NCT 4: Loopy

Rome to Cortland, NY

Written May 18th, 2021:

I can't believe it's only been five days since we last left town. We're in Cortland, NY, sixty miles short of our original goal of Ithaca, and it's been a bit of a hectic nearo. I'm struggling to recall the first couple of days in this section, since the trail has radically changed in character since we left Rome.

After our deeply relaxing nearo we left town at 9am as usual, and set off for our roadwalk down the highway in high spirits. Constantine breezily assured me that the trail to Ithaca was only about a four day section, maybe five, and he sounded so confident that I didn't think to check his math. I don't know why I keep taking his word for it - his mileage estimates are almost always wrong, and usually they're somewhat short. He finds it motivating when his estimates are off, but I need to know exactly what I'm in for so I can pace myself correctly, and I can't survive entirely on water and caffeine like he does. We were a bit low on fuel so we'd packed out ramen for every dinner, which requires only hot water and not a hard boil.

Leaving the hotel, we were greeted by an unusual sight. We were next to a major thoroughfare, and traffic was stopped in all four directions. As we reached the crosswalk, we saw the cause of the disruption - a woman had parked her car in the middle of the intersection and was shepherding a line of ducklings across the road! The mother duck was flapping anxiously on the sidewalk, attempting to hurry her brood along, but the littlest one was having trouble getting up the curb. The woman chased him along, then finally scooped him up in her hands and carried him over to the sidewalk. The mother duck honked in thanks and the family waddled off into a nearby park. The most astonishing thing was, nobody else honked. The entire line of cars, including traffic going the opposite direction, had decided as a group that this was worth being late for work and were waiting politely. Her task accomplished, the woman ran back across the lanes and slid into her parked car, beaming. I applauded and gave her a giant thumbs up, and she gave me one in return before she drove off. It left both me and Constantine with a smile that lasted all day.

We had a few miles through a neighbourhood and a short mile of highway before reaching the Erie Canal Towpath that would be our trail for the next two days. As we headed west from the major road, the feeling of Rome changed. We left behind the tony suburbs that had me feeling so out of place the day before and walked instead through the stages of gentrification. At first, I was reminded of my old neighborhood in Winnipeg's West End, where streets of tidy lawns and coffee shops alternated with blocks of ugly townhouses. I used to live in a tumbledown rental like that, and the sight of art-school sidewalk chalk and anarchist flags brought back good memories. As we progressed further into the outskirts, the buildings were increasingly abandoned and derelict, and the businesses turned into cheque cashing services, pawn shops, and dusty convenience stores. Here, the newly restored houses stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs, and there was the definite odour of a grow-op. Still, the lure of cheap real estate could not deter the yuppies, and one house sported a large yard sign alleging that their neighbour was a convicted felon. I'm sure he was, but jeez, leave the poor guy alone. The last few blocks were straight out of Gran Torino, with fallen-in houses and chained-up dogs. One car's bumper was decorated with what looked like real bullet-holes. As we crossed a boulevard over to the highway, a cop made a hard left turn and screeched off in the direction we'd just come from.

The highway was terrible. It was a concrete wasteland of mattress stores and HVAC repair, dominated by the acrid chemical reek of a nearby cement factory. There was no sidewalk for much of the mile-long walk, and we had to watch for semi-trucks backing into the driveways. Finally, we found the turn, which was mercifully located at a crosswalk, and darted across the road into an entirely different world. I couldn't understand why the NCT was routed this way - a spur of the Canal Towpath joined the main trail not even half a mile on, and that section of the bike path would have taken us through downtown and past a bunch of little parks. I figured it was because the highway route was longer than the Canal spur trail, and the NCT likes nothing more than to make their route longer. Either way, the Canal Towpath was a refreshing change from urban sprawl. As soon as we set foot on the gravel path, the trees closed in and shielded us from the highway noise. Birds chirped, ducks paddled, and dozens of turtles lounged in the sun atop the floating logs in the canal. It was lovely and fresh, and even the stench of the cement factory seemed a distant memory. I removed my headphones and walked along happily in the growing heat of the day, waving greetings to the stroller-moms and dog walkers who were also enjoying the refuge.

By mid-afternoon I was hot and cranky. After we ate lunch at a picnic shelter, the leafy shaded marsh gave way to a long, exposed section of mixed gravel and roadwalk, and it was clear that this part of the canal path was very rarely used. It wasn't used by hikers, anyway - two people passed us on loaded touring bikes, and I sorely missed the Surly LHT sitting at home in my garage. I now understood why I'd used the NCT so much on my bike trip in 2016 - most of it is cycling path! Now, cycling path does make for nice, easy walking most of the time, and I don't generally find it objectionable. It's not even that I was particularly bored; the route continued through interesting little neighborhoods and there was plenty of waterfowl to observe in the canal. It's just a bit... same-y. The closest comparison I can think of is to listening to classic rock radio all day. I like classic rock just fine, but it's the same few songs on rotation and the same old commercials. After a couple of hours, I start to crave a different sound.

Around 5pm we went through the town of Canastota, where I got attitude from a very snarky gas station clerk when I asked for water and ended up having to buy two bottles of Poland Spring. I was also annoyed that we'd chosen to resupply in Rome rather than looking ahead and hiking to Canastota with light packs, but I was very much in a “you made your bed, now lie in it” type of mood and shot down Constantine's suggestion that we get dinner here anyway. We hadn't done enough miles yet! I didn't deserve town dinner, and besides, our packs were way too heavy for only four days. We had to eat some of the weight out them, and I was still deeply stuck in my anxiety about looking lazy to those watching our GPS tracker. I paced out of town feeling tired and slow, and we soon left the town sprawl and made camp on a secluded patch of the path between farmer's fields.

We had plans to meet up again with Jim and Alizabeth the next day, so we woke early to run out the ten miles between our campsite and their parking spot. They'd brought two vehicles this time, so they could hike with us for most of the morning. We'd originally planned to camp near what we thought was an old quarry, but stopped short when we found a nice site around 7pm. It was a good thing we did, because the quarry was still active! It was a Saturday, so the rock crushing equipment was shut down, but there were No Camping signs all around and work trucks parked on the access road. Still, the trail continued to be soft and shady, so we were in a good mood when we came upon Jim and Alizabeth at their truck.

It was good to have their company again. They'd actually gotten married in the little town of Cazanovia that we'd be passing through, and had their first kiss on a trail nearby. We chatted and made fun of Constantine's weird self-imposed challenges on trail, and when we reached Cazanovia we popped our heads into the cute historic inn where they'd held their wedding. They brought picnic blankets, and we ate our trail lunches at the Art Park just outside of town, which was scattered with large metal sculptures and abstract installations. It was a very pleasant morning, but when we bid them goodbye at a trailhead parking area, I found myself anxious about miles once more.

Constantine had the great idea that we should hike the entirety of the Finger Lakes Trail, just to check another one off the list, and at first he said it was only an extra 80 miles or so. That didn't sound quite right, so at a break I sat down with our FLT data and the calculator app to figure it out. If the trail was 4,600 miles long and we'd spent 15 days hiking 320 miles, how much would we need to average to smooth out an additional…. oh. The extra length of the FLT was actually 120 miles. Oh no. “Babe, how did you decide that it was just four days to Ithaca?”

“Just guessed. Gaia says it's like 60 miles from here as the crow flies, plus I added a little extra for twists and turns.”

OH NO! I looked through the data sheets and added together all the map sections that would bring us to the Ithaca turn-off. The FLT maps are organized for dayhikers, so there are no total mileages on them - instead, each map section starts from zero miles and counts up to the end of the map, anywhere from 17 to 26 miles. Ithaca was on M16 - we were not even at map O2 yet, the beginning of the NCT's spur to the main FLT. “Oh my god, Ithaca is over 130 miles away! What the hell!” We had slightly overpacked for a four day section, but now we were looking down the barrel at six full days and the food bags suddenly seemed light. And we were nearly out of fuel. “Oh no!”

There was nothing we could do about it, so we just hiked. After some more mental math, I put my foot down hard and was able to convince Constantine that we absolutely could not spare the time to hike an additional 120 miles. My visa runs out in mid-October, so to accomodate an extra four or five days, we'd have to average about 34 miles per day from now on, without zeroes. That's aggressive, even if we hiked 40s through the flat roadwalk sections. With the mileage we have left, we only have to average a 28 mile per day pace, which we can do. For every day we hike 30 miles, we earn 10% of a nearo.

Towards evening, we at last came to FLT map O2, the beginning of the Onondaga Trail. We'd been fantasizing about the moment we could leave our camping worries behind and just hike whatever distance we wanted, but a closer inspection of the maps had quashed that hope. The FLT is much like the rest of the NCT, in that it's a patchwork of state forest and private land. We could make camp 28.5 miles into our day or at 32 miles, but nowhere before, after, or in between. We'd started late the day before and taken a leisurely pace all morning while walking with our friends, so I was determined to punish myself for the indulgence and push for the 32 mile camp spot. My body had other plans, however, and at 5pm sharp my energy cratered. I don't quite have the hiker hunger yet, so I'm chronically deficient in calories, and my medication can cause a blood sugar crash when it wears off. Five o'clock had been my cue to start struggling for two weeks now, and this was the day I put the pieces together: meds wearing off + skinny Magpie = exhausted crying. I unwrapped a Snickers, and felt a surge of energy the moment the chocolate hit my tongue. I imagined all of my red blood cells whooping with delight as the sugar fizzed through my system.

The light grew thick and gold as the sun began its slow descent, and I was still feeling pretty wiped. Stablilizing my blood sugar had stabilized my mood too, and I was able to forgive myself for the slower pace of the day. 28.5 miles was right on target, and a totally acceptable day, so I called it at the Tromp Pond Bivouac Area. “Bivouac area” is the weird name that the FLTA has for a primitive campsite with no tables, to distinguish it from a primitive campsite with a picnic table. If it has a picnic table, they weirdly call it a “campground”, even if it's one site. An actual campground with electricity they call a “private campground”, I think, although we haven't run across any of these yet. Anyway, neither of the names made sense here, as Tromp Pond was more of a mud puddle and the “bivouac area” was just a chunk of dirt track separated from an ATV road by a bulldozed pile of gravel. We managed to find a flat spot to one side of the old track and went to sleep after a meal of lukewarm ramen.

We didn't get to sleep for long. Deep in the dead of night, I awoke from a dream where I was trying to sleep in the middle of a busy highway. Or that's what I thought - but the headlights just kept staring me in the face. Engines revved from all directions, and a painfully bright beam lanced through the tent as a vehicle rumbled by. What was this nightmare? I wrestled my brain awake and gradually realized that the noise and light was coming from an ATV. Blearily, I checked my watch - 11:30pm. What? Another ATV growled up out of the mud puddle and disappeared behind the gravel barrier. Okay. That was weird, but it seemed to be over. The engine noise rip-roared away down the road, and then - no! - multiplied and came roaring back! An even bigger ATV with a roll-cage and rack-mounted spotlights hove into view beside the barrier, followed by two more massive beasts and then three regular ones. It looked like dads and kids going for a joyride, but it was nearly midnight. What was going on?! During a lull in the engine noise, I heard one of the men say “There's a tent there!”, and all six ATVs crawled slowly around the gravel pile then revved into the puddle, passing inches away from our tent. They didn't want to run us over, but they weren't going out of their way to avoid making a scene. It was a frightening couple of minutes, but soon they'd all splashed through the mud and were safely on the other side. Then, to our mutual horror, Constantine and I realized that they were turning around. Six sets of headlights and three excruciatingly bright spotlight bars were now trained on the tent, blinding us as the redneck motorcade reversed course and thundered past at high speed. We just lay there, transfixed and trembling like proverbial deer. “Good night!” one of the dads yelled as he passed our tent, and the whole noisy troop broke out laughing. Or at least I think they did; I could barely hear anything after all of that. “What the fuck?” I said.

“What. The. Fuck.” Constantine replied.

“What the actual fuck.”

Engines revved up again, then receded.

“Are they leaving?”

“I think they're leaving. Nope, they're playing around on the road.”

“I don't think they're coming back here.”

“No, they're not. They're leaving now. What the fuck?”

“Yeah.”

It took us a while to get back to sleep after that, and it was well after midnight when the last of the ATVers got bored of ripping up and down the road and drove away. As a consequence, we slept in a bit the next day, and only got to hiking at the extravagant hour of 8am.

It felt excellent to be back on a real trail after all that bike path, and the day was sunny and clear. The morning had us running over little hills, popping in and out of pocket-sized state forest lands and across farmer’s fields. After the unmarked, inaccurate maps of Eastern NY, the Finger Lakes Trail Association's attention to detail was greatly appreciated. We couldn't go ten feet without walking past a blue blaze, and in the span of three hours we signed at least four trail registers. Constantine got his daily dose of cows to admire, and I amused myself by listening to the counterpoint of the birds. Different melodies bounced off one another, as if in call and response: tiu-weet, toodlayooda, whee-da-dit, toodlayee, tiu-weet-weet! The pattern repeated and changed, no iteration quite the same as the last, and each time it was newly punctuated by the honk of migrating geese and the squabble of jays. It was a puzzle for my musical brain, and together with the morning sun, it was wonderful. We crossed the day-hiker threshold into Highland Forest Park and suddenly we were surrounded by runners, dog-walkers, and families out enjoying their Sunday. We were being a bit lazy, stopping often to take breaks and equally slowed by the sheer number of trail registers we had to sign. There were benches and picnic tables everywhere in the state forests, and as the day grew warmer we got even more tempted. It was humid, and by lunch my shirt was sticking to my back. The number of trail registers was really kind of absurd - in the first day alone, we dutifully signed into eight seperate State Forest logs and an equal number of random NCT, FLT, or Onondaga Trail “passport books”.

Knowing that we only had to average 28 miles a day to finish, I was finally feeling relaxed about the miles. We could just hike our normal pace, and that would be enough! I had it in my head that any kind of FKT attempt had to include monster miles from the very beginning, but of course, as we've been saying, the NCT is a different animal. You can hike something like 50 miles a day and run yourself into the ground on a trail like the PCT. That's only two months of hiking at that pace, and you can rest at the end of it. As Constantine had been telling me, you literally cannot do that for 4,600 miles. You'd just die. Our 28 mile per day target was on par with what the most elite and famous thru-hikers do for a Calendar Year Triple Crown, and thinking about it like that made me feel better. I was good enough.

As I mentioned, the FLT is really oriented to serve day-hikers, and that was made extremely obvious on Sunday afternoon. After a long, winding climb up the shoulder of Morgan Hill to 1,600ft, the trail dropped us straight back down the other side, then straight up to 2,000ft on Jonas Hill to a scenic overlook, and then down, and then up again, and then down again, bouncing us over the same knee-breaking descents and lung-crushing climbs until we finally regained our original altitude of 2,000ft at the top of… guess where? Morgan fucking Hill. Yep. The Finger Lakes Trail and NCTA really needed us to see all the perfectly average waterfalls they have to offer, and unnecessarily added thousands of feet of climbing and nine miles to our day. Oh yes. NINE ENTIRE MILES. There's a three mile trail that goes directly over the summit of Morgan Hill, and it's in serviceable shape with only 400 total feet of elevation gain, but of course the FLT is for day-hikers who want to feel like they accomplished something, so they took us on a pointless loop. A third of our day was spent getting almost precisely nowhere! Can you tell I'm still mad about this? Oooh, when I figured it out that day, I was so mad. I dutifully ate my Snickers bar at 4:45pm to avoid the sugar-crash blues, but I was still fuming as we left Morgan Hill State Park and set off on our final roadwalk before camp, on an obligatory patch of public land 29 miles into our day.

Written May 20th, 2021

I cheered up a little when we hit the road, as the day had finally cooled down and my body no longer felt like a microwaved burrito. To my further delight, we got to pass by a herd of recently sheared alpacas! Alpacas are so bendy and incongruous that they they don't even look real - they should be pretend-animals, or fanciful puppets, except they actually exist. "They're like sheep from the moon!" I told Constantine. He does not find alpacas very cute, so I spent the last mile of the day extemporizing on their merits. Our roadwalk turned from paved highway to rural road to rough gravel track, eventually terminating at a concrete block and sign proclaiming the road "Abandoned as per the NY Highways Act". This was our home for the night. Just past the concrete barrier, we entered the state forest once again and found a comfortable place to set up camp.

Neither of us woke with much energy the next day. Something about the oppressive humidity and the complete absurdity of our nine mile loop the day before had robbed us of motivation, and we were now officially out of fuel. I had one ramen, some extra lunch food, and a bag of combos, so I technically had enough food to make it to Ithaca, but I wasn't thrilled about three days of cold meals. Constantine was in even worse shape; all he had left after today was a couple of protein bars and way too many Slim Jims. My equanimity about the mileage had vanished overnight, and I spent the entire morning trying not to obsess about numbers. Hard as I tried to tune into birdsong and the scent of the trees, I couldn't escape my relentless inner critic. You're failing, you're lazy, you're slow, hissed the serpent, and the more I argued the worse it got. Be present, breathe in the good smells, look at the plants! It's so peaceful and pleasant here! Come on. My better angels did their best, but I couldn't let it go.

"We could go to Cortland tomorrow," Constantine chimed in. "It would be ten miles or so, then we hit Highway 11 and I bet we could call a taxi." It was a sensible suggestion, practical even. I had thought of it myself and then pushed the possibility away as too indulgent. I responded to him waspishly, then caught myself and told him it was a good idea, that I was feeling stubborn and mean, and that I'd consider it and decide at lunch.

I feel guilty about putting in my headphones on nice singletrack trail, but sometimes you really just need to get out of your own thoughts, so I turned on some music and trudged dutifully through the idyllic woods. You should be enjoying this more! Why are you so tired? Lazy, selfish, taking the trail for granted! My inner critic would not shut up, so I ate some Ritz crackers and drowned it out with a podcast on the American temperance movement. The trail itself was shady and cool, and didn't seem to be winding around in pointless directions. We ran along the flattish tops of hills and only went up and down as the actual topography demanded, with no more day-hiker funny business. By lunch I was considerably more cheerful, and eagerly perused the PDF data to get a sense of our options for Cortland.

Resupplying early seemed to be the right call, as it would set us up perfectly to walk straight in to Watkins Glen four days later. With our revised plan, we could aim to stay at the Hoxie Gorge Shelter tonight and thereby cook our ramen at the fire ring. Hot dinner! It would be a four day section after all, and knowing that gave me a boost. It was as if I'd been trying to make one day's worth of energy stretch to fill three, but now that I no longer had to make it last, I was free to spend it on happiness.

The rest of the day felt especially cruisey after that. The trail was genuinely easier than it had been the day before, but there was also the unexpected pleasure of The Last Day Before Resupply. We'd both been super sluggish and quiet all morning, but the afternoon was full of jokes and chatter and fast miles. We walked through stands of young maples and doomed chestnut saplings, at one point crossing through a mile-long stretch of trail that was carpeted with white trillium flowers, as thick on the ground as snow and stretching as far as the eye could see. Yellow warblers flitted about while chipmunks zipped by like furry lightning, and the sun's fiery gaze was tempered by a cooling breeze. Even a 1000ft climb we'd been dreading turned out to be better than expected - the trail had changed slightly from the mapped route and now featured moderating switchbacks. Just before we reached Hoxie Gorge State Park, the trail took us across a long stretch of farmer's fields. They were lying fallow that year and were full of tall grass and dandelions, which only made the view prettier. Constantine collected an impressive assortment of burrs while I somehow escaped with none. "It's the pants," I told him smugly, but I also had the advantage of hiking behind him, so I knew which weeds to avoid. We dropped, dropped, dropped to the shelter and found ourselves wrapped in the wide embrace of Hoxie Gorge. A stream trickled cleanly over geometric slate rockforms, and the shelter itself was well-kept and stocked with wood and a bag of dryer-lint firestarter. It was seven o'clock, and the sky was just shading to a darker blue as the sun took on the glow of evening. Beautiful. Our house in Pemberton is heated by a woodstove, so I've had months of daily practice at starting fires, and I got our cookfire going with only a single match and a handful of kindling. Constantine couldn't believe how fast I got it done, or how I estimated the amount of wood perfectly. It snuffed itself a few minutes after our water boiled, though I did pour some excess ramen-water on it to douse the last embers. Proud of my prowess, I didn't even mind that I melted the handle of my pot a little bit. We slept soundly in that shelter, and the morning run to Cortland went by so fast that I barely remember anything.

I'm finishing my writing on trail, two days out from Cortland. As I said at the top, it was kind of a hectic nearo, and I didn't get started writing until nearly 7pm. I wrote steadily until midnight, then frustratedly until 1am, and then lay awake for two hours castigating myself for not finishing the post. Drinking a caffeinated soda at 6pm probably didn't help matters, so if this post is a little light on details, that's why. As I finish tapping in my notes app, the full moon above is shining bright, the nearby stream is burbling, the mosquitoes are whining outside the tent, and my sweat has finally dried. It's still humid but no longer hot, and Constantine is snoring gently next to me. I've eaten my dinner, and my feet have the satisfying ache of an easy thirty miles. My tendon has healed, I still haven't gotten a tick, and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. It's been a good day, and now I am going to have a good sleep.

Best,

Magpie