We left town early thanks to Dave from Nye's B&B. We had an epic breakfast of blueberry pancakes, sausage, eggs, juice, and real coffee! Powered on town food we began our first ascent to Prospect Rock and, just before hitting the top, we saw a blog follower - Ingrid. We talked trail for a few minutes before heading back up the trail to Roundtop shelter. Even though it was earlier than 10 am we had already been sweating buckets! We began our descent to Post Road before beginning our next climb to Laraway Mountain.
Heaven on earth!
The footing was good and the trail was in great shape, so getting up and over this mountain went pretty quick. We got to the Corliss Camp very early in the day and decided we should at least attempt to push on toward Spruce Ledge to get an early start on the rain predicted for tomorrow.
On our way up Butternut Mountain we ran into a few small groups of college students and chatted with them before finally making it up. We had three false summits, but the climb was pretty easy: the fact that the mud is starting to dry up due to the hot temperatures definitely helped also. We crossed some great snowmobile trails and had more good footing all the way to Bowen Mountain, actually following old roads and nice trails most of the way. We made it to the Spruce Ledge shelter and camped for the night with another group of college students and two older guys doing a section hike.
Crossing the Lamomille River!
The college students played some word games and offered us hot chocolate before bed, which was a very nice gesture. We all crashed before 8:30, falling asleep to the sounds of loons on the pond below us.