Long Trail Day 21

15 Miles (252 Total)

Corliss Camp to Tillerson Camp

I slept very well last night. Almost too well. I fell asleep at 7 PM and woke up at midnight to a large animal fumbling through the woods. It was most likely a deer. It didn’t sound large enough to be a bear. They are usually unmistakable in their lumbering. Instead of small twigs snapping it sounds like full trunks splintering in half.

After taking a whiz and shining my head lamp into the woods to spook the mysterious forest animal away, I promptly fell asleep and didn’t wake up until morning. I had crazy and intense dreams, ones where you feel like you are actually inside them. I was fighting aliens in one of them and had to save Carolyn from getting abducted. The aliens had a gun that shot mosquitoes out of them, but I was wearing my special fly suit, which was a suit made of fly paper, and all the mosquitoes got stuck.

Today was mostly an okay walk. We saw various toads along the trail, beautiful in their markings. Some were quite large while others were smaller, blending in perfectly with the dark brown leaves.

We saw a gorgeous centipede crawling over a wet rock. It was vibrant orange and yellow and black.

We saw some hornets too, grazing over a log. Their stingers looked like they were a whole inch long.

We got caught in a pretty unfortunate thunderstorm only a half mile from the shelter. Thunder warned us for roughly an hour before it hit. The rain came on very suddenly and absolutely unleashed its wrath on us. We got pretty wet scrambling to put the ponchos on.

The trail became a river again and our shoes were completely soaked.

Luckily there was still shelter space when we arrived.

Tomorrow is our last full day on the trail. Our goal is to hike over Jay Peak, the last remaining large Peak of the trail, and camp at the shelter on the other side of it. The following day will be 9 miles to the border as we hike out.

I’m ready for this trail to be over. It feels like we’ve been out here far longer than we have.