Three's Definitely a Crowd

When we woke up this morning, we had an unfortunate discovery. A mouse had chewed a pretty good-size hole right through the tent down by our feet. We never heard a thing, but he managed to chew a tiny hole in Keith's food bag, and nibble on his cereal. We have avoided this so far, but this is what happens when you decide it's okay to keep your food in the tent and not hang a bear bag. Luckily, Keith is a wiz at tent patching!




I don't have too many pictures of views today. We had a total of four peaks to climb (three of them over 4000 ft.), and so when we reached the first (Lone Mt.), and you had to take a steep (optional) side trail to the summit, I opted to check out the views from the higher mountains that were yet to come. However, by the time we reached those later in the day, we were in the clouds, and there was no view at all.
Swamprat had texted us, and with things under control back at home, he was back on the trail, and had camped about 6 miles behind us. He would catch up to us when we reach Stratton, our next town.
We packed up, and went up and over Lone Mt., and then Spaulding Mt. We were making such good time, that Keith told me if we kept this up, we'd find ourselves hiking right into town instead of taking an extra day to get there. The trail is so unpredictable in Maine, we had allowed ourselves 3 days to cover the miles from Rangeley to Stratton.
We continued on, at one point passing a plaque commemorating the point where the very last part of the AT was completed. The last two peaks we crossed were Crocker South and Crocker North, and the first one, Crocker South seemed to take forever. I think it is now officially my least favorite mountain of this trip. You could never see the the top as you climbed, and so there was no real obvious destination. Very annoying. Just keep going up, and eventually you'll get there - or at least logic would tell you that! It was the never ending mountain! I FINALLY reached the top, and it was a mile over to the second summit, so not so bad. We knocked that out, and we realized we only had 5 miles to go downhill to town, and it was only 4:00. We decided to go for it. We finally reached the road about 6:50, and it was starting to get dark. We went to the road, and before long another hiker gave us a ride to the White Wolf Inn in Stratton, which we had heard gives thru-hikers rooms at a 50% discount. Keith's parents are also arriving today. We will see them this one last time before we reach Mt.
We ended up hiking 18.7 miles today.
































- Steady and F100