Why do a long day when we can do a short day?

8-18-09 day 77
start: Horns Pond Lean-To, ME
end: Little Bigelow Lean-To, ME
daily mileage: 10.2
total mileage: 993.2


We climbed up onto the Bigelow range today- our last big mountains before Katahdin! We're told that it's considerably flatter after today, and our mileages will start picking up. We'd planned a 17 mile day today, but when we reached the top of West Peak we (for some reason) had an impromptu planning session. We planned out the rest of our journey all the way to Katahdin, and we realized that at the rate we've been going we'll get there on the 28th! We're actually ahead of schedule! We want to go quickly through the 100 mile wilderness (to cut down on the amount of food we'll have to carry), so we figured that we should take shorter days before then. Starting today!


So, we took a 3 or 4 hour napping/lunch break once we were off the ridge. When we finally decided to do the 5 miles over Little Bigelow into our lean to, we knew we'd be getting in late again- our plan seems to be to get in late every night, even if we have to take outrageous lunch breaks to do it! On Little Bigelow Mountain Huck Finn caught up with us. He was in a really foul mood from his long day. We got into the shelter, and met Whisp, Bon Bon, and Huck Finn, and were lucky to get in when we did, as a whole mess of loud and annoying section hikers came in just after us. Fortunately, as we'd claimed the shelter space, they had to set up their tents (and not we ours).