i heart wrenches.

i am currently writing (typing?) from the state of new hampshire!

we have been here in gorham for the last three days, and it's a wonderful little town. there's even a mcdonald's... i haven't seen one of those since millinocket! (not that i'm complaining... it's kind of nice to be so remote at times.) we're taking a break to let swayze's toenails heal up again. :( the granite rock here in maine just SUCKS. she feels fine and wants to play, but every time she starts to run around, her toenails open back up again and her feet start bleeding. i've been keeping her on pain meds and trying to keep her as still as possible. i bought her a rawhide this morning to keep her entertained while she's having her "down time."

i don't know how we're going to solve this problem. i bought her a full set of dog boots and we're having problems with them staying on, so i bought a roll of gorilla tape this morning at wal-mart that will hopefully help. i ran into guiness, a hiker who's got her dog with her as well, the other day on the mountain and she told me that she uses baby socks to help protect her dog's feet, so i'm going to combine the baby sock idea with the dog boots in hopes that the socks will help give the boots something to "grip" to and will keep them on. and by golly, if that doesn't work, i'll just superglue the boots to swayze's feet. :)

i seriously hope it doesn't come to this, but i may have to either send her home or just pull off the trail myself. i would hate to end my journey this close to being done, but if she can't hike, i can't either. =?

other happenings include seeing a moose in the wild, falling down a mountain, feeding feral chipmunks, and completing mahooSUCK notch. :) the moose that i saw was a really big bull moose and it was cool as heck seeing him on the trail. i didn't take a picture because moose tend to blend into pictures, so i just sat there and enjoyed the moment. when i went to move on my way, i startled him and since moose are pretty dumb, the only way he knew to escape was to retrace the route that he'd taken to get to where he was. too bad i was standing right where he'd come from! so here's this umpteen-hundred pound moose running right for me. my eyes got really huge and my heart stopped and my brain stopped and i was thinking, "omg omg omg what do i do? what do i do?" but my legs wouldn't work and i'm not sure i would have ran even if they would have. luckily, when he was about fifteen yards away, he turned north and headed down the AT in the opposite direction. i had to make myself breathe once i couldn't see him anymore and i laughed out loud because of how absolutely scary the situation had been.

falling down the mountain was rough. i've still got a pretty decent set of scrapes and scratches to show off that will probably stay with me for another week or so. i was coming down baldplate mountain the morning after it rained the whole day prior, and i knew it was still slick, so i was trying to be as careful as i could be. but i still managed to stumble over who knows what, and it was a fall that i thought i could run and catch myself on, but i didn't catch myself. so i kept running downhill on this slick rockface. when i realized i was not in a good situation, i yelled out a four-letter word and tried grabbing hold of a charlie brown christmas tree, but it wasn't big enough to stop me. so my brain told me that i should probably wipe myself out before the mountain did the job for me, so i sat on my left side and slid about ten feet and my hiking poles went in opposite directions and i had a big crybaby fit, mainly because i scared myself more than anything. my ankle was the size of a golfball immediately after my fall, so i went into town that night and RICEd (rest, ice, elevation, compression) it and now it's perfect. good. as. new.

i've also decided that the true spelling of the mahoosuc notch should include a K, to be correctly spelled as mahoosucK. it took us SIX HOURS to go one mile in the notch. it specificially says in my guide book that mahoosuc notch is the hardest and/or most fun mile of the AT. there's no and/or about it. it's the hardest and my fun ended about fifteen minutes into it. i kept having to lift swayze up and put her on top of boulders and then take my pack off and go back and help her and help her down a four-foot drop and then lift her up again. this went on and on and on and on. i never thought we would be done. the only good thing about being done with mahoosuc notch is that i've been told by everybody that's hiking with a canine companion that the notch is THE hardest section of the trail when you've got a dog with you. so we have overcome the hardest section in the 2,181 miles. yay us.

oh! anddd... the entire state of vermont is closed due to irene. i won't be able to hike it, so that'll cut out 150 miles of my trip. my thought about vermont is to skip it this year and come back and maybe hike it with my cousin when she thru-hikes next year. :) technically, we'll still be able to be "thru-hikers" since it's not our fault that we can't do that section of the trail. the ATC says so.

so those are my wrenches: swayze and vermont. i love new plan As!