Second Tree Blog

We did a couple of day hikes — one with just the Wilsons to Smalls Falls, and then another one after the Herberts arrived to Angel Falls.

Smalls Falls

There will be a “Then and Now” post at some point from this hike…but that’s for another time. Smalls Falls doesn’t really have much of a trail — there are lots of little paths and pathways that meander up along the falls and to another tributary that runs parallel to it.

As tends to happen with group shots, getting all three kids to actually look at the camera, keep their eyes open, and smile at the same time is next to impossible. But, we had Carson in pure Carson form:

And…then we had Alana being charming:

We got to watch a couple that was being “very unsafe” (consensus of all of us). The guy jumped off this rock and then, clearly, was twisting the arm of his girlfriend to do the same, which she eventually did (the picture didn’t have to be this blurry…but it’s all I got):

It was easily 20 feet down to the water, and there were some extremely unsafe rapids immediately downstream.

Angel Falls

Angel Falls was a longer drive and then a mile-long hike in that included wading through several water crossings. Unfortunately, while trying to find an easier crossing at one of these, I took a spill…while carrying Alana. She landed on her bottom, and I took a chunk of skin off and bruised the pad of my left hand. Julie was immediately and decisively anointed the Alana-carrier at that point. By Alana.

The falls are pretty impressive — 90′ with a lot of water. Carson and Jack at the base of them:

Carson, Jack, and Jordan posing on the big rock at the base of the falls:

Bob throws the kids off the rock and declares himself ruler of all that he can see:

And by “throws,” I mean, “Gently helps them climb down,” of course.

Various groups of ducks on the lake paddle by the dock off and on throughout the day. We had some old bagels that lasted long enough that, not only were there seven ducks, there were a half-dozen seagulls vying for a snack.

Probably not the most environmentally responsible thing to do…but damn hard to resist.

This is a 5-month long series of blog posts that are the entries in my journals written on most evenings as I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1993. The journal entry appears first — indented — and then any additional commentary from my 15-years-removed perspective follows.

8/26/93 - Thur.

Last entry for a bit. I made it to Killington, VT, last night & today did 21.3 miles to get me to VT 12, where Julie is to meet me. As I write, I sit on the side of the road and hope that she is the reason for this being a short entry.

Tomorrow, I am going to slackpack about 13 miles and then head to Boston for the weekend (MIT rush).

[Omitted: a couple of paragraphs about the stress I was generating in Julie's family due to the hike and her frequent trips out to meet up with me.]

No more entries until Monday night.

The temperature of the water in Rangeley Lake hovered between 69 and 71 degrees Fahrenheit during our stay. Several of the locals commented about how it had “finally warmed up,” and both myself and Bob Herbert agreed that the water seemed a tad warmer than the last time we had been in it. But it was still pretty chilly.

If you ranked the Wilsons in order from 1 to 5 as to who was most interested/willing to get into the water, it would look something like this:

1. Me
2. Alana (a very close second)
3. Carson
4. .
5. .
6. .
7. .
8. .
9. Benton
10. Julie

Benton waded in a number of times, but his actual swimming time was so limited and brief that it was not captured by any cameras. Julie waded in a few times…and that’s as far as she got.

Alana got in the first time by jumping off the dock (not this picture). She was wearing her floatie suit and holding on to my hands, but I let her go completely under and then bob back up. Her eyes were open really wide and she came up and sputtered, “That’s cold!”

And that was it. She then proceeded to jump in a half-dozen more times, even without holding on to my hands as she jumped. And, she got to the point where I wasn’t holding onto her in the water, either. She’d hold her hands up and proudly proclaim, “No hands!”

Carson also enjoyed jumping off the dock, and we got a couple of half-way decent pictures of that.

And, there was plenty of wading around for the purposes of finding rocks to skip across the water.

The Herbert Kids — Jack and Jordan — put all of the Wilsons to shame. But, that was expected — we’ve always suspected they were a bit cold-blooded. More on our visit with the Herberts in a bit.

We spent just over six days at my parents’ cabin in Rangeley, Maine. This is only the second time that we’ve been to the cabin (first time for Alana), and it was every bit as wonderful as we remember.

View Larger Map

(If you don’t see the satellite view, you may need to click on the “View Larger Map” link to pull it up in a browser.)

We’ve got a series of posts coming that cover our week at the cabin. This post is all about the various paddles we took on the lake. My folks keep a tandem canoe and a couple of sea kayaks there, and they got a lot of use. Having grown up canoeing and canoe-camping quite a bit…I’m excited by the kids’ enthusiasm!

It took a little experimenting to figure out how to position my 200-lb. body (um…on a generous scale) in the canoe with the kids in a way that didn’t have them riding out of the water. First, I tried kneeling on one of the thwarts (with Carson):

This worked well balance-wise, but was brutal on my knees and not particularly comfortable on my tush.

From then on, every time we got in the canoe, we paddled it backwards, so I could sit in the bow seat (facing backwards) and whomever was in the bow would sit in the stern (facing backwards). Hmmm… If you paddle a canoe backwards, is the bow still the bow? With Alana in this arrangement:

I still kneeled occasionally, but I kept my life jacket off to use as padding on the bottom of the boat. Much better.

On Thursday, Carson, Benton, and I paddled just over 2 miles to the Rangeley town center. Benton’s idea was that Carson would paddle on the way over, and he would paddle on the way back (quietly telling me that he thought Carson might just decide to ride back in the car with Alana and Julie, who were meeting us there). As we departed from the dock at the cabin:

Doesn’t the water look nice and calm? It was. I’d noticed during the week that the prevailing wind was a west wind when it picked up, and we were paddling pretty much due east, so Benton’s plan seemed like a good one, as I would have a stronger paddler on the way back if the wind was blowing. While we were in town, we ate lunch, had some ice cream, did a little shopping, spent some time in the public library (free wi-fi, so I could check in with work), and got ready to head back. The wind had indeed picked up.

And Benton had decided that he wanted to ride back in the car with Julie and Alana. Doh!

Carson was game to paddle back with me. He paddled for the first half-mile and then got engrossed with the small rubber lizard (dubbed “Lizzie”) that he had purchased in town. Paddling solo into a stiff headwind in a tandem canoe. I’ve got good form. I can take it.

Until Lizzie “jumped” into the water when Carson dangled him over the side for a drink. He floated, fortunately, so I was able to retrieve him fairly quickly, but I was then turned broadside to the wind in open water. To Carson’s credit, he gamely grabbed his paddle when I told him I needed some help to get us pointed into the wind again, and he was a help. After that, he went back to Lizzie-time.

Back at the cabin, Benton was well-rested and wanted to do some sea kayaking. The next thing I knew, he and I were paddling (separately) a mile west into that same headwind up to Hunter’s Cove. Much easier in a kayak, and I was impressed that Benton completely had the hang of things by that point. He spent a lot of time in one of the kayaks:

Carson did some kayaking as well, but the kayak that had pedals that were adjustable far enough forward for the kids to reach was my dad’s, oddly enough, and it is a bit of a tank as sea kayaks go. Still, Carson could fairly consistently maneuver himself and got to where he’d paddle 10-20 yards out from shore and back:

Alana even got into the action (note that the stern is cropped out of the picture…to obscure the firm grip I had on the boat!):

Julie, too (take note of her here, as you won’t see her at all in the post of us in the water):

This is a 5-month long series of blog posts that are the entries in my journals written on most evenings as I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1993. The journal entry appears first — indented — and then any additional commentary from my 15-years-removed perspective follows.

8/24/93 - Tue.

I did over 25 miles today but am still in bed & writing by 8:30. The rain started coming down really hard about an hour ago. It was a really nice day until about a mile before the shelter, when it started clouding up. But, I got here before it started raining, as did “Pooh Bear,” another northbounder. He is 26, a carpenter from Massachusetts, whose girlfriend dumped him while he was on the A.T. He’s a pretty cool guy, and I have enjoyed the evening.

Tomorrow, I hope to do the 20 miles to Killington, VT, where The Inn at Long Trail (my next maildrop) is. Tomorrow, I talk to Julie, and the next night I see her!

We spent a serious day of moseying around the area of our hotel on Sunday.

Probably one of my favorite pictures from the trip was a hastily snatched moment of full family cooperation around a dancing bear statue in a courtyard we stumbled upon:

We also encountered a massive spider outside the art museum (click the image to view a larger version):

Alana tried out her Mission Impossible skills at a large war memorial:

And Carson tried out what it would be like to be memorialized on a coin at the Ottawa mint:

Carson also transformed himself into Obi Wan Wilson with a hotel bathrobe:

And Alana tried out my sunglasses:

All in all, we had a fairly action-packed day+ in Ottawa. We also managed to squeeze in a swim in the hotel pool, check out the locks that ran right past the hotel (waiting long enough to watch three boats move from one lock to another…if not all the way through the entire process), and take in a light show that was performed on the side of the main parliament building. From there, it was on to Rangeley, Maine on Monday…

This is a 5-month long series of blog posts that are the entries in my journals written on most evenings as I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1993. The journal entry appears first — indented — and then any additional commentary from my 15-years-removed perspective follows.

8/23/93 - Mon.

As I write, I am seated at a picnic table at Mad Tom Shelter, baking a “pesto pizza” on the outback oven. This is meal #2 on the oven, and so far all is going well.

Now, back to yesterday.

Mosquito Lunch (Ben & Betsy) were pretty sore that Buck was planning on staying in the warming hut on top of Stratton Mtn., which would make for a 24-mile day, with a 3 1/2 mile uphill at the end. Ben predicted that we would arrive at 7:00 PM, which we stayed on track for most of the day. The three of us hiked together and talked the whole time, so most of the day passed fairly quickly.

About Mosquito Lunch:

Ben & Betsy are both from Syracuse, NY, and both know Ateev Mehrotra (sp?), a friend of mine from school (he used to live across the street from Ben and play with him daily). they have been dating for the past four years and live together in Pittsburgh, where Betsy is a junior at Pitt and where Ben has held a number of different jobs, his most recent being an auto mechanic. they are both very bright. Ben has pulled a number of “hacks” that would make any MIT hacker proud (he attended R.P.I. for six weeks on scholarship before dropping out). We talked about doing long-distance canoeing and they were both really interested, so who knows what the future may hold with them?

Back to yesterday.

We got to the summit of the mountain only to be told by the GMC (Green Mountain Club) caretaker in residence that the warming hut was 3/4 of a mile “further down the trail,” and taht Buck and “Special K” were indeed there. Now, had we stopped then and looked at the map, read the handbook carefully, and looked in the guidebook, we might have realized that she meant 3/4 of a mile down a side trail. But we didn’t do that until we’d already gone 0.7 miles down the mountain on the A.T. In the end, we arrived at the warming hut just before dark. Then, we stayed up talking and catching up until after 2:00 AM (the lights off for the last two hours). So, again this evening I am tired.

Everybody else went into Manchester Center, VT, today and are taking tomorrow off. I am pushing on so that when I take off for 2 days this weekend to go to rush, they won’t get too far ahead of me. With luck, I’ll be with them pretty much all the way to Katahdin.

(The first pizza turned out pretty well except it stuck to the pot a bit, which it wasn’t supposed to do. The second one is cooking now.)

The sunsets are supposed to be great at this shelter, and there are just enough clouds in the sky to make tonight’s a candidate for one of the best.

The end of the week seems so far away. Luckily, Vermont has been beautiful so far and I’ve finally caught up with some of the people I have been chasing for months. But I still wish it were already the end of the week and Julie was here.

This was a fairly significant…and highly memorable day. I’d first met Buck on June 3rd and hiked with her for a week before getting off the trail for a Love Family reunion. We really clicked (with Bearanoid as well), and I’d pretty much been keeping track of how far ahead of me she was from that point forward. So, no real surprise that we were up to 2:00 AM catching up on the prior two months — we’d made any number of mutual acquaintances along the way.

This post is heavy on the pictures, light on the text. But, we spent a good chunk of time on the grounds of Canada’s parliament:

It was a block away from our hotel, so we wandered down on Sunday morning to watch the daily reenactment of the changing of the royal guard.

Which wound up being canceled for Sunday.

But, until we found that out, Julie played around with some odd-perspective pictures in front of the main tower:

We got a shot of most of the family at a statue of Queen Victoria on the grounds (click the picture to view a larger version):

And, on the backside of the building, Alana and Julie took in the view:

Benton voluntarily chauffeured Alana around throughout the time we were in Ottawa. He liked to push her fast…and she liked to be pushed fast!

There is also an over-sized tea party set of statues memorializing the women’s rights activists from Canada’s past. Carson settled in with them (and there will be a Then and Now post at some point with Julie):

And, just a block away from the grounds, Carson was inspired to leap up on a pedestal and meditate (this pose was entirely unprompted!):

Luckily for us, we were staying for a second night, so we got to return on Monday to watch the reenactment of the changing of the guard. This involved several hundred people, including a full band that had a bagpipe section:

A bit more randomness from Ottawa in the next post…

This is a 5-month long series of blog posts that are the entries in my journals written on most evenings as I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1993. The journal entry appears first — indented — and then any additional commentary from my 15-years-removed perspective follows.

8/22/93 - Sun.

Caught Buck. Long day. 1.4 mile detour. I’m tired. That’s it.

I’ve got very vivid memories of the latter part of this day. A more complete recap comes in the next entry.