ways that it has not been this entire summer. My glutes and hamstrings are more sore than I remember them being in years–yet another testament to the difficulty of the Long Trail. I haven’t event felt this beat up by the Grand Canyon in years!
I’ve been trying to compensate by eating a lot of protein, but I just don’t know if my body is going to have time to adjust to the demands of this trail before it’s done and we’re at the Canadian border in a few days.
It’ll probably be 5 more full days from here.
I am also losing feeling in one of my toes. It’s the fourth toe on my right foot. I’ve had issues with that toe before, around 6 years ago while I was on the CDT. It was diagnosed as a neroma, and I had a cortisone shot there in 2019. But it hadn’t been an issue since then.
In 2019 it was extreme pain and then the toe went numb. This time around it seems that it skipped step one and went directly to numbness.
Plinko diagnosed it as “Christmas Toe.”
I told him I’d never heard of it, but he said a lot of thru hikers get it.
“Is it sort of tingly and numb?” He asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And the second to last toe you said?”
“Yep.”
“Definitely Christmas Toe. You should start to get feeling back around Christmas.”
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This morning I took a gram and a half of mushrooms in commemoration of my 100th day on trail. And they kicked me in the soul! It had been maybe a week or two since I’d had any psychedelic, and my tolerance has clearly reset! Fortunately the miles this morning were mostly downhill and included a very rare road walk for several miles. By the time I started into today’s big climb the peak of the mushrooms had mostly worn off and I was left glowey and thoughtful for the remainder of the day.
Strange how they affected me today. Almost nothing visual whatsoever, but a very powerful mental effect that lasted for a long time.
It was positively delightful.
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While I was on mushrooms I listened to two very powerful things.
For some time I listened to music and let my phone pick songs at random. A song played by a band called Modest Mouse and it moved me so heavily that I had to play it over and over again until I was in tears.
The song had been significant to me since the day I left my home town of Valdez, Alaska to start college. I remember it playing while I drove away from the place I’d called home up to that point and out to Anchorage.
It’s called “Bankrupt on Selling” and as I listened to it over and over today it made me feel like the story that I’ve been trying to write about my life has already been written, and it is every lyric of that song.
I have to believe we’ve all felt that way at some point before.
I’ve literally felt it once before on this trail–with another song that I have since played over again more times than I can remember. I never told you the name of that song. It was Tool’s “Push It.”
Bankrupt on Selling:
“Well I’ll go to college and I’ll learn some big words; and I’ll talk real loud; goddam right I’ll be heard; and you’ll remember that guy who said all those big words he must have learned in college…”
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I then listened to the entirety of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” on audiobook.
It’s a book I’ve read and listened to dozens of times over. This is my second time in the last six months, but my first time on the AT.
It’s a text I listen to at least once through on every thru hike. Every time I pick up on something new in it. This time may have been my first time listening to it all through while under the influence of mushrooms.
The scene with the sharks struck me heavily this time… pun not intended.
The old man’s feeling of regret for ever having killed the fish, which is his brother once he realizes that it’ll all be lost to the sharks.
I’ve had that feeling before too. Recently. In the last two years.
Listening today made me think of the greatest thing I have ever captured and lost, and what that did to me. I found myself relating to the old man at the end of the book in ways that I have not before. Thinking that I shouldn’t have gone so far out to sea, and regretting returning with that which I caught.
It was profound.
I cried.
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Tomorrow we’ll summit the highest point of the Long Trail–Mount Mansfield. From there we descend into the Stowe ski resort where Alaska’s car is parked. We’ll have a short day tomorrow but the miles we do have will be aggressive.
This is the Long Trail for you. It does not fuck around.
Appalachian Trail Journal 2025 