Today's miles 21.6. AT miles 1517.3
Breakfast at Bearded Woods was just a delicious as dinner, Big Lou served us omelette, English muffins, corn muffins and watermelon. We were also given some packed lunch trail magic from Lucky. Hudson kindly drove us back to the trail after breakfast. As we were driving down his long drive we saw our first wild bear, a small bear cub ran across the road in front of us, no sign of its mum though. Thank you Hudson and Big Lou, you have a fabulous place.
We were walking for 9am on another beautiful, very warm sunny day. We passed 1500 miles today! We had three mountains over 2000ft to climb the highest we've been for a few weeks, we've been hovering around 1000ft. First was Bear Mountain (2316ft) which had a rock monument on top marking the highest ground in Connecticut. It was a steady climb up but a very steep rocky climb down again. The trail descended alongside Sages Ravine for a while, a beautiful stream/gorge where we also crossed into another state, Massachusetts.
Our second mountain was Mount Race (2365ft), a steady but long climb to the top, we were sweating buckets in the heat. Although hot it was less humid so bearable, being slightly higher up helped. We stopped at the top on a rocky overlook for lunch eating our delicious trail magic meatloaf sandwich from Lucky and to air our feet and dry our tops out. Nigel was sporting a fetching Britney Spears look all day, tied T-shirt, to try and keep a bit cooler! From the overlook the trail continued along a stunning ridge line with great views for about half a mile to the actual summit before descending.
The biggest mountain of the day followed Mount Everett (2602ft). It was a steep rocky climb to the summit although the rocks did make quite nice natural steps up. There were remnants of an old fire tower at the summit. It was a very long 2000ft, five mile descent down over quite a rocky trail, very steep towards the end.
We passed a couple of shelters 0.1 mile apart on the way down but ending our day at them would have meant a short thirteen and a half mile day. We wanted to continue a bit further and had planned to stealth camp next to one of two streams marked in the guide after around seventeen miles. They weren't streams they were stagnant boggy trickles in mosquito swamp city. We walked for two miles through mosquito infested forest/swamp, there was no way we could stop and camp there. We had to continue a further two miles or so to the next marked stream where luckily there was water, just. It was 8pm by the time we got to the bridge/stream. Nigel pitched the tent next to the bridge while I got what water I could from the stream. It wasn't easy it was a very steep muddy bank down. We didn't avoid the mosquitoes either, being dusk they were out in force and after our blood. We got tucked up in our tent as quickly as possible, hopefully they'll be gone or less of them by the morning.
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