Friday,
Sept. 15, 2017
Triumph! But first, yet another long,
harder-than-expected day. Yet I suppose it was fitting, seeing as how this
trail has fought with us the entire time.
According to my NET maps, we had just 16 miles left to
hike. After numerous days of +20 miles, that should be easy. We allowed
ourselves to sleep in a bit, then drove to the trailhead.
Today called for hiking 14.6 miles southbound, shuttling
the cars, then finishing the last piece of trail northbound. That's because the
last bit of the trail is a .7-mile walk into the Royalston Falls area, where
the trail officially ends in the middle of the woods at the border with New
Hampshire. (Another trail continues on from there, but it's not the NET.)
As soon as we stepped onto the trail, a trail volunteer
did, too. His name was Tom, and we learned two interesting things. One was that
another volunteer loved to build trail, but wasn't good at it. He often ran
trails up and down steep hills without employing switchbacks. (Groan!) The
other was that he liked to constantly re-route trails.
Tom was chatty, so we didn't get started until 10 a.m.
The hiking here was just lovely. The footing was largely soft pine needles and
moss, so different than the rocks in Connecticut and a few other spots in
Massachusetts. We passed lots of burbling brooks and enjoyed looking at the
foliage, which is just starting to turn.
At one point we ran into another couple. I thought it was
Keith and Karen at first, the Florida hikers we met with Parks a few days ago, but
it was Dan and Ruth. They live in the Finger Lakes area (NY) and recently
completed all of the North Country Trail.
Moving on, this area of the trail is well-marked, with
lots of signs indicating the distance to the next road crossing. After a few
hours, we saw a sign indicating that Alexander Hill Road, where our car was
parked, was farther away than the map indicated. Not again! We figured from
what Tom said that the other volunteer must have re-routed a lot of trail
somewhat recently, and that the maps didn't reflect this. We ended up hiking
three more miles in this section than we planned on.
So that meant we got to our little .7-mile out-and-back
(1.4 miles total) at 6:30 p.m. We hurried in without our packs, and much to our
dismay there was no northern terminus sign – just a sign saying we were now in
New Hampshire, and the distance of locations that lay ahead. Oh well. We took
pix anyway and split a celebratory beer.
On our way back to the car, we took a .3-mile detour to
see Royalston Falls, but the detour was poorly marked and we could only see a
tiny portion of the falls (we were probably in the wrong spot). We couldn't
spend any more time looking for a better vantage point, though, because it was
quickly getting dark. We reached our cars just as night fell.
We shuttled Parks' car to a campground a few miles up the
road; he'll pick it up sometime in the next few days, when he finishes the
trail.
Thus ended our thru-hike of the New England National
Scenic Trail. We enjoyed the majority of our time, but we did find the hiking
difficult. But it's the difficult things in life that often prove the most
rewarding, isn't it?
Snowshoe and Stubs
Flights to Date: 2,093
Map Miles: 16
Map Miles to Date: 231.6
iPhone Miles: 18.8
iPhone Miles to Date: 237.8
Steps: 46,785
Steps to Date: 600,464
Flights Walked: 159
Flights to Date: 2,093
No comments:
Post a Comment