We woke up with the sun but were moving in slow motion. While Joe went to retrieve the food I started to setup our cooking space. Since it wasn’t an official campsite there was not a good spot to setup the stove. Everywhere was covered with dead leaves which seemed like a bad idea for lighting a stove. So I setup the stove on a flat rock at the end of the footbridge and had moved the rest of our food prep stuff nearby. Not proper protocol but I wasn’t expecting anyone to be coming through at 7:30 in the morning anyway. Joe came back with the food and started cooking and so I started filtering water from the stream.
After we’d eaten last night’s dinner for breakfast and started clearing up we heard loud crashes coming from the direction we had come in from last night. We talked loudly in case it wasn’t human and in the hopes it was human started clearing our stuff out of the trail. A few minutes later Hubey from VT arrived. Hubey was thru hiking the trail and had camped at the previous brook the night before. Hubey asked if we’d mind some company for awhile and we said we’d love it. So we got dressed, organized our gear and packed up. Hubey hung around getting water and chatting while we prepared to leave which for some reason took us until almost 9:30AM.
We hiked and chatted with Hubey who was semi-retired and an experienced thru hiker for several hours. We came to learn that the loud crashing we’d heard prior to Hubey’s arrival was Hubey clearing the trail of downed limbs and debris as he went. We left Hubey at Rock Lake where he stopped to take a dip. Joe and I continued on to Silver Lake and decided we’d make an easy day of it and stop there for the night. We arrived at Silver Lake leanto around 2PM and were lounging around when Hubey arrived about an hour later. After hearing about the leaches in Rock Lake I was turned off from taking a plunge in Silver Lake and would go the rest of the trip without washing my hair. Hubey wanted to make some more miles so he went on his way.
Silver Lake was beautiful, had a privy and fire pit and was a welcome source of water. We were still working out the kinks with our filter and getting water took us longer than it should have every time. We would eventually read the manual and figure out we had to clean the element after every use.
A small group of guys arrived via kayaks how we aren’t exactly sure. They setup in the campsite at Silver Lake and we never did talk to them. We decided to stay in the lean to so we could avoid setting up and taking down the tent again and hopefully get going more quickly in the morning.
While Joe went to a spot away from where we would sleep to start working on boiling some water for dinner, the pair of thru hikers we had chatted with at Benson Road the day before showed up. They were a brother and sister and had hitched a ride home for the night and lightened their packs and started out from Benson Road again that morning.
We had dinner and played some cards and then settled in early for bed. About 7PM a lone exhausted hiker showed up. He seemed relieved to be there and asked if there was room in the leanto which of course there was. Then he asked if anyone had a map he could look at! Said he should have bought the map. Um, yes. Then without a word after looking a the map hiked away.
Words of Wanderers 