On the AT - Grange Hall Road to Church Road, Cheshire, MA

September 18, 2006 | Miles: 11.5
Start: Grange Hall Rd., south of Dalton
End: Church Rd., Cheshire
Danielle:
Started off cloudy, turned into bright and sunny and warm
Back on the AT for us! We’re on vacation this week, and are doing pieces of the trail in Massachusetts, based out of Mim’s house, which is fun. We chose this stretch between Dalton and Cheshire since Patch said it was “flat.” Well, I’m sure his brain thought it was flat, but there were definitely a few bumps J Especially to those of us who haven’t hiked much this summer!

Still, we had a great day. Didn’t get the earliest start—well, which isn’t really new for us—and the taxi driver dropped us off at a different starting point than expected, which added a few miles, but we were still done by 3:15. Not so bad for 11.5 miles! The trail today took us through the town of Dalton for a mile and a half road walk and then up onto a nice ridge, where it dipped and turned, through some beautiful woods. We had our afternoon snack by a pond, the swamp maples just starting to turn, showing off their fall foliage. I picked a few blackberries that had ripened in the sun near our rocky perch, and which we enjoyed with our molasses cookies. Yum! It was great to get out on this gorgeous day, and even better was that Ryan felt good. Very exciting, especially as we’re hoping to get in a short overnight later this week :-)

As always, it was good to be outside and we’re happy to be back on the trail!

Ryan:
Sunny, Warm
Well, we’re back at it. Best of all, we’re on vacation. Certainly, there are more glamorous places to go on vacation than western Massachusetts, but there are still many miles to be done. And, as I said today, “Hiking is really fun when it doesn’t hurt.” So, that’s the good news of the day, no pain. Anywhere. Sure, tired feet and legs, but we walked 11.5 miles. Plenty of stretching is in order for tonight. We feel like we’re getting back into it slowly, but today was great and we’re very excited looking ahead.

So, like I said, we’re on vacation. Spending time with Danielle’s grandmother in Williamstown and using it as a home base for our hiking operations. The logistics are much more difficult since we’re not just walking north, but it’s worth it. Today, we drove our car to the finish point and had a taxi take us to the start. This worked out great, even though he dropped us off about 2 AT miles south of our plan. But it was fine. It gave us time to get a couple miles in before the long road walk through the town of Dalton.

The hiking today was fairly mellow: a couple little bumps that we would have barely noticed if we were in real hiking shape. We met a group of 10 or so headed south—the Monday Mountain Boys, a hiking group in the Berkshires of retired men who hike every Monday. The oldest of which was 80. That seems like a good goal.

We have a few more days to plan for later this week, including a short backpack. It won’t help us get a lot of miles done, but it will be great to be out camping again. It’s much easier to just carry the light daypack, but I’m really looking forward to it.

So, the AT was good to us today. Hopefully, that will be the story moving forward.