Mountains Under Foot

From Hazard’s notes:
Day 73: July 21, 2009
Travel:
From: Mohican Outdoor Center, NJ
To: Gren Anderson Shelter, NJ
Beginning: 8:30am
Ending: 4:30pm
Number of miles hiked:
a) Trail – 20.9
b) other – .4 to and from Brink Road shelter, .2 to tonight’s shelter
c) AT Mile Marker – 1314.9 cumulative
Weather:
AM: Started drizzling the moment we started hiking and only got increasingly heavy as the day wore on.
PM: After lunch things slowed down a bit. Started up again in the evening pretty steady.
People: Crocstar, Cleancut. Two massive groups of kids near the shelter, one of which were yelling and making noise way past hiker bedtime.
Animals: Mosquitoes!
Money: $0, $1287 cumulative.
Notes of the day:
AM: Around 4am it started to drizzle so I packed up my stuff, grabbed my sleeping bag, and staggered off to one of the cabins. I figured I could crash under the back porch overhang to get out of the rain and not anger a park ranger, because you have to pay to use the cabins. When I woke up again around 6:30am from mosquitoes eating me alive I was so fed up with the morning that I took my stuff and threw it in the unlocked cabin and went inside to pass out on a cushy couch. I woke up from my nap at 7:30 and needed to find Spoon and Crocstar because they had no idea where I went. Breakfast was had inside the visitor center where we could sit at a folding table and smell the delicious things cooking in the kitchen. As soon as we had everything packed up and ready to step off the front porch it started to drizzle. Awesome. So we walked in the rain all morning as it increasingly became more steady.

PM: We stopped at Brink Road Shelter for lunch, which was the poorest excuse for a shelter I’ve seen in awhile. It was infested with mosquitoes but we stuck around anyway. I went off to find the privy and found a box over a hole with a toilet seat on top in the open woods labeled “The Throne”. The mosquitoes were so bad I came back and motioned us to get as far from this place as possible. It was here that we decided that it might be a good idea to stop short today and walk into Unionville, NY tomorrow to try and find “The Mayor” who we had heard all of these too-good-to-be-true stories. Everywhere we looked while hiking there were large groups of hikers, anyone from Boy Scouts to local campers. The worst part is one of these groups decided it would be cool to camp behind the shelter this evening. They pretty much made as much noise as possible even after we told them to keep it down when they came down the trail. They were yelling at each other apparently until 11pm and Spoon had to tell them to shut up. (Mom’s note – Welcome to New Jersey, son…)