Monday, July 15, 2019
Mountain View Pond to White House Landing
20.2 Miles
We were up and
on the trail by 6:15.
We passed the
campsite where Brightside and Squeak spent the night and he was outside his
tent, covered from head to toe. He told
us later that he had never seen so many mosquitoes in one place. We told him it was no better where we
were. We are still wearing long sleeves
and headnets most of the time.
The majority
of the trail today was flat and level
and followed an old logging road. Right
past Jo-Mary Road we came across a couple of barrels of Trail Magic left by
boyscouts. It had a big bunch of candy and
other sweet treats and Cheez-its. Wow,
we ate our fill and left plenty for others.
It was such a surprise to find Trail Magic in the middle of the
wilderness.
After Antlers
Campground the trail became more rocky and rooty. At 4:30 we reached Mahar Tote Trail where a
.2 blue-blazed trail took us to the shore of a lake where we could be picked up to go to Whitehouse
Landing. We had been leap-frogging with
Brightside and Squeak all day and when we turned off, they kept going. We had already hiked 20.2 miles.
Going down the
.2 trail, a big black bear ran out of the woods and ran down the trail in front of us toward the lake. I only heard it, but Wait-up saw it. He said it was really big, we were glad it
was running the other way from us.
We had read
that you had to ring a bell to get them to come get you, but that is not the
case. It would be too far for them to
hear a bell from there. You cannot see
the hostel from this side of the lake. A
phone number is listed for you to call for pick-up, which we did, and in a few
minutes a boat came around the bend in the river and pulled up to the
shore. We jumped in and in a few minutes
we were on the other shore, just in time for dinner.
Several other
hikers were on the porch of the main building, including Jurrasic, Flickertail,
Shroom and a few others. We started the wilderness with Jurrasic but he got
ahead of us. He spent the night last
night at Antlers Campground and only had to hike a little ways today, so he had
a nero. The others were new to us.
The dinner was
good and ample. We had a hamburger, some
had a pizza. As we sat around the table
the conversation was all about the trail, the terrain that was ahead of us and some
of our plans for our Katahdin summit.
Jurassic, Flickertail, Shroom and us were all planning to summit now on
the 19th. We were concerned
about the space available at the Birches Campsite and whether there would be
others that we didn’t know about to vie for the 12 spots. We speculated
about how we could get to the sign-in kiosk before the spaces filled
up. It was all a mystery to us at this
point. As it turned out when we got
there, it worked out just fine.
After dinner we had time to shower in the standalone
shower house and do our laundry in a washtub with water from a faucet pulling
water out of the lake. We hung our
laundry out and it was mostly dry by morning.
We had
communicated with the folks at Whitehouse before we started our hike about
mailing a resupply box and spending the night in a private room. I had kept them updated on our expected
arrival date, which changed a couple of times along the way.
They had a
bunkhouse and another house with separate bedrooms. We had a room in that house with a few others
in the other bedrooms. The queen sized
bed was comfortable enough, but we fought mosquitoes all night. There were lots of gaps in the walls and
around the windows.
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