Waking up on the dining room floor of the hut at around 5.30am, I was feeling fantastic. I’d eaten about half a turkey the night prior, and downed enough lentil soup to drown a large moose.
A quick and easy pack up had me ready to hit the trail before 6am. But wait. The croo did even more awesomeness for us and fed us oatmeal for breakfast. I didn’t even have to enact any operations or side quests to achieve this delicious bowl of goodness.
With a massive bowl of oats in my tummy, now it was time to hit the trail. Purportedly, the easiest and most well maintained part of the Whites non existent trail system lay ahead. So of course I came up with a plan to avoid this bit of much needed infrastructure.
I had devised a much more interesting blue blaze plan the night prior, which allowed me to walk directly to the AMC highland centre. The benefit of this plan was no hitching required to get to the centre, and I could recharge my devices before continuing on to the next campsite.
The blue blaze was a really beautiful trail traversing through gorgeous forest and past some lakes, and included a hill that was not bad to climb or descend.
Highland Magic
As keen readers will remember, one of my hiking superpowers is to read Farout comments for all the icons that I will pass on my days hike. This methodology will often bear fruit, and in the case of the AMC Highland Centre, I made it rain.
We arrived at the lobby of the hotel cum visitor centre and took up position in the corner of the common room, hoping our thru hiker stench may contain itself. We plugged in devices to charge and took a break after the enjoyable morning hike.
I hunted around for the hiker box that a comment on FarOut had mentioned from a couple of years prior. After making like Sherlock Holmes all around the common areas I was perplexed and vexed in my inability to sniff the box out.
I asked at reception, and the girl on the desk immediately smiled and said, let me grab it for you. The box was stored behind reception, which struck me as odd as the idea of the boxes is for people to leave what they don’t need and grab what they do.
When the receptionist went to pick up the box I was concerned she was about to break her spine. It took a herculean effort to heave the box from the ground and place it on the desk. I smiled, knowing I’d just hit the trail magic motherlode, and politely asked if it would be OK to take the box to the common room to see if there was anything of use.
The receptionist acquiesced, and said that nobody had looked in the box for weeks and she had no idea what was inside.
Opening the box was a bit like what I imagine opening the Millennium Falcon toy would have been like as a seven year old Star Wars super fan. Laid out before me was some serious trail magic. Some kind angel had clearly come along and packed the box full of supplies for the thru hiker.
I took the photo after already distributing a lot of magic out to Chestnut and myself. And there was still so much left. We gorged ourselves on skittles, and m&m’s, trail mix and gatorade, and resupplied with ramen and knorr’s sides.
The thru hiker I’d chatted to the night prior about getting off trail then turned up at the Centre, and said he had indeed decided to pull the pin. He had two more nights booked in the hut system, and wondered if I would like to use the accommodation as he was unable to get a refund.
My answer was of course yes, I was so grateful, what an incredibly generous gesture. He also wanted to unload his food on Chestnut and I as he was heading straight home that afternoon and was confident he wouldn’t be eating any of it.
Pack Weight an Issue
When all your Christmas’s come at once, it can get tricky. Chestnut and I hadn’t been eating our own resupply due to Operation Oatmeals and WFS, we had just stuffed our gourds full with trail magic, and added some of it to our packs, and now we were being gifted more food. Also we were insanely hungry. So we loaded up with even more food, and heaved our full to bursting packs onto our shoulders, ready for our afternoon hike up another blue blaze to our campsite.
Our pack weight was noticeable as we climbed up another hill to camp. Fortunately the blue blaze was a real trail like this morning, so it appears it may be a conscious effort by the Whites governance to not maintain the AT while creating more accessible trails in other parts of the park. Sad.
WFS Again?
We arrived at the campsite in the afternoon, and were greeted by the bubbly Sofia, the caretaker of this AMC location. The camp was located right next to another of the huts, and it was a little after 4pm. The possibility of another WFS was right there. Chestnut and I were unsure of the etiquette of doing two WFS in a row. We decided to wander over and see if it was available, and if more thru hikers turned up we could always just give it to them and head back to the campsite and put up our tents.
We walked into the hut and were told we could do the WFS. We grabbed a bench near reception and waited to see if any other thru hikers turned up to look for WFS that evening. We sat and chatted to some hut guests and thru hikers that had booked to stay as a guest, and then I spotted it. Another hiker box. Here in the hut. Where day and overnight hikers come past. All the time. And it was a holiday weekend.
The box had a trail mix bag inside that easily weighed over a kilogram. Chestnut and I, along with the people we were chatting to, dug into it and enjoyed our fourth dose of magic for the day. Magnet doing what Magnet does.
Dinner time for the guests arrived and no other thru hikers had come in seeking WFS, so Chestnut and I made ourselves scarce to allow the guests to enjoy dinner, and wandered back over to the camp to chat with Sofia and a couple of children that had become enamoured with the two old smelly thru hikers as we had been telling them tall tales all afternoon. Their parents I believe were equal parts horrified and happy that we were causing such entertainment.
Dinner?
At 7pm we came back to the hut, and were presented with an absolute feast.
We even got dessert! You’d think after the day of eating we had enjoyed that eating this sickening amount of pasta and corn would be beyond us. You’d be very wrong if you thought that.
Very, very wrong. We ate until…well we ate until there was no more food. I’m not going to lie. Toward the end it did get tricky. I was very close to being full. Close. But not quite.
My chore for the evening was to crush cardboard boxes. I used to do this chore when I worked at McDonald’s in the 1980’s. It was with great nostalgia that I bashed up these boxes for about twenty minutes until there was a large flat pile of cardboard.
Croo Raids
We chatted with the croo after the chores were completed, and found out about a secret underbelly world that has been happening in the huts for years. Croo raiding. Each of the eight huts scattered throughout the White Mountains has a relic from the past inside. The hut crops mount night time raids on each other trying to steal each other’s relics, with a goal to hold all eight of the artifacts at one time during the season.
This croo had raided The Lake of the Clouds Hut successfully two nights prior and had carried an old aeroplane propeller at 3am across the trail and back to their hut. Craziness.
We were asked to come and wake the croo if anybody came to raid that night, and after being fed so well, we were happy to raise the alarm.
The hut guests all turned in early, and at 8.30pm we were able to set up our mattresses, and head to sleep as well. What an incredible day of magic it had been.
I remember thinking how unusual it must be to spend a day in the Whites as a thru hiker and to increase your pack weight through a combination of finding trail magic, not eating any of your own resupply the entire day, and going to bed completely stuffed full of food.
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