Hurricane Irene Moves the Trail

This morning I started hiking a little before the boys, and unfortunately, never saw where the AT departed and went off into the woods.  Instead, I continued down this nice, easy downhill, and before you knew it, I was at the bottom of the mountain, and noticed a blue blaze on a tree.  Not good.  I hiked back up the mountain, most frustrated, and found the white blaze going off to the right.  Keith soon caught me, and I told him how I had messed up.  I had also managed to fall again, this time on a slippery rock, but once again, landed on my pack, no harm done.
Soon, we reached a beautiful river, and stopped and ate lunch and swam (with a bar of soap).  There was a nice gorge there, and suspension bridge.  The trail today was really beautiful, following lovely mountain streams for quite a ways.  At one point, the trail disappeared due to storm damage from Hurricane Irene last year.  It took a while for us to locate where the trail picked up again, but we did finally find it, and hiked on to a shelter that backed up to another beautiful stream.  That was one of the prettiest campsites we have had yet, and we got to listen to the background music of the stream all night long.

We passed the point on the trail today where it was 500 miles to Katahdin! Whoo hoo!!!




















(Camped at Governor Clement Shelter, mile 1685.3)