Appalachian Trail Section hiking: Abol Bridge Camppground to the Birches Campsite

Day Fifty-One
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Abol Bridge Campground to the Birches Campsite
10 miles

After a free breakfast buffet at the campground, we hustled on up to the sign-in kiosk at the entrance of the trail. It was further in than we were thinking it would be so I guess it was a good thing we didn’t try to come here early this morning to sign up for the Birches then go back for breakfast. Anyway, the sign said that was not allowed, which we did not know. We were third on the list. We had seen one fellow come by while we were eating breakfast, out from the last lean-to I suppose.

It was a relatively easy 10 miles. The first 5 miles went by pretty fast, the last 5 not so fast. We thought we had done 5 miles, then we cam out on a parking lot and found out we had 2.5 more to do!

We came out of the woods at Katahdin Stream Campground, and went across the bridge to the Ranger Station to check in with them and get a daypack to use for our summit. The Ranger told us the water supply for The Birches was the stream under the bridge that we had just crossed (inside Katahdin Stream Campground). We stopped to fill our water containers and lo and behold our last Sawyer water bag busted! We had nothing to squeeze our water into our bottles. I had been using a soda bottle for one of my drinking bottles, so we used it as our dirty water bottle, but that put us two water containers down. We didn’t have enough bottles to hold enough water for tonight and in the morning both. We would have to come back to the water source in the morning before breakfast. Not a good thing to happen on your next to last day and in a spot where there was absolutely no resupply place.

The Birches campsite sure seemed a lot further than .2 up the road. When we got there, the youg man we saw go by us this morning was already there (his name was Smurf or Smitz or something like that). Later on Jurassic and Torch came in. Flickertail came by with her parents, they were staying at Abol Bridge Campsite and her dad was going to hike to Katahdin with her tomorrow.

Jurassic, bless his heart, gave us a liter bottle full of water. Saved us a lot of trouble. Besides, we didn't have enough water bottles to make it to the top of Katahdin and back.

The excitement was tangible as we all thought and talked about tomorrow’s summit of Katahdin. We had all come a long way to get here, one way or another.

We all finally made our way to our tents or shelters and called it an early night so we could get an early start tomorrow. Sometime during the night another fellow named Ferrel came in and joined us for our summit.

Youtube of Abol Bridge to Birches