We finally made it to a town that isn’t Millinocket! Five days and a lot of mud and mountains after our last shuttle back into the hundred mile wilderness, we popped out at the parking lot on the side of Route 15, a few miles by road from Monson, Maine.
The hundred mile wilderness sign in Monson, which somehow took us 21 elapsed days to reach.
We’ve completed one hundred fourteen trail miles, and we’re currently ensconced for two nights in a thru-hiker’s heaven called Shaw’s Hiker Hostel. As the last town stop of the trail for most Northbound hikers and the first for most Southbound hikers, nearly everyone visits here. I can’t even express what it means to come out of the woods and find yourself at a place that feels like you’re staying with family, but family who also understand exactly what you need to recover and prepare for the next section of your hike, and truly care about providing it. I’m writing this at the Shaw’s kitchen table as our esteemed breakfast chef, Amelia Airheart, and one of Shaw’s co-owners, Hippie Chick, finish cleaning up from breakfast, orient new arrivals, curse a bit about the trials of running a busy house full of hikers, and do a hundred other tasks at once. In the next room a group of hikers are debating the mileage for their next few days and laughing. The other owner, Poet, is giving the orientation tour to some new check-ins. I’ve been hearing hikers rhapsodize about this place for years, but if anything they undersold it.
But I didn’t promise you a travelogue, I promised a chronicle of what happens in my brain while I’m hiking all day, and one thing that happens is that my brain starts making lists. So here are some lists I meditated on while I picked my way around the rocks and roots of northern Maine.
The Chairbacks are tough but some of it looks like this, so it’s not that bad.
