Stayed in the Zealand Falls AMC hut last night after climbing Mt. Hale and Zealand Mtn. yesterday for 11 miles of hiking. Today we will climb Mt. Tom (4051′), Field (4340′), and Willey (4285′) ending up at our car that we dropped yesterday for a total of 9.5 miles today.

I got up at 6:15 am and Jacob was still sleeping. I had a pretty decent nights sleep even though I got cold and had to put on a sweatshirt when I was up to the bathroom at 3 am. The Croo woke up the rest of the bunkers with a song at 6:30 am. Breakfast was served at 7:00 am. We had scrambled eggs, pancakes (gluten free for Jacob), oatmeal and bacon. I had brought my Starbucks Via instant coffee and the mini-moos for milk. Other campers were jealous. The coffee served is not very good and there is NO milk or cream.

After breakfast and cleaning up in bathroom, we packed our packs quickly and said goodbye to the Croo. We tipped them well ($50…they are college kids working hard for goodness sake) and let them know we were not staying that night. I had only booked it to give leeway in case we had bad weather. Was hoping they would offer up our two spots for meals and bunk that night to  thru hikers.

The weather was forecast to be pretty nice today. We would get some cloud cover to keep the heat down and no threat of rain. We didn’t experience any bugs on the trip. I think it is too cool above 3000′ so the only bugs we had were spider webs on the trail if we were the first to cross the trail that day.

We filled all of our water bottles (7 quarts) and I took a couple of Advil to start the day. I was a little achy from day before, particularly my knees.

Just as we started the hike we ran into a woman going the other direction. She told us to stay quiet and we would see a moose just ahead. She had been camping just up the trail (The forest service makes campers stay away from huts) and had just seen the moose in the alpine marsh we were crossing. Unfortunately, we weren’t so lucky to see it. We ran across another couple heading the opposite direction. We asked about the moose which they had not seen, but we got them to take a picture for us.

We started the 2.7 mile hike on the A To Z trail and wouldn’t see any other hikers the entire 1:20. This trail was a little more uneven than the previous day.  The uninterrupted hike gave Jacob and I time to talk. We discussed the challenge of his upcoming sophomore year of high school and that he had signed up for an aggressive academic schedule. We had a good talk about his summer reading book and the idea of a “personal journey” in life. We got to the Mt. Tom Spur at 9:33 am.

We started up the Mt. Tom Spur at 9:35 am and met a lady on the way down. She told us about people doing something called the “Red Line”. The “Red Line” is the challenge to hike EVERY path in the AMC NH hiking guide. Not sure how many there are, but there are alot. This woman had done it nine times!

We made it to the summit of Mt. Tom (4051′) at 10 am.

We had a nice break on the top of Mt. Tom and headed back down at 10:24 am. Back down at the start of the Mt. Tom spur we would see a couple other groups at the trail intersections taking a break before heading up to top of Mt. Tom.

Mt Field was only 0.9 miles away and we would get there quickly (30 minutes) getting there at 11:15 am. We met a young woman school teacher out hiking with her dog Winston. He loved us because we fed him left over cheese and salami we weren’t going to eat. If I was going to get a dog, it would definitely be a Lab. We had been hearing about gray Jays on the top of Mt. Field coming up and eating out of your hands. We didn’t see any.

We left Mt. Field at 11:30 am heading for Mt. Willey (4285′).

We arrived at Mt. Willey at 12:15 and it continued the theme of disappointing mountain top views!

We had lunch here and while we were eating saw these jay birds come around. If you held your hand out with some peanuts they would land on your hand and eat right out of your palm. Pretty cool. I have a video but couldn’t post it on this site.

We left Mt. Willey after having lunch at 12:45 pm for the final leg of our hike and our car. It reminded me that we always think the last part will be easy, but this is the part where you are coming off of the ridge and back down to the valleys where the roads are. The going is very steep with uneven terrain. It is the hardest on the knees, especially since I was already aching from previous day. You just take it slow and try to ease yourself down the steepest parts.

We ran into Charlotte going the opposite direction. She had taken the AT and was heading up our path in a big loop back to the hut we stayed at last night. She was travelling light, but that was a long day hike for her.

Some of the trail was so steep they had to put in wooden stairs in order to traverse it. It was a good challenge.

At the very end we connected back up with the Ethan Pond Tr. which was back on the AT and we ran across a Southbound hiker (heading to hut) who was barefoot. I have no idea how he could do that or maybe he would put shoes on as soon as he got to the rocky terrain we had just been on.

We would make it back to the car at 2:30 pm.

Just after we started home in the car I looked over and saw this….

This was a great two day hike and I got to spend some quality time with Jacob with no distractions. He has turned into a fine young man and I’m sure we will see great things from him in the future.