Today's miles 18.3. AT miles 1644.4
It was a much cooler, cloudy day today, rather than t-shirts we were wearing a double layer most of the day. Today's trail started off with a short steep uphill over rocks and boulders from the shelter but then the trail improved and we were able to keep a steady pace. It was a long steady downhill, then a long steady uphill to Stratton Mountain 3936ft. There was a fire tower on the top again. We got half way up the tower, realised there was no view, it was too overcast and cloudy, so turned round and came straight back down. It was very windy on the summit so didn't want to go to the tower top and brave the winds if we had no view. Stratton Mountain apparently was the mountain that inspired the creation of the AT and the Long Trail.
From the summit it was a long downhill again, it started raining just as we past Stratton Pond a beautiful large lake and continued raining the rest of the afternoon. We passed the three quarter way mark this afternoon about five miles before we reached our shelter for the night, Spruce Peak shelter. We arrived about 3:30pm, it was still raining and the ground was quite boggy so we're braving sleeping in the shelter. There were a couple of hikers there sheltering temporarily from the rain. One provided us with trail magic. There was an empty gas canister in the shelter, he saw Nigel shake it to see if it had any gas left in it and asked if we needed gas. We were low on gas because we couldn't get any in Bennington, he said he was heading home so gave us his nearly full gas canister. 'The trail will provide' as they say.
The shelter is more like a log cabin though rather than the normal three sided shelters. It has glass windows, a table and wood burning stove inside and a door which we needed to keep the wind out. It remained very windy with heavy rain showers all night. We shared the shelter with Mountain Mime who we've not seen since Front Royal and Hawk, both who arrived a bit later.
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