Day 132
We woke up a little earlier this morning than usual and Nokey was feeling better than when he went to bed, so it had the makings to be good! We knew if we wanted to do big miles today it would be due to taking lots of breaks since we had tough terrain ahead though. We began our descent of Moose Mountain and it had a lot of little uphills to be going down! We reached the 3 mile mark pretty quickly and now the trail turned into Holts Ledge Trail. All of the trail in New Hampshire has another name due to the trail system already being used before the AT was developed. We walked straight up the mountain for about 50 minutes before coming to the ledges. There were pretty views in several spots, but we had a destination in mind: Bill Ackerly’s house for free ice cream and our lunches! We made the downhill quickly and arrived at Bill’s to find no one home. We had our lunch on the big porch and I bought the last soda in the cooler. Great Lakes and Tall Grass showed up with the section hikers from last night and a SOBO. We moved on for the next climb - Smarts Mountain. The trail going up was tough and we sweat like we’d never sweat before! When we reached the last half mile, it was a 600-foot climb up slick rocks with ladders and rebar drilled into the rock to climb! Thankfully, we reached the ridge a little quicker than I anticipated and we were treated to the nicest fire tower we’d seen in a long time. You could climb all the way up, so we did and checked out the views, including looking north to the whites! We unfortunately still needed to do four more miles from here to keep ourselves on a good pace, so we began the long downhill (which again had a suspicious amount of uphill). We were pretty beat when we reached the brook where we decided to stealth camp, so we grabbed a ton of water, cooked dinner, and were in bed by 8 pm. The photo today is looking south from the fire tower on Smarts Mountain. There were five lakes visible from the top (3800 feet up).