A whole lot of bogs

Another day in the books. It was another day of walking north, another day in which I crept closer to the greatest mountain.

I was on trail at 6:00AM once more. My focus today was getting to Vernon, NJ.

The trail out of the shelter was fairly favorable, allowing me to cruise along at a pretty good pace for the first part of the day.

The trail spent of the first several hours of the day cutting through different open fields and meandering across silent country roads.

Eventually the trail walking the perimeter of a National Wildlife Pond Refuge. Even though the Federal Government screws up a lot of things, this is one example of the feds getting things right. The pond was buzzing with wildlife ranging from ducks to birds to many species of insect.

The trail then traverses you over a ridge with no views. The ridge line consisted of scrambling up many rocks faces that seemingly come out of no where.

After descending off the ridge the trail then traversed one straight mile of boardwalk. This is here because there is a large marsh field that the trail would do massive amounts of damage to over the course of time.

There were a lot of bog bridges in general today. It seems that this area is heavily saturated. It must have taken a whole lot of work to put in all those bridges. Thanks to all who made that possible.

I rolled into NJ 94 around 11:45AM, and Cookie and I rolled into the church hostel about 20 minutes later after a fairly easy hitch into Vernon.

Over the course of the afternoon I did laundry, took a shower, and resupplied at the grocery store. I also added a few entries to my journal.

I also created the groundwork for a trip into NYC Saturday night, Sunday, with a return Monday morning to the trail. I am looking forward to this trip, it will be a nice change of pace from the everyday grind of the trail.

Well, time to sleep, 17 miles is on the docket for tomorrow.

And that's the way it was.

Kirby

Ga>ME 2008.