START TIME: 5:05 AM 
END TIME: 10:25 PM
Jen had another strong day with big miles. It took her about 2 hours to hike the first 5-mile stretch. She was a little disappointed with that pace, but the rest of the day she hiked fast. So fast that our friend Steve Feller, an accomplished trail runner who’s completed an Ironman triathlon and numerous 100-mile races, hiked with her for about 10 miles then had to take a break until it got dark because, as he said, “She’s running me into the ground.” And so fast that later in the day, Melissa and I missed her at a road crossing.
It turned out all right, but I was furious with myself at the time. We had reached NY 55 outside of Poughquag around 6:30 PM. Jen had a 7.6 mile stretch, and she’d left the previous road (NY 22) at 5:35. NY 55 is a major highway so we couldn’t set up on the side of the road like we usually do. We had to park in a lot about 50 yards down the road in the woods. But there was a short side trail that led to the AT.
I figured Melissa and I could sit in the car until 7:35 because Jen hasn’t been running and I didn’t think she could average 3.5 mph walking. But apparently she can. We took the chairs, drinks, and snacks and got to the trail junction a few minutes late. We waited for a while then I decided to walk in because the section was relatively flat. After 15-20 minutes I didn’t see her so I was assuming she was just hiking slow. I was getting a little worried after hiking in almost a mile.
Then around 8:05, I got a call from a 610 number. I didn’t recognize the number, but we’ve had enough incidents like this over the years that I know to answer the phone because it could be Jen calling. And it was. She’d passed the trail junction a couple of minutes before we got there. She still had 30 minutes or so of daylight so she wanted to hike on to the next road crossing at Depot Hill Road and wait for us there. We figured she and Melissa could hike the last 5 miles with their headlamps. That is, of course, assuming we could find her.
We had great road maps for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, but for some reason, you can’t find detailed maps of Connecticut and New York in the average gas station. It’s probably because—unlike Jen and me—most people live in the 21st century and have moved on to things like GPS, iPods, and 4G cell phones.
We do have an iPad for the summer, but we couldn’t pick up a signal so I just decided to start driving in the direction I thought the trail would be. I saw train tracks and figured Depot Hill Road might be near those, but the road we were on started winding away from the tracks. Eventually it dead-ended into a larger road and we saw a pizza place in a shopping center a couple hundred yards away. I ran in there and asked if anyone knew where Depot Hill Road was. One of the guys in the back came out and was able to tell me where to go. It took another 5 or 10 minutes for us to find her, but we did. She’d been waiting, she said, for about 20 minutes. She wasn’t upset or frustrated, but she did say she could picture me having a few choice words for myself on the drive over. And she was right.
When Jen realized around 8 o’clock that we’d missed the re-supply and that it was getting dark, she didn’t want to stop but she knew she had to find someone with a phone. She kept hiking and didn’t see anyone, but then she smelled someone. What she really smelled was bug spray. She started looking around and eventually saw a couple camping nearby and asked to use their cell phone. They were kind and helpful and let her use the phone, then offered her water and snacks if she needed them. And an hour or two later, they called me to make sure she was OK.
Anyway, at the Depot Hill Road crossing, Melissa hiked in with Jen, I drove around to set up the tent, and Steve met us at NY 52 with an enormous New York-style pizza. He said it wasn’t very good but we all loved it because we were hungry and happy that everything had worked out and that Jen had hiked 49 miles. So it was just another exciting day on the Appalachian Trail for Jen and her Pit Crew.