We heard that the end of the 100 mile wilderness is sometimes referred to as the red carpet to Katadhin. I think it’s more like a red carpet with a few wrinkles to trip you up unexpectedly.
The first 14 miles or so of the hike today were just nice and flat and smooth. We put in 11 miles by 10am, and our first break of the day. I do want to mention the spring at the Potaywadjo Spring Lean-to, where we took that first break, was one of the best water sources on the whole trail. It’s a beautiful open pooling spring with abundant ice cold clear water. Of course we still filter water from springs, but it was nice to get some cold water as opposed to the tepid water we’ve been getting from the pond and lake outlets recently.
After our first break we had a few more miles of nice smooth trail, until just after the Nahmakanta Stream Campsites. The trail was still relatively flat for a while, but became covered in rocks and roots which slowed us down considerably. As we reached Nahmakanta Lake, the trail took us up and down a few steep bumps. After lunch at the lake we had a not insignificant climb up and over Nesuntabunt Mountain. So yea, not exactly red carpet trail all day. It was a beautiful day though, and we caught our first couple spectacular views of Katadhin. In fact, from the top of Nesuntabunt Mountain we were only 16 miles from Katadhin via line of sight. Of course the trail takes 35 miles to get there from that point.
In all we covered just under 30 miles today, ending at Rainbow Stream Lean-to with only about 30 minutes of daylight left. There’s rain in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow morning, and in fact as I write this it’s just starting to rain. We only have 15 miles left of the 100 mile wilderness and about 30 to the top of Katadhin. We’ll see how tomorrow goes, but we may summit on Monday instead of Tuesday as we originally planned. I think we’re at the point of being excited to finish, though it’ll be strange to be done.
We’ve been talking about what we’ll miss about being on the trail, and I thought I’d share some of that here. One of the things we’ll miss is that feeling of coming into town after a few days out. There’s really nothing quite so satisfying as hiking for 4 days straight, getting rained on, or getting all sweaty, then reaching the destination you’ve been thinking about and getting a shower, some food, and a cold beverage. Along with reaching town, we’ll miss the ongoing game of leap frog that we play with our fellow thru-hikers. It’s fun to read the trail registers to see who’s ahead, then meet them a few days later. Even more exciting is reuniting with hikers that we haven’t seen in months. As I’ve written before, the camaraderie out here is amazing. Finally, I think we’ll miss the freedom that the last few months have represented for us. Yes we had an ultimate destination we walked to, but we had the freedom to make changes to our plans on the fly… we got to be flexible. It’s nice to just be able to decide to take an extra day off just because. You don’t always have that ability, and I’ll miss it.
