After last week’s hike was cut short I was left with an unfulfilled desire to spend a night in the woods. Since my weekends for the next month were already booked, this was my last chance for a while if I wanted to fulfill that desire. Plus, I had a bag of apples and six cans of coke from last week that hadn’t yet found AT thru-hikers to assist. We hadn’t hiked too much of the path I’d planned for last week and the area was pretty, so I figured I’d just head back there again to try to finish what we’d started.
Because of some Saturday evening plans, I didn’t leave the house until around 20:00. Not to be deterred, I made sure my headlamp was packed with fresh batteries and drove off into the night. I arrived at the Beartown State Forest parking lot at 21:10, well after dark. Once I’d taken a look at the trailhead signage and eating cupcake to balance the insulin still in me from dinner, I set out on the roughly two mile hike to the shelter on the AT.
I have mixed feeling about night hiking. On one hand, it can be slow and harder to navigate the trail, and I can’t see nearly as much of the scenery as I can in the daylight. On the other hand, the relative lack of visual stimulus means I can appreciate the other senses more, and combined with changes in other human activity, there’s a type of calm that can’t be replicated in daytime. And I can appreciate stars.
The hike started circling around Benedict Pond until it joined up with AT. At one point, a clear view of the pond allowed for a beautiful reflection of the sky, and the glow of civilization in the distance. After crossing a dirt road, the trail climbed steeply upwards, and I was climbing up stone steps and around mud puddles for a while. After 15 minutes, it leveled out along the edge of a ridge and I could look out south and see the outlines of the hills against the sky quite distinctly.
Around this point I began to worry a little bit, because while I wasn’t concerned with following the trail in the dark, if the path off to the shelter wasn’t well marked, I could definitely imagine walking past it and missing my place to sleep. I was counting on the shelter to sleep in, so I hadn’t brought a tent or ground cloth, and wasn’t looking forward to sleeping on soggy ground without them if I couldn’t find it.
Luckily, after 20 or so minutes the clearly visible sign pointing off to the shelter came into view. I wasn’t sure how many people to expect in the area, so after sneaking my way past half a dozen tents, I was glad to see the shelter itself was unoccupied. I unloaded by pack, and after another 15 minutes of unsuccessfully hunting for a bear box mentioned in the shelter’s register, I gave up, hung my food over my head in the shelter, and finally got to sleep around 11:00.
The sun woke me up at about 06:30, and I was ready to go fairly quickly, since I didn’t have to pack up a tent, and my breakfast of poptarts would stay in my pocket until I was actually hiking. I needed to hike back to the car first thing to get the parking permit I couldn’t have been bothered with the night before, but before that I made sure to distribute some food to the hikers camped around me. This late in the season they were mostly southbound or section hikers, but most of them were glad to take me up on the apples and chat for a while. No one seemed interested in the coke, possibly because they were planning to head into town later that day.
I finally left the shelter around 07:30. It was really fun being able to go back through the same area I’d hiked the night before, and seeing it all in a new light. I took the time to explore a side trail I’d ignored on the previous night, and found a very pretty lake sitting just above the trail that neatly explained the all the mud I’d been having to avoid nearby on trail.
I made it back to my car with plenty of time to spare only discovered they stopped enforcing parking passing September 4th. By that time, I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated go back into the woods for another 12 miles of hiking, so I just hung out enjoying the ambiance of early fall forests for a while before getting back in the car and driving home early. (I had also stopped long enough to that I’d given myself more insulin to cover my poptarts, and didn’t want to manage the hassle of so much insulin if I started hiking again.)
Hike Details:
- Date: 9/11/2021
- Distance: 5 miles
- Route: https://www.alltrails.com/explore/map/map-oct-5-03-07-am-6af97d7
Pokin' Along 