Day 5, June 18th, Bivouac

Day 5, June 18^th    Bivouac

We all get up early and have a breakfast of potatoes pancakes, maple syrup, fruit, and coffee. I take my backpack out to the car. I show Gina how I have set up my food boxes and show her where I have put the addresses for each box. I also give her an envelope with $100 to cover the cost of postage.

I am leaving my car with Gina and Pat. Gina, Drew in his car seat, and I get into my car, and I start driving away to my journey. I stop at a gas station and fill up the car’s gas tank. I pull out and we are on the road for the next 3 hours. On the way, I see signs on the roadside identifying this as The Southern Tier, which means the southern half of western NY. The weather is minimal clouds, hot, mid-80’s and relative high humidity. We have to drop down into Penn. to get to the trailhead. I fill up the gas tank in the last town before the trailhead. I start driving out into the countryside. It seems like we may have gone too far so we stop and ask a man walking along the roadside if we had missed the trailhead. He says know that it is about ½ mile up the road. And, there it is, a small parking area on Penn. route 346, a sign saying North Country Trail and Finger Lakes Trail, and a clear foot path heading north.

We get out of the car, and I put my pack on for the “start the hike” picture. We say our good byes, and as I start up the hill, I see them drive away in my car. I am on my own now.

I have a black shirt because it was the only color the color the odor resistant Tramcar shirt came. My ventilated wide brimmed hat came from Walmart, the backpack is an Ospry Aether 70, the gaiters are OR knee length, the water bottles are Platypus 1 liter and 2 liter with a hose and bite valve, the short are zip leg nylon, the size 14 boots are a wide toe box from Keen, and the 6 ft. hiking poles are out of the woods.

I start into the woods following the familiar 2 x 6 in. white blazes as if I were hiking the Appalachian Trail once more. The trail is flat for a few hundred yards and then starts going up hill. I start up the hill and have numerous flashback pictures pop into my mind from the AT and the AT in NJ. For the past 9 years, I have had AT flashback pictures almost every day. Different sights, sounds and smells trigger the pictures, thoughts, and emotions. For a while, I my consciousness is absorbed in past hiking experiences. Gradually I am drawn back to the present as I begin to sweat very hard and my breathing becomes more labored. I have been on blood pressure medication for several years. When I first the medication any effort in the warm weather made me sweat very hard but that reaction has been dormant for years. I am not sure if it is the medication or just the heat, but I am losing water rapidly. I stop to rest and realize that my heart is beating rather fast as well. I start up again; I start hiking slowly and realize that my pack feels rather heavy compared to 45 minutes ago when I started into the woods. I only brought 2 liters of water figuring I would get to the Lean-To quick enough to avoid the weight of 2 additional liters. I also realize that I probably have only hiked a mile or so out of the 7 I plan to hike this afternoon. I start up a long hill and my breathing rapidly becomes labored and my heart is racing. I get the inner urge to “push through” the discomfort as I did when I was younger, but decide to slow down and pace myself better. Before I left Wisconsin I had a number of people tell me to be care during the hike. I even had two people tell me they had a “bad feeling” about the hike and advised me to stay home. I took the advise “to be careful” to heart, and I am applying it right now. The sweat is soaking my clothes and my hat.

I see a young man coming down the hill in front of me. When we get abreast, we stop and talk. Jeff is out for 3 days and is doing some advanced training before he goes on a 10-day backpack trip. He is headed down into Pennsylvania to a campground for the night. I tell him about my plan to do an end-to-end hike of the FLT. He wishes me well, and we head off in different directions. I try to pick up my pace and my body responds with heat/sweat and deep breathing. I slow down. I sip some water through my bite valve. I wipe the sweat from my forehead as I top the hill and see a little down grade ahead of me. I move a little faster. For years, I have always gone faster on the downhill “slide”, while the uphill “climb” has always been slower. Today, I pause often on the up hill climb and catch my breath and rest my legs. The downhill feels good, but as it always goes, “when there is a downhill slide, there always comes an up hill climb that follows”. I start up another hill and realize that I am taking single steps verses keeping up my momentum by taking striding steps. I retrieve the memory from my AT hike of the “stride” and try to put it into my muscles, but my muscles are too fatigued and too weak to make a stride. I keep clodding along up one hill after another. I feel more fatigued and thirsty. I drink more water and eat two fig-nutons. I burn the fig-nutons calories fast and feel fatigued again. It is getting later in the afternoon, and I am not making good mileage.

At 4:40 I come to a little creek with a bridge over it near Wolf Run Road. I look at the map and see that I have only come 4 miles. It is 3 more to the shelter. I consider the option of camping or pushing on to the shelter. At 1 mile and hour, I could get to the shelter around 7 or 7:30 pm. There will be enough evening sun light for it to be safe hiking. I cross the bridge and walk through some waist high grass and weeds. I go 100 years and hear all the voices from Wisconsin telling me to be careful. I hesitate for several minutes and then turn back, cross the bridge and drop the backpack.

Over the years I have developed somewhat of a pattern of what I do first when making camp. I pull out my small ground cloth of silicon-impregnated nylon and spread it out. Next is the unloading of the backpack putting items in different quadrants based on when they will be used. Next is setting up the tent, followed by getting water either from a spring or filtered from a creek. I have an Aqua Mira Frontier Pro for filtering water. It is a few oz. and says it is good for 50 gallons. I bring along a small bottle of white iodine as back up. Then I set the food aside and let the rice meal start soaking in the ¾ liter aluminum cook pot from Campmor. I blowup the air mattress and pillow then put them in the tent. I have decided to leave the tent fly off tonight since I know that there is no rain in the forecast. I hang the drying line and put my wet clothes on it. Then I go cleanup in the creek. By then the rice is ready to cut. I set up the Esbit stove and get a ½ oz. fuel pellet open. Setting it on the Esbit platform, I light it, put the pot on top, and set up the windscreen. Next I sort out what will go into the tent for the night and what will stay in the backpack. By then the food is hot. I sit on the bridge with a liter of water and eat my one hot meal for the day. After hanging the food bag high in a nearby tree, I go to bed. The stars are out and bright. There is a cooling breeze. It is 8 pm. I quickly fall asleep alone in the woods with the sound of the creek behind me, and the stars above me.