Today's miles 17. AT miles 1904
Two big milestones today, we passed 1900 miles and also entered our final state, Maine. It was another very warm humid day, cloudy to start but then sunny spells. We left our motel at 7:15 to hitch a ride back to the trail. The motel owners unfortunately were unable to give us a ride back this morning. We got two rides! A youngish lad stopped and gave us a lift to the other end of town, then we hitched again and almost immediately got a ride with a landscaping company in the back of their covered in truck to the trailhead. We were walking for 7:45.
We were back on a civilised trail again today, especially for the first twelve miles, no more steep rocky climbs or scrambles just a moderately good path. We had a long steady climb up to Mount Hayes where we had views back to Mount Madison and Mount Washington, the last time we'll see them. It was down a bit then up again to Cascade Mountain then another down and up again past Page Pond, which was beautiful and covered with yellow water lily's about to flower. We reached Gentian Pond Shelter just after 2pm. This was one of our camping options but because we arrived early we decided to carry on to the next shelter 5.2 miles away.
The next five miles were a bit harder which we knew would be. There was a steep 1000ft climb up to Mount Success a bit rocky but OK, not as bad as we've had this last week, we passed the 1900 mile mark on the way up. We passed a few Southbounders today, hiking the trail in the opposite direction to us, heading for Georgia. Southbounders start later in the season in June once the northern weather improves hoping for warmer weather all the way to the south. We reached the summit about 4:30 from which time onwards we were racing the rain. We kept getting odd spits of rain but somehow got lucky and managed to keep in the sun and out of the black clouds. There was a lovely rainbow in the distance. The descent from the summit had a few tricky rocky scrambling sections just to keep us on our toes. About half a mile before we reached the campsite we crossed the state line from New Hampshire and entered Maine, our final state. Fourteen states in total the trail goes through. Our campsite, Carlo Col campsite was about a third of a mile off the trail down a steep path, luckily on the sunny side of the mountain. We arrived about 6:15pm. There was a large group camping but luckily there was one tent platform left for us.
Just as we were going to sleep at nine it started thundering and lightening then we had a torrential downpour. The rain was so heavy it penetrated one of our tent roof seams so we had a few small drips. It was a warm night, we only needed our sleeping bag liners to sleep in so packed our down sleeping bags away into dry bags to prevent them from getting wet. Once the rain calmed down though the leaks stopped.
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