We took advantage of Susan’s help to once again hike lightweight from road to road today, beginning and ending at the Pine Ellis hostel in Andover. In spite of N’s best efforts to delay the start through his senior citizen moments, we were on the trail by 7:00 a.m. The first 4.7 miles were mostly a gradual uphill climb to 2,920′ on Wyman Mountain, with only a slight dip to pass the lovely Surplus Pond. There were many stone steps on the steeper sections and on the whole, the trail had the appearance of a place to hike rather than an obstacle course as we have seen in recent days.

We took a break at the Hall Mountain Lean-to before beginning a 1.5 mile, 1,500′ descent into Sawyer Notch. However, once again there were enough stone steps in place to keep it civilized and walkable. One nature note on this section: Although we had already walked several days in Maine under wet conditions, we had yet to see an orange Eastern Newt and were wondering if we had gone beyond the habitat range of the little guys. However, although conditions were starting to dry, there was one of the small orange critters right in front of us! We have now seen them in all 14 AT states.

We barely managed to rock hop rather than ford Sawyer Brook before starting the climb of Moody Mountain. Although the climb does not go as high as on the south side of the Notch, trail builders on the north have had to resort to wooden ladders and metal rungs as well stone steps to get their job done. We spent a full hour making the climb, after which it was an easy walk back down to South Arm Road. As we forded Black Brook, just before the road, in perhaps the most unexpected event of the day, Castaway was set upon by an array of leeches, which attached themselves to his feet, lower legs, and Crocs. Always something new on the AT…

We were finished with this section of the AT by 2:00 p.m., leaving the rest of the day to plan our hike towards Stratton. If the dry weather continues, we hope to be there in four days. We won’t say anything about distances, as we are looking forward to hitting 9/10 or 218.4 to go, but today we went under 250 miles reMaine-ing…