The Last Section Part 11: Resupply Day in the 100 Mile Wilderness

This is part 11 of a 188-mile northbound section hike of the Appalachian Trail in Maine in September 2023. At this point in this series of posts, I enter my third week of the hike. I started hiking at the road crossing near the town of Stratton, ME and finished at Mt. Katahdin in Baxter State Park, the northern terminus of the trail! 

Read the previous post, part 10, here!

Day 15: Stealth Tentsite near Crawford Pond Outlet to Antlers Campsite

When my alarm went off while it was still dark out, it felt even colder than two mornings ago when I was at my tent site before heading up White Cap Mountain. The alarm was only necessary because I had squeezed my tent in a questionable spot right along the trail and didn’t want everything to still be set up once anyone started passing by. 

I packed up as the sun came up over Crawford Pond, but instead of getting moving right away, I decided I wanted to eat my cold-soaked oatmeal and stretch for a while since I only had six miles to go to get to my food drop at Jo-Mary Road. I had more than enough time to get there, since the earliest the driver from Shaw’s would show up to drop off the resupply was around 11:00 a.m. 

Trying to enjoy the beauty by sitting around at that spot while stretching and eating was a bad idea. This was a morning where I should have gone into colder weather hiking mode, which meant that if I wasn’t going to stay in my sleeping bag until it warmed up a bit, then the alternative would have been to pack up quickly and start walking. Instead, I let myself get very uncomfortable while sitting around before I finally started hiking in all of my layers and expended energy trying to warm up. 

It wasn’t that big of a deal though, because the day warmed up to perfect sunny hiking weather. The morning temperatures were really the only thing showing signs of fall, the days still stuck in late summer.

Food Drop at Jo-Mary Road

I arrived at Jo-Mary Road with plenty of time to spare. Eventually, six of us were there awaiting the arrival of the driver from Shaw’s, including yet another thru-hiker I had met that I didn’t think I’d see again! His name was Cloud, and we had camped together back before reaching the town of Caratunk. It turns out we left Monson on the same day and were moving at the same pace through the 100 Mile Wilderness but just hadn’t seen each other at all. This is how the trail works – you can be right ahead of or behind someone for days and never see them.

By the time the car pulled up with our resupply buckets, the tough first two days of the 100 Mile Wilderness when I was slogging through rain in the dark seemed like eons ago. It was now day six and felt like I was coming into a much-needed town stop, well, minus the town. 

There wouldn’t be laundry, a shower, or restaurant food, but there were three days’ worth of new hiker food I had packed myself, a bag of chips I had thrown in, and a can of coke. There were patches of sunshine scattered on the gravel road. I got to throw my trash away. And best of all, I paid cash for a new canister of fuel to replace my malfunctioning one, which I had inquired about when I sent my check-in text to Shaws from White Cap Mountain. 

From that point, I still had 41 miles to go until the next resupply point at Abol Bridge. It humbled me to really think about what doing the entire 100 Mile Wilderness at my section hiker speed would mean without a food drop. 

The “wilderness” part of the 100 Mile Wilderness might not be the same type of wilderness it once was, being that six of us were there at a gravel road meeting a car to get our resupply.

That said, this section is not to be underestimated. The reality is that it’s still far more remote than where most of us are used to spending our time.

Antlers Campsite at Jo-Mary Lake

If it weren’t for the cloud of gnats swarming around my head like I was that character from Charlie Brown who always had a dust cloud around him, I might have been at risk of hanging out at that sunny road crossing all day. But I still stuck with my town-day-even-though-there’s-no-town vibes and ended my day at a site called Antlers Campsite after only another 4.5 miles of (finally!) easy hiking. 

I had been mostly stealth camping during the 100 Mile Wilderness so far, so when I reached this big, open established backcountry campsite right on a lake in the late afternoon, it was almost impossible to peel myself away from it. 

For my friends at home, it might seem like camping is camping. But there can be quite a difference between “stealth” spots where I had mostly been staying, and an actual backcountry campsite. An established backcountry campsite like this one had a lot of room for tents with nice flat areas on which to pitch them, and a privy somewhere in the vicinity. The neighboring lake was an unbeatable view. 

This is by no means glamping or car camping, but still a lot more comfortable than some of the teeny little flat patches in the woods where I had camped in previous nights. At those types of camping spots, there’s generally nowhere to sit down, definitely no privy, not always a water source, and sometimes a general sense of being unsettled like a couple of the places where I pitched my tent in a pinch. 

I set up at a spot at the very edge of the campsite where I was well within earshot of several other hikers who would show up later, yet I was still secluded by a small barrier of trees. I boiled water with my finally functioning stove and fuel canister and celebrated a hot dinner with the site of rippling water to my left and my extra socks and bandana hanging off a big branch to dry to my right. I slept with my rainfly off that night, fresh air drifting over my head while I was huddled up in my sleeping bag and beanie hat. I was exhausted, very in need of a shower, and life was good. 

Read part 12 here!