NCT 5: Feverdream

Cortland to Watkins Glen, NY

What I neglected to mention in my last post was our incredible luck with hitchhiking on the way into Cortland. As we reached Highway 11, Constantine began calling taxi companies and searching for Ubers, with no success. One company was based out of Ithaca and would have charged us $100 just to get to our pickup spot. Another taxi service told us that they would have been able to come and get us, except that nobody had shown up for work that day. I was nearly resigned to walking the ten mile stretch to Cortland, but I made one last-ditch effort and threw out my thumb at a pullout. Two cars passed, then an SUV, and then a driver coming from the other direction turned around and waved us over. Her name was Catherine, and she was on her way from her night job in Cortland to her day job in Marathon, but she did have time to help out a pair of hikers. She assured us she was vaccinated, so we donned our masks and piled in. Crushed under both of our packs in the backseat, I could hear absolutely nothing of the conversation, but when we reached the hotel Constantine had charmed her sufficiently that she offered to come pick us up at 8am and drive us back to the trail the next day! All she asked in return was that we keep track of any morels or lion's mane mushrooms we saw along the trail and text her the co-ordinates; Catherine, among her many vocations, was also a mushroom hunter and herbalist.

I didn't get to sleep until nearly 3:30am, so the 7am wake-up call came far too early for me. I stumbled around woozily, chugging motel room coffee and cursing my habit of procrastination. If only I had started writing earlier in the day! At least I had gone to the trouble of creating a total-mileage databook, so I knew exactly how far we were from Watkins Glen - 110.4 miles. Our camping options forced us to stop about 7 miles short of Watkins Glen if we wanted to nearo into town, so we had some flexibility. We could do a little less today and still be on target to hit our resupply, and I wasn't feeling ambitious after three and a half hours of sleep. We settled on Foxfire Shelter as our destination, 18 miles away, which would have us arriving at 4pm. I'd have the time to finish writing and potentially the cell service to post it.

Catherine arrived precisely at 8am, as promised, and we thanked her profusely when she dropped us off at the highway pullout. Our next couple of miles were a gravel roadwalk, and despite my sleep deprivation I was out ahead and crushing. The day promised to be hot, and I pushed as hard as I could to make it to the shady trailhead. A short, steep climb brought us into a mellow softwood forest, all pine-duff and rolling hills, sheltered from the rising heat of the day. Surprisingly, I wasn't in a bad mood at all, and the morning sped by under our feet as we made our way over Snyder's Hill and back to another gravel road before Greek Peak Ski Area.

Stopping at a roadside stream to refill our water, we chatted with a new mother who was out taking a walk with her three-week-old baby, a precious little guy with a headful of brown hair. “He was early!” She said. “Friday is actually his due date.” We wished them an early Happy Birthday and set off up the climb. We took lunch at Woodchuck Shelter and I was tempted to take a nap too, but we heaved ourselves up after forty-five minutes and paced out the last ten miles to Foxfire.

I'd intended to write when we got there, but I found myself staring off into space instead. It was a beautiful lean-to, spotlessly clean and furnished with a fire ring and benches. A clear spring was gushing water 250 feet down the trail, and Constantine filled our bottles while I sat in the shelter and contemplated my toes. A small movement on the logs drew my attention - a giant, winged ant. Huh, okay. I scooted away from it and right into the path of two more massive ants. Looking deeper into the shelter, I saw a ominous shadow clustered in the corner. Just as I feared, it was a swarm. Dozens and dozens of enormous thumb-sized ants were crawling all over the corner where the roof met the shelter wall. Ew! I scrambled out to the picnic table with my pack and set myself to the task of starting a cooking fire. We hadn't been able to get any fuel in Cortland, so the majority of our dinners were mashed potatoes, which are good to eat cold. We'd banked on staying in at least one shelter though, and I was looking forward to hot ramen. Constantine had packed out frozen microwave burritos for tonight, and as my water started to boil he had the brilliant idea that he should toast them over the open flame. He even had an extra one for me! The flame-cooked burritos were delicious, and I ate my bonus dinner with gusto.

By 6pm the ants had disappeared in the mysterious way that ants do, so we relocated our stuff to the shelter and broke down the tent. Constantine had set it up to stay away from the mosquitoes until the cooking smoke chased them away, but when the fire went out, they were back in force. At 6:30, we lugged all our gear back out of the shelter and set up the tent again to sleep. I hadn't written a thing, but my mind was so fuzzy with sleep that I didn't even bother to try.

The next day dawned hot and got hotter. The trail smacked us in the face with a steep uphill first thing, but after some rest and a hearty protein-bar breakfast, I was ready to go. We cruised along a flat hilltop, dropped, cruised back up, and made our way through a warren of dense mountain bike trails before we descended for the first of many roadwalks that day. Many parts of the Finger Lakes Trail are on private lands, and many of those private lands are periodically closed for hunting season. Fortunately for us, the worst of these road re-routes are only an issue during deer hunting season in the fall, but we still had a few closed sections to deal with. And was I crazy, or was it unbelievably hot for May? “What temperature do you think it is?” I asked Constantine.

“I dunno, high 70s? 80s?”

Farenheit means absolutely nothing to me, so I tried again. “Don't you think it's really hot out? I'm sweating like crazy.”

“I love it!” He replied “This is like, autumn temperature in South Carolina. It's perfect!”

My boreal constitution begged to differ. I was soaking wet with sweat - my shirt looked as if I'd just jumped in a pool, and drops were rolling down my nose and streaming off the ends of my fingers. If this was winter in South Carolina, I now understood why his work wardrobe consisted exclusively of polos and business shorts. The reflected heat from the asphalt was searing, and the humidity rendered all that sweating useless. I could actually feel my blood vessels dilating, and I watched as my hands turned from pale to pink to scarlet red as my body desperately tried to dump heat through my extremities. The thick arteries in my wrists got so swollen that I had to loosen my watch. My ears itched. I couldn't stop sneezing as my nostrils dilated with heat, and every outgoing breath felt hot as a fever, misting over my face in a plume as the saturated air rejected it. It had to be over 30°C, and I was betting that it was much, much hotter on the paved roads. I wrote a few posts ago that I'd forgotten what it was like to experience summer - now I remembered that I hate summer. That’s why I spend the season at high elevation! Why, oh why, did I decide to hike the NCT?

“You guys sure picked a hot day to go for a hike!” shouted a highway maintenance worker as we passed by.

“Yep.” I replied, a little more tersely than I intended. I gave him a wave to make up for it and showered myself with droplets. Ugh.

“Gotta be over ninety degrees out there!” he said, cheerful next to his air-conditioned truck. Farenheit means nothing to me, as mentioned, but I do know that 90°F is about the same as 30°C. Vindicated! I felt a little bit less like a wuss as I chugged water and swore under my breath at the heat. I found out later that that day was 33°C with 60% humidity. I was immensely grateful when we got back on trail, and could breathe a little more freely in the shade.

“I stink,” I told Constantine.

“You're so pretty, baby.” He replied.

“You're saying I look pretty so you don't have to say that I smell really bad.”

“You're soooooo pretty.”

Aside from the heat, the trail was being pretty nice to us. There was no more nonsense with nine-mile loops or unnecessary climbing, and we were able to cruise steadily all day. It was a Friday and we were in an area with easy road access, so we decided to bypass the Shindagan Lean-to in favour of Braley Campsite (which, in defiance of the FLTA naming conventions, did not have a picnic table). A bunch of college kids were at Shindagan for their graduation party, so we gave them a wide berth and just waved hello. Weirdly, at least one of these weekend hikers was setting up an ultralight Six Moon Designs shelter, so maybe they had plans for the Appalachian Trail.

Braley Campsite was almost precisely thirty miles into our day, and it was still so sticky-hot when we arrived that I was happy to have my mashed potatoes cold. Despite the hateful weather, I was feeling pretty good. My tendonitis was 90% healed with only some lingering stiffness in the ankle, and I had the pleasant tiredness that's appropriate for an easy thirty. An easy thirty! That's how I knew I was back in thru-hiking shape.

The next day, Constantine happily informed me that the temperature was forecasted to be 94°F - in Ithaca. Which is on a lake. With a breeze. He had cell service, so we could convert that to Celsius and get an intelligible temperature reading: it was expected to hit at least 35°C with peak humidity topping out at 80%. Holy fuck. “Nooooooo that's too hot!” I whined.

“It’s awesome! Solar power!” He was pumped. He was also extremely sweaty.

“You're so pretty, babe.” I told him.

“We're gonna get even prettier today! Salt stains incoming!”

35°C is only two degrees lower than average body temperature. Thanks to working in public during Covid, I've had my temperature taken every work day for months, so I know my personal average temperature is more like 36.5. The air was only one degree colder than my actual blood. NO!

The morning was blessedly still cool, so we set off fast to make the most of it. The miles were pretty mild today, just a baby rollercoaster of hills before we’d descend to Treman Gorge. Before the heat set in, it was pretty unremarkable, and that's remarkable in itself - just an ordinary day of hiking, which meant that hiking felt ordinary. A few miles into our day, we came across a piped spring at Taramack Shelter, and I took the opportunity to douse my shirt and hat in the powerful flow. It wasn't flowing into a basin that people would have to drink out of, otherwise I wouldn't have done it, but as it was my sweaty residue would wash away down the slope. The spring was bracingly cold, and for a few short minutes I enjoyed the sensation of shivering before the sun steamed it away.

I was sweating like a pig again, and instead of evaporating, the water in my shirt grew increasingly hot. For the first time ever I wished I was wearing a bra on this thru-hike, so that I could hike topless along the hot roads. The bugs were too thick to free the nipple on trail, and by 3pm I had chugged three litres of water and still hadn't had to pee. The sky was overcast and grey, but it didn't help - the thick blanket of clouds only seemed to hold in the heat. It was the kind of weather I associate with tornados in the prairies, a staticky menacing simmer slowly building to thunderheads.

We dropped our elevation in Lickbrook State Park, and here we got a reprieve. After a short, sharp descent through lush hardwoods, we were treated to the coolness of a truly stunning waterfall. The fast-falling water created its own breeze, and a kind of natural air-conditioning. We luxuriated in the freshness for a few long minutes, then set off for camp.

Normally 3pm is the hottest part of the day, but at five the mercury was still climbing. I was concerned about Constantine - he seemed a bit disoriented and he had very little water left to drink. There was a spigot at a developed campground on the other side of Treman Gorge Park, and he hates filtering water so much that he was determined not to refill until we got there. He said he had ringing in his ears, and that he'd stopped sweating, so I forced him to take half of my limited supply. I was worried he had heat exhaustion. He loves the heat so much that he forgot what a toll it could take, and now in the thick of it, he was suffering.

We pushed on. Treman Gorge State Park has a developed campground of its own, but the Finger Lakes Trail kept us high on the rim for five miles, avoiding all spigots and water sources. I'd been fantasizing about yogi-ing a hamburger for several hours, but it was clear that we wouldn't be getting close to the weekend crowd. My time-tested skill of looking pathetic and hungry near car campers wouldn't be of much use. We inched closer to the Parkview Campground, and Constantine's situation seemed to be getting desperate. I knew he was thirsty when he stopped making jokes. I knew he was in trouble when we crossed a tiny stream and he suggested we stop and filter water! We were both dizzy and exhausted with heat, so I said yes to the break and we slopped the meager trickle into our bottles. Our camp that night was Locust Lean-to, which was noted on our maps as “dry”, so we'd need to find a better source or take a detour to the spigot. Only three miles until camp - we could do this.

We didn't end up going into Parkview Campground. We were both so tired that the extra half-mile to the spigot was more than we could bear, so we filled up for camp at a wide brook and pushed on. I felt like a wrung-out rag, like the kind of crispy old towel that hangs under your sink pipes and stays bent in a “U” until you drench it again. Any water that went into my body was immediately pushed out as sweat, and drinking only seemed to make me sweat harder. Finally, finally, we left private land and got into the tiny pocket of forest owned by the FLTA. We'd actually met the farmer whose fields we'd walked through near the campground, but we were so dead-set on rest that we didn't stop to chat for very long.

Locust Lean-to was on a modest hill overlooking the farmland. It would have been beautiful if we'd had the energy to look. The dense storm clouds had faded, their approach merely a bluff-charge, but their disintegrating forms coloured the sunset red and gold. We collapsed gratefully onto the sleeping pad and completely ignored the spectacle. “That thirty felt like a forty,” Constantine said, and I could only agree.

Our next day had a ton of flat roadwalk, and the temperature was a relatively cool 27°C. The humidity was still ridiculously high, and the sense of a gathering storm was stronger than ever. We left early to take advantage of the cool morning and soon found ourselves crushing miles. The trail was weird - frequently, it would pop us off on pointless half-mile sections of blazed single-track trail, then drop us back off on the exact same road. I couldn't make sense of it. Trails are an act of communication in some ways, and through the passage of many footfalls they take on an intelligence and character of their own. I couldn't feel any kind of communication from the Finger Lakes Trail - I was mostly getting to know the Finger Lakes Trail Association, and the character of these pointless off-road jaunts felt petty and bureaucratic. No thru-hiker or collective of thru-hikers would ever choose to hike this way, and there was no emergent intelligence embedded in the route. The message I was getting was, “We had to tick these boxes and have this exact percentage of miles on single track, and we did. So there!” It kind of felt like the FLTA was having a joke at our expense.

I was starting to get pretty frustrated when we at last popped up on a consistent stretch of road. A truck pulled up behind us, then rolled down the window. “You guys hungry?” the driver yelled. It was Jim and Alizabeth again! They'd brought us breakfast sandwiches from McDonalds as a surprise, and we pulled off into a side road to feast. It was so good to see them again! We spent maybe twenty minutes talking and eating, and then bid them a fond farewell as we set off to crush more miles.

It was easy walking for the first part of the day. The minor decrease in heat was just relieving enough that my circulation could disperse it properly, and for the first time in two days, I wasn't sucking down water. We ate lunch at a picnic shelter in a tiny unnamed hamlet, and chatted with the caretaker as he went about his work. I was grateful for the privy - something about my McDonald's breakfast hadn't completely agreed with me, and I'd been fighting nausea for an hour or two. The scenery had been lovely, the trail a pine-softened railroad grade along a wide brook, but I'd had to keep my headphones in and fight my stomach all the way to the park. After lunch, I felt much better, but the heat of the day was now building and we had long ascents on exposed roads.

“It's so hot out!” I whined to Constantine. “I'm so sweaty!” He was back in fine form and luxuriating in it, even asserting at one point that it was “cool” and “breezy”. There was a breeze, I'd give him that, but as we got on to the heat of 3pm, the wind stilled and died. The clouds were looming overhead once more, a smothering green-grey haze that promised a monster storm. It felt like we were walking in the mouth of some great beast, the storm breathing down our necks with its hot, wet, stinking breath. Or maybe that was just me stinking - I couldn't tell. As we slogged up our final gravel climb, the air grew so thick with moisture and charge that I was almost pushing into it, as if walking through weak Jell-O.

Our campsite was obligatory again - a small patch of FLT-owned land seven miles north of Watkins Glen. It was the last public land we would see until we were through the town, so we had to find camp there or get all the way to town tonight. Both of us would rather walk into a town in the early morning instead of taking a zero, and we'd especially rather do that than stay in a tourist town where hotels are $200/night. Booking for Sunday was cheap - trying to find last-minute accommodation on a Saturday would not be. This little patch of public land was gorgeous, but it was not especially great to camp on. The trail took us around the shoulder of a little marsh, and wove through dense stands of honeysuckle and tall grass. In other words, it was tick heaven. It also wasn't flat, except right at the summit of a hill where it met the road. After our experience at Tromp Pond with the ATVs, neither of us wanted to camp right next to a road again, so we settled on the flattest and least tick-infested-looking spot we could find.

It was definitely sloped, and we found a tick in the tent almost immediately. Constantine crushed and killed it, but in reaching out of the tent for my Oreos, I discovered that my pack was covered in slugs. I hate slugs. I accidentally touched one, and in my panic I flailed the tent door wide open and let in another tick and a spider. In trying to rescue the spider, I lost track of the tick, and a frantic hunt for arachnids kept us up later than we planned. We eventually did find and kill the second tick, but since I don't believe in killing spiders, I probably let even more ticks inside during the evacuation process. I also injured the spider, so it may have been for nothing.

We woke up at 5am, to my equal delight and dismay. I love early morning hiking after I'm awake - it feels great to get your miles done early, and I like to watch the sunrise, but I don't like the process of waking up. I grumbled crankily at Constantine and then, seized by the terror of slugs, insisted he get out first and check my pack thoroughly before I would even consider getting up. There were no more slugs on my pack, or at least that's what he told me. I assumed there were plenty of ticks in residence, but I couldn't see any and forcefully decided to ignore the possibility. Ticks have to be latched on for 24hrs before they can give you Lyme disease, and I'd be able to have a shower and check in just a few short hours.

Our walk to Watkins Glen was almost entirely road, and I hadn't looked at it too closely. It was downhill on paved rural routes for the most part, and as we got close to the highway we saw the sign declaring that it was only one mile to to the town limit. The FLTA had other plans for us though - another totally pointless little loop of singletrack! This one was especially egregious, as it was uphill and through a dense, brushy, tick-y forest with no views. A mile and a half later, we emerged from the singletrack, and I could actually see the junction we'd come from. They made us do a mile and a half loop to get 0.3 miles down the highway. That's less than 2,000ft! Now that really felt like a mean joke.

Our cheap motel was far enough away from the Wal-Mart that we decided to resupply on our way in. Usually, my advice is to never resupply when you're hungry, but today it worked out surprisingly well! We were so starving for breakfast and so ready to get to the motel that we shopped in record time, and I managed to keep Constantine from buying anything truly disgusting. It was his most efficient resupply ever, I think - we were in and out in twenty minutes, so fast that we forgot to turn off the GPS tracker. As a consequence, you can see our exact path as we walked through the aisles, which I find deeply amusing. I think I'll end up doing early-morning resupply more often, now that I know it's a good strategy. It feels good to knock one town chore out before you even get started, and as a result, our rest day has been so much more relaxing. We had breakfast and lunch and ice cream and showers, and watched TV for a while with no stress. I've only been writing for four hours, and I still have time to eat a second dinner and watch a movie before bed.

Oh, and I did find three ticks on me - I'll let you know if I get Lyme Disease.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4chhvf3zSf6TCppovdoGpT?

(For some reason Spotify doesn't want to embed properly, so go listen to the song “Bad Fever” by The Asteroid's Galaxy Tour if this doesn't show up)

Bye for now!

-Magpie