Day 133
It was so nice to sleep next to the brook last night that it was tough to leave it this morning! The sky was overcast and almost too dark for my sunglasses, but we had some climbing to do! The climb up Mt Cube promised to be rough and man was it! It seemed like we just went up and up! We stopped to take in the view before realizing that we still had almost one more mile to climb - sneaky hidden peaks and false summits! When we got to the top we had an amazing view below us as we were actually up above the clouds. We now had a long 3.3-mile downhill to the next road. Before we even left the summit it started to drizzle and man was it cold! It really felt like late fall up there. We worked our way down and, at the road, we ran into Mom (Tank’s mom who we hadn’t seen since Pawling, Ny). She gave us an orange soda and we talked to her for a bit before staring our next section of trail up to the Ore Hill campsite. This part had some unexpected steep climbs, but all in all wasn’t too bad. The sky cleared up and the sun came out which normally would be great, but we did a lot of walking through bogs and the mosquitoes were out in full force. We had one final gentle uphill before coming down to the next crossing. We passed a group of nearly 40 kids dayhiking Mt. Mist, so we should have known how easy the climb was going to be! When we first started the trail seemed steep, but when I saw Nokey standing and waiting for me about 40 minutes later he informed me we were at the top. I was waiting for the hill to get steep and had no idea we were so close! We then had a quick downhill to the next road. We got lost here several times as once again the DOC doesn’t know how to blaze trails - we couldn’t find the AT and then we had to cross a fast and deeper brook. We lost about 15 minutes screwing around thanks to The lack of blazes. Finally, we began the climb to the Jeffers Brook shelter. The guidebook said this nasty, dirty creek was the water source, but we found a better one nearly in front of the shelter. We were surprised to have the place all to ourselves and were there less than 40 minutes before a killer thunderstorm rolled through! The lightening and thunder were crazy and the rain kept up for a while, so we were happy to have the place to ourselves and it be dry.! Tomorrow we start The Whites by climbing Mt. Moosilauke and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared! The photo today is from Mt. Cube.