Day 31: Gorham to Zeta Pass
Miles today: 12.6
Total miles: 310.9
After a relaxing stay in town and being especially spoiled with my parents there, we got started hiking again Wednesday morning. We hiked over Mount Moriah and I stopped at the summit with Blue and Wolf Bird for a long relaxing lunch break. Next we climbed the Carter Range. We had beautiful weather and were rewarded with views of the Whites for miles all around us. We decided to stealth camp at Zeta Pass, at a lower elevation just past the Carters. After we set up camp we realized pretty much all the trees around us were blown over, fallen on top of each other and dying. Great decision on our part. We joked that if it was windy the remaining standing trees would surely fall on us in the night. Luckily it was a calm night and we all made it out alive.
Day 32: Zeta Pass to Gorham (again)
Miles today: 8.2
Total miles: 319.4
Twas a very chilly morning and tough to get out of my warm sleeping bag today. We climbed the Wildcats today, a series of mountains with one of them a ski resort. That mountain had a gondola to the top so at that summit we found all these tourists in jeans picnicking and lounging around as we walked by, all sweaty and smelly.
When we were taking our lunch break we talked to a northbounder who said he’d stayed at an abandoned house in Gorham the night before. He was just wandering around town looking for a place to stealth camp and found this empty house with the garage wide open. We were intrigued and very soon we changed our plans to go right back to Gorham to check it out. After the Wildcats the trail crosses a road at Pinkham Notch Visitor Center. About ten miles straight down the road is Gorham. Me and shuffle competed with Blue and Wolf Bird (and Mabel) to see who could get a hitch into Gorham first. Unsurprisingly the ladies won!
Once in town we went straight to Mr Pizza, where id already gone three times when we were in Gorham before. I felt like a local! We had tasty pizza and a pitcher of Dogfishhead to celebrate our 300 miles a little belated. Then Shuffle went to McDonalds for literally five hours to mooch off their wifi, leaving me with Blue and Wolf Bird (Google decided not to stay in an abandoned house, mature and smart guy that he is).
The boys and I went to check out the house. We had to go around the backyard and walk through the open the garage, stepping over boards and wall panels all over the floor. The inside was empty and kind of falling apart except for one room. The room had all these glass display cases and had a small room attached to it with a safe in it. We later found out the house was an old gem shop based on a sign on the ground outside. It was kind of creepy (and definitely illegal, sorry mom and dad…and law enforcement) but also was really fun in an eerie sort of way if that makes sense? The boys and I went up into the windowless attic, lit it up with our headlamps, and hung out drinking and talking and listening to music. We stayed up way past our 730 pm bedtime. At 1130 we went across the street to visit shuffle (still at McDonald’s). Wolf bird went and bought a 20 piece chicken nuggets and fries and we demolished it in two minutes so blue went and got us another which we similarly ate in a grossly short amount of time. It was a fun change of pace to just hang out for a night but I was ready to leave gorham by the next day after spending far too many days there in the past week.