No joke, I think I hike past a thousand lakes today. Well, maybe more like 40. I was rounding up.

There was no rush to get up early for my short 20 mile day today. So I slept in a little and didn’t get out till 7:45. Watercolors was awake then, but she was in no rush to get up. It seems weird getting up this late but it will prevent me from doing something stupid at the end of the day like try and hike to much.

The humidity is definitely up today. I decided to wear some fresh clothes and that probably was not the best idea. Within 30 minutes everything is saturated with sweat. I sure hope there is a laundromat in Birchwood because I am in need of some laundry.

I have enough water for about half of the day so I will need to decide where to get some more. It is hard to tell sometimes which lakes are natural lakes and which lakes are beaver ponds. I come to a fast flowing stream that is very cold so I go ahead and scoop some and filter it. It has a bit of a brown color and when filtered still has an earthy taste.

This must be from a beaver pond. I fill only one of the bottles in case the next water source is better. I will just dump this bottle and refill in that case. I make a coffee in my small bottle and down the whole thing at once. 100 yd later down the trail confirms that this is the outflow from a beaver pond. Joy.

The first few hours of hiking are in hardwood forests and a few short connector road walks. The sections here don’t seem to be more than about four or five miles before it starts an official new section. It’s hard to keep all these section names straight since they aren’t really spelled out in the guide. But half of them have the word Lake in their name.

The section also has decent boardwalks and bridges to bypass the larger areas of water. But all of these elevated structures require maintenance. As soon as they are built they become a liability. One bridge in particular was in such bad shape that they just built another bridge on top of the crumbling bridge. I’m not sure if that should be celebrated or not.

The good part about so many lakes is that each Lake will have at least one bench facing it. So I have no trouble finding a bench at 11:00 when I am ready for lunch. I bought more baguettes in Cornell and that’s the first thing I tear into. Fresh but not crispy baguettes with Irish butter, yum. Pepperoni, Cheetos, and apricots round out lunch.

I have only done 7 miles so far, but it’s still not even noon yet. But luckily this Lake seems to be a good water source. The water is cool and much clearer than the beaver stream that I filtered from before. So I dump the bottle of beaver water and refill both water bottles with this fresh lake water. It has a much much better taste.

The trail now follows a lot of logging roads and many of the areas are completely logged out. I read one of the signs they have at a clear-cut area about aspen regeneration. Apparently they want to clear cut big chunks of forest because the aspens are the first thing to spring back and they only prefer full sun.

I guess 40 years from now this will be a stand of tall aspens. 80 years from now it will be hardwoods again and all of the aspens will have died. They want the Aspen to grow because of the wildlife that they support. No aspen’s, no grouse etc.

The worst part about the clear cut areas is that the sun is shining on me as well as the baby aspens. And with the high humidity today I don’t want the sun shining on me. There’s also one meadow in the middle of the day. And then it dawns on me I haven’t walked through a meadow in at least 400 miles. Good riddance too, because even at 12:30 the grass is still wet and getting my shoes damp.

There are also areas where the logs have been cut and neatly stacked but never collected. Just today I saw probably 10 truckloads worth of logs just riding in the woods. I’m not sure if they are defective but if they never intended to collect them in the first place. All I know is these aspens better be appreciative of their elders that gave their lives so that they could grow uncontrollably.

The trail is easy to follow in well marked in these sections. There are tons of intersections but I don’t miss any turns and I’m never second-guessing if I’m on the right trail or not. It’s also nice having standard yellow rectangles again.

I passed a hiker early in the afternoon going the other way who is covered head to toe in bug protection. I haven’t really noticed any significant bugs today. I wonder if he’s just overly sensitive or if it’s about to get nasty. The mosquitoes aren’t really bothering me but there are gnats flying around my head. Later in the day around 5:00 p.m. I do end up putting my bug net on just because I’m tired of waving in front of my face. They are not biting me they are just annoying.

I take an afternoon break for another snack and decide to make a nuun instead of coffee today. It turns out the noon I have been carrying have caffeine in them. And that is probably what caused my caffeine headaches earlier in the trip. I probably never factored in the extra caffeine from the nuun tablet. Today will be an experiment to see if one nuun is equivalent to one coffee. As far as the energy it gives me they don’t seem to be quite as strong as coffee.

At 5:15 in the afternoon I am in a section that has more signs describing the terrain and Ice Age features. One of the diagrams shows that there’s a visitor center on top of the hill I’m standing on. I had no idea there was a visitor center.

A few minutes later I make it to the visitor center but I guess they closed at 5:00 because it is completely shut down. There is an impressive view of vast meadows for about a mile in three directions.

They have some signs around the building identifying a lot of the wildflowers I have been seeing. I take pictures of all of them for reference later. There doesn’t appear to be water or bathrooms or anything like available so I keep heading on down the trail.

I’m only about 2 miles from my planned campsite and should be there by 6:00. And right on time the trail to the campsite appears so I head down it to check it out. When I get there it’s not a great campsite. The two official temp pads are mostly dirt and have no trees above them. I don’t feel like wrapping up the soaking wet tent tomorrow.

Further on down by the fire ring the ground is sloped but at least there’s plenty of tree cover. I find a section of ground that seems like I can sleep on it comfortably without sliding off of my air mattress.

I also still have the option of going one mile further to a commercial campground. They have water but only put toilets and no shower and no laundry. The only main advantage is that bar and grill so I could have a decent dinner. I called the number but it just goes to an answering service so I hang up. I guess I am here for the night.

There is a firing with a grate on it, so I set up my stove there and cook dinner while I filter water from the lake. I want to have two full bottles for tomorrow’s road walk of about 20 miles.

By the time I’m ready to crawl in the tent, my clothes are still quite wet. I was hoping they would be dry by the time I was ready to go to bed. This means I will be putting on wet clothes in the morning.

Emotion of the day, Drained

I wore fresh clothes to cheer me up today. But the humidity is so high and the sun was beating down on me in the open logged areas. I was sweating almost as bad as the road walks in the heat waves earlier in the trip.

Clean clothes are hard to come by in the woods. There are not many cities from here to the end of the trail. So the drench my last clean set within 30 minutes was kind of a letdown.

And just seeing all the clear-cut areas and how much wood is actually wasted was a bit depressing too. I know they have a good reason for doing it, but for the next 20 years this is not going to be a fun place to hike.

It was hard to keep my energy levels up today. I’m not sure why but I really did feel drained all day long today.