Our journey began on July 2nd as we made our way up to Harts Pass – thank you to trail angels Ani & Tigger for the local tour and ride up from Bellevue, WA!

We checked in with Ranger Terry at the Harts Pass Ranger Station and then began the 30 mile walk to the US/Canadian border. The trail was stunning from Harts Pass -> Canadian Border – as lifelong east coasters this is our first time on the west coast and we are thrilled to be here. 

On July 3rd we arrived to the northern terminus monument at 6:00 pm and hiked 3.7 miles (officially heading south now) – if we hiked this mileage every day we wouldn’t arrive to the US/Mexico border until next June!

The section from the border to Stehikin was one of our favorite parts of Washington and we are already making plans to return. Rocky and Woody Pass were one of my favorite areas. We saw lots of hummingbirds, marmots, wildflowers, and hung out with lots and lots of mosquitoes. 

After the first 100 miles, our time in Washington seemed to go by quicker and quicker. We swam in endless pristine back country lakes, hiked over pass after pass, walked through old growth forests, and hiked around volcano after volcano. We stopped in the towns of Stehikin, Leavenworth, Snoqualmie Pass, White Pass, and Trout Lake and were so appreciative to those who helped us out (Right Time, WAC volunteer – helped Matt get new trail runners, Jo Ellen, and so forth). 

We are taking a couple of days in Cascade Locks to rest up before heading through Oregon! We have been loving the trail and are so grateful to share this experience with one another. We are realizing just how fast this journey will go so are taking everything in as much as possible. We are thankful for all of the love and support from family, friends, and folks we’ve meet along the trail! Looking forward to Oregon and hopefully meeting up with some friends. 

For more updates follow along on IG or Facebook @ashleydefayette

Happy Trails

~Matt & Ashley

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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.

While the Green Mountain House Hostel’s bunk itself was great, there was one slight problem. For some reason, it was shorter than normal. I really don’t know how to describe it, but for some reason, my feet were poking off the bottom edge! And that never happens to me. I’m barely pushing 5’8”. Oh well.

I’ve been trying to use my watch’s alarm instead of my phone’s alarm to wake me up, and it does well enough. I’ve noticed that even though I want to sleep in more, my body will simply just wake itself up at around 6, and no matter how tired I am, won’t let me fall back asleep. Some type of anxiety around waking up just keeps me up. It’s just something to grind through.

I quickly gathered my things, trying to get my pack packed a lot earlier than yesterday. I want to make sure to get in as many calories as I can during breakfast… since today’s currently planned to be about a 26 mile day! I want to be on top of Killington tomorrow, which means really pushing it today. That way, I can have a chiller day even though it ends with a death march climb, and then meet my friends on Saturday relatively refreshed!

The Green Mountain House Hostel’s breakfast options were delicious. They had eggs in the fridge, and pancake mix. I just scrambled some eggs, using a kitchen for the first time in ages. I honestly didn’t do too bad, for not having heavy cream, and just trying to do it quickly. Not rubbery, and not too runny. I also shoved as much cereal down the hatch, but before I knew it, we got back in the truck, took our picture with the hostel, and were off!

Getting dropped back off at VT 11/30, I had some anxiety, just facing a 26 mile day. Can I do it? The last three days, I’ve failed my mileage goal every time. I knew today failure wasn’t an option. So the real question is… am I fast enough to do it?

There was some trail magic at the start, which was nice but a bit too early in my day, so I passed by it, and started the climb up our next ski resort in Bromley Mountain. During this, a thought passed me by — a ski resort kind of is the ultimate display of the arrogation of man. We’re taking this beautiful mountain, and carving out these artificial paths for ourselves to get an adrenaline rush? And then we make it so you don’t even have to work up the mountain. You can just… glide down. But yeah. All of this makes me depressed for the flora and fauna that calls this mountain home. It’s just… so disrupted. Such beautiful green everywhere, carved for our own enjoyment.

There’s also nothing more demoralizing to me than hiking up a Green ski run. It was kicking my BUTT! But, made it to the top of Bromley to enjoy the wonderful views. It was a bit cloudy again, but you could barely make out Killington and Mt. Moosilauke in the distance. I wanted to try to make out Okemo, where I’d be in two days, but no luck. Unfortunate. I think it’s too short! Maybe I’ll see it when I’m on Killington.

Then downs to Mad Tom Notch, only to go back up Styles Peak. Two days ago, I had a friend send me a picture from Mad Tom Notch being like “haha, I was on the AT a few days ago.” She didn’t even know I was close! So we missed out on a chance to hike together, but it is what it is. Going up Styles was tough, but when I made it to the top, I rewarded myself with the lunch I’d packed out from yesterday. Chicken salad sandwich. 

Right as I packed up and started heading down, I felt the pitter patter of rain, before the skies just simply opened out of nowhere! I tossed on my rain jacket, but by the time I did, I was already thoroughly soaked. And this is where Vermud really showed its true character. No matter what I did, my feet got absolutely coated in mud. The root systems below a lot of the trails were washed out, and aren’t ever going to grow back, so I just resigned myself to flopping through the mud. At least it stopped after about an hour, but then the bugs started coming out. At Peru Peak shelter, I spent some time chuckling at the shelter log. Sometimes, you find some small bits of drama in it. I call this one “The Ballad of Hound Dog.”

I passed by Griffith Lake in a haze, trying to not fall asleep from the monotony of the terrain and the humidity that draped around me like a blanket. I was so tired that I wasn’t cognizant I grabbed water from a beaver brook, until I grabbed the unfiltered water and realized it was EXTREMELY warm to the touch. Ew. While a filter takes care of giardia, it’s still not great to grab water from the beavers… so I kind of just dehydrated myself until passing through the Long Pond and Beaver Brook shelters, where there was fantastic water. 

I don’t know how to describe how tired I get from humidity. It just feels like no matter what, at 10 minute intervals, I have the deep desire to lay down and sleep. But no matter how much sitting I do, sleep doesn’t greet me. So there’s no option but to walk forward, and forward… and forward.

Today at least has some BEAUTIFUL mountain lakes. I passed by Griffith Lake earlier, and then stopped by the Little Rock Pond, where I met some section hikers doing MA -> VT. Apparently one of them, Morgan, had heard about me from Komerican earlier in Massachusetts! It’s been funny how my name travels up trail a lot, I guess I’m just memorable? Komerican thought I was only a day behind him and would catch up, but to be honest, he has much more tenacity than I do. He’s been hiking 20 miles, every day, for forever, not taking zeroes or breaks. 

The Little Rock Pond shelter was cute, but I had a bit more to do today, since I’m meeting up with friends in three days, and want that last day to be super easy. Plus… even though both FarOut and the AWOL guide claimed I’d be doing 26 miles today, I hadn’t even hit 19 miles by the time I hit the shelter, with only 4 miles left in the day. Weird. So I think the day was actually easier than it looks. The last four miles were just a battle with monotony, but blasting good tunes propelled me to the Greenwall shelter, where I set up for another night alone. Peace and sleep.

(title lyrics from: One Short Day, Wicked)

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