Day 8 - Monday, June 20

Linda

We were off at 7:30, and passed the Canadian couple in about five minutes. They had camped just beyond us last night. Went straight up 4^th Mt. for quite a while, then over a lot of rocks and down. The downhill stretches in Maine are almost worse than the uphills, because they aren't graded, and just dive off the side down whatever happens to be there. We passed the turn off to Cloud Pond at 9:45, then up over more rocks to the top of Barren Mt. There's an old fire tower on top, and we climbed up there for the first view of anything we've seen in four days. The view stretched out to Barren Ledges, Bodfish Farm and several lakes. From there, the trail really dived almost straight down the mountain.

About half way down we saw a split log bench. It looked oddly out of place, but was a nice gesture on someone's part. Seemed like this stretch today had a lot more log bridges over boggy sections than any others. We appreciated the efforts of the trail crews in this section. The "interesting bog", as the guidebook puts it had bridges the whole way. Nice change from muck to the knees. At the bottom, we took a side trail to a waterfall on the Long Pond Stream. There's a neat suspension bridge, which I was glad to see, because it was a very deep gorge, and the water was high and swift. We walked back up to the main trail which followed a road for several miles.

At Bodfish Farm we stopped for water. A mountain family lives there in a couple shacks and a trailer. We talked to one of the men, Donovan Drew, who turned out to be one of the originators of the trail in that area of Maine. He told us how they measured the mileage with a wheel, and of some rescues he's made on the mountains. Neat old man - it would have been interesting to stay and hear more of his stories, but we had to be going.

We kept walking on the road until it cut back into the woods. Our feet were really beat from the road, but as soon as we left it, it got so boggy, I soon wished we were back on the road. Passed Little Wilson Campsite just before leaving the road, and continued for another 2 miles before I gave out. Pitched the tent on a flat area between bogs by Moose Pond. 14.2 miles for the day, 9.6 to Monson tomorrow morning. Can't wait to be in a town and get clean again. I feel like a walking crud.

Ron

Today was a long one, involving some long assents and descents in the morning. We hiked the three remaining miles to Cloud Pond Lean-to (our original destination of yesterday). Then on to the top of Barren Mountain. On top of the Barren was and old lookout tower that had been out of service for at least 10 years (judging from the old magazines we found). We walked down to the ledges to enjoy the view and eat a candy bar. When the rain began to threaten, we hurried down the steep trail to the blue blazed high water bypass trail over Long Pond stream.

The next miles were all road walking. We met Donovan Drew at Badfish Farm and learned that he was one of the original builders of the trail. Except for the last 1.5 miles, the rest of the day was on roads. We are both physically okay, our feet are badly battered and shriveled from the constantly wet boots. Tomorrow we'll be in Monson and have a chance to clean things up.

(14.8 Miles - 104.7 Total)