Miles today: 13.8
Total miles: 270.7
It was just me, Cool Blue, and Google hiking together all day today. Shuffle and Wolf Bird had to wait for the post office to open back in town so they got a later start than us.
We climbed the Baldpate Mountains, which were beautiful. It was cold and windy on top and as I got to the summit I had a great view of a cloud drifting across other mountains toward Baldpate, covering the trees below me. It was surreal. After Baldpate we had a nice smooth downhill to Grafton Notch.
The boys always want to hike further and without Shuffle there to back me up in being lazy, they convinced me to push onto the top of Old Speck Mountain. A northbounder had told us he hiked to the top of Speck (about 0.3 up another trail not on the AT) and had the summit to himself. He said there was an observation tower with outstanding views and he stayed the night and highly recommended it. We decided to do the same.
I hated that climb up Old Speck Mountain. From Grafton Notch, it was 3.8 miles to the top, which isn’t all that far. But the trail was at juuust enough of an incline to make you tired and out of breath, but not enough of an incline to make the trail steeper and thus shorter. So it was a prolonged, tiring uphill climb. It was also cold and rainy and by the time we got to the top I was exhausted.
We hiked up to the summit for the fantastic views and were met with…. grey mist. We were basically in a cloud and could not see anything except for the trees directly around us. It was also freezing and windy. Soo we quickly set up camp among some trees for shelter, made dinner, and went to bed. Even though it didn’t rain at all, it was one of our wettest nights with the wind blowing the condensation off the trees onto our tents all night long. In the morning there was still no view. Oh well, at least the thought of potential views pushed us to go further than we otherwise would have.