Yesterday, we traveled up to Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia to get 6 miles of backpacking in. With 107 days until Maine, we need to get more miles under our belt. We had originally planned to backpack 17 miles on the Foothills Trail this weekend, but Sean had to go out of town, so we are dog sitting our grand dog and we aren’t quite sure she would settle in the tent at night. We changed our plans so that we could care for her here at the house. Of course we wouldn’t leave her alone for an entire day, so she hit the trail with us yesterday.
We have not been to Hungry Mother in about 3 years. It’s a beautiful park and we love to camp there. The lake loop trail is 6b miles and is fairly easy. We knew this would be a good one to take Ammy on, as she is not as experienced as Ghost is on the trail. Hopefully we will be able to get the 17 miles of backpacking sometime in April. Practice makes perfect and gives us a chance to make sure we have our gear just right. We want to make sure it’s good to go in July.
We also ordered two more 14L Grizzly Bear Bags from Adotec. The size of the 14L bag fits perfectly inside of our backpacks. The 9L is too small and the 20L too big, but not big enough for 10 days by itself. With the two 14L bags, we can separate out our food and carry ten days worth. We are not planning any food drops. Once we get on the trail in Monson, we are on it until we summit Katahdin! I think it is a recent phenomenon that people setup food drops along the 100 mile wilderness. There are a few roads where folks make deliveries.
It is starting to feel real now that we are making final plans and prepping our food. I’ve been working on learning how to edit videos, too. I’m hoping that I can make a decent video of our epic 118 mile backpacking adventure in Maine! We hope to get several longer backpacking trips in before we start in Monson, but work seems to get in the way of that. Ha ha. The next weekend Marty is off is Easter weekend, so we won’t be camping then. Maybe we can do the Foothills trail the weekend of April 17th, if we are lucky. I have a new client rollout in April that will hopefully be going smoothly by that point so that I can be home early on that Friday.
May will be busy with another in person management meeting and we are going ti the Indy 500 for a week, so that leaves April and June for getting any extra backpacking miles in. Marty told me the other day that he would consider doing a thru hike when we retire. I reiterated that I am not thru hiker material. LOL I can do several weeks, but am not sure I could do a stint of 6 months on trail. Well, maybe if I was retired and had nothing else to do, I could do the whole trail. <laughter>
Happy Sunday, everyone!
My Little Red Bike 