We grabbed breakfast this morning in town and ran into our old homies from Virginia, Z and Gia. It was cool to see them again. They came into town from Pinkham Notch, meaning they are a couple days of hiking behind us right now. We chatted and then had to hurry to jump on a shuttle we scheduled at 9am to get back to the trail.

The first half of the day was fairly easy hiking, certainly a notch below the difficulty level of the Whites. We had some really cool parting views of the Whites and Mount Washington as we hiked away from them.

The second half things got progressively tougher. The climb up to Mount Success was steep and on many slick rock slabs. The summit area was an interesting above-treeline open swampy thing.

The descent down included some monster boulders and tough scrambles, which is probably a little preview of tomorrow.

And then not long after that, we hit this bad boy.

We hiked on for another half mile and then went down and set up on a raised tent platform at the shelter. It’s been very hard to find good stealth campsites lately, so we decided to go against our normal ways and stay at this shelter. This one is pretty nice and our platform is pretty far away from the old guys and their midnight chainsaw snoring machines.

Tomorrow we have probably the single most difficult section of the entire trail, the Mahoosuc Notch. It’s 1.2 miles of bouldering over and around car size boulders. Then we have the supposedly ultra tough Mahoosuc Arm climb immediately after, so we aren’t planning any huge miles.

It feels amazing to be here in Maine, the last state, after so much hiking. I can see the light shimmering and hear the wind whipping on Katahdin in my dreams as we start to draw near to her.

Vital stats for Sunday, August 24th :
Milestone – done with New Hampshire, in Maine now (state 14 of 14). Also, 1900 miles.
Miles hiked today – 17
Mood – so psyched
Physical state – tired after a big tough day with warmer weather than of late
Smell – Mainely
Song stuck in my head – Take A Walk by Passion Pit