May 11th, 2015

Today's miles = 8
Today's ADK miles = 6
Total ADK miles = 87.2

Today I woke up in the motel in Lake Placid. I did not want to get out of bed. We had set an alarm for 7 thinking that that wouldn't feel too early but I think any time would have felt too early for me. I am a morning person by nature but while on trail I almost never want to get up. I moseyed my way to the lobby to grab some coffee for us and then began to get my things together. We left the motel by 9:45 or so and headed out for breakfast. After toast and hashbrowns I made my way to EMS and got a new pair of shoes and a fuel canister. I absoutely could not walk another 5 miles in the shoes I had. I realized that those particular boots had walked with me over 1,500 miles and I feel like that is why I was having so much trouble. Who'd a thought? I guess I didn't sit back and think about the mileage on them before I decided to bring them. In any case, I have new Solomons! After the EMS run was done I got a sports wrap for my leg and Monkey had called a taxi to take us back to the trail. A taxi! I know. Since when do we take taxis instead of hitching?  Well, the taxi was ten bucks and we wanted to get to trail asap. It was perfect. We got dropped off right at the trail around 1pm...which was a paved road. Wtf? That road lasted for a few miles before finally turning left onto to private land. There was a little trail that meandered around a brook thet we followed for while. We were suppose to follow that trail all the way (3 miles) to the top of South Notch. The trail disappeared after a half a mile or so. We searched for it for a while. Retracing our steps and noticing that the trail did in fact suddenly stop. While we were searching for the trail in a rather thick forest the sky got dark and it began to pour. It was the first rain of the Trans ADK for me. And oh what a rain it was! The thunder and lightning was pretty intense and a tree not far from where we were got hit. This made searching for the trail nearly impossible.  I knew the trail was suppose to cross the brook so I walked up and down the brook looking for any signs of possible trail.  The problem is that I have a very keen eye for spotting trail and I kept finding them everywhere. They all seemed to be game trails that lead nowhere I wanted to be. Monkey busted out the GPS and we decided to just bushwhack through the forrest and up to South Notch.  We had been following it for a while when my suspicion that we were no going in the right direction was confirmed when Monkey stated that the GPS was not working properly. We had hiked out of our way and up a mountain we didn't need to climb. So, putting the GPS away we took a compose bearing SW and continued bushwacking down the other side of the mountain we had just climbed and started heading the right direction. The rain was still coming down.  The tress were getting denser. The ground was so soft it was disintegrating underneath my feet. The whole mountain was practically a bog. It was a hot mess. Hours of trudging through (including some screaming and treking pole throwng) we finally made it to the top. Soaked the bone and freezing we acknowledged that it was going to get dark in about an hour. There was no trail heading down the mountain we had just worked so hard to get up. We had to bushwhack down in even worse conditions than there was going up. It was STEEP! The ground did not hold. We had to cross a raging river multiple times all while getting poured on in the (almost) dark. At the bottom of the mountain was suppose to be a road. When we got there we found that it was a flooded old jeep track. So, we set up camp in the rain and dark alongside that road pretty much right on a game trail. Everywhere else is flooded. It took a while to get out of my wet clothes and dry off. Of course, you never fully do when you're hiking in the rain. I had chili for dinner and went right to bed conpletely stripped of any and all energy I may have had.