FLT Day 7: Plymouth leanto 0 miles

I woke up this morning to the forecasted rain, and decided to wait it out for a bit. Well, it never let up, so I just stayed in the shelter and read for most of the day. Freezing rain is not something I want to deal with if I can avoid it.
The good news is that the rain is continuing to melt the snow. It seems like in most places it is about ankle deep now, but really wet.

FLT Day 3: Paradise leanto 14.8 miles

Another repeat of yesterday's postholing. I was awakened by two hunters walking by wondering why there was a tent in the campground. Not sure of the logic there, but that's what they were saying.

After postholing again for the entire morning I hit a bit of roadwalk. Never have I been so thankful for roadwalk before.

I did talk with one local who knew about the leanto I was headed to, and he told me I'd be there in 45 minutes, even through I still had 1 mile of roadwalk left and 1 mile of trudging through snow. It ended up taking me about 1:30 hours to get there, and I was dead by then.

Got a small fire going, enough to cook dinner with, but most of the wood was wet and frozen.

Tomorrow is supposed to be in the mid 40s so I am hoping for some of the snow to melt, and hopefully compact the rest so I can walk on top of it instead of through it.

FLT Day 2: Chiningo Day use area 15.3 miles

Well, I spent the morning wishing I were Legolas, and the afternoon thinking about how to make snowshoes out of various things in my backpack.

The snow has definitely deepened, up to my knees in places. The top layer is powdery, but then 6 inches down is an icy layer. It seems like this layer isn't enough to support me, so I keep breaking through. Sometimes it holds my weight, which actually makes it worse. Basically the entire day was step, kathunk, step, kathunk. I probably look like a drunken sailor with a peg leg.

Fortunately the last several miles were parallel to a snowmobile route, so I stepped over to that and was able to make some distance. The rest of the day I was probably only going about 1 mile an hour. Hopefully the snow starts melting soon, it was supposed to warm up this weekend a bit.

FLT Day 1: Blodgett Mills to Hoxie Gorge leanto 3.8 miles

First day back on the trail. Through a combination of buses I arrived in Blodgett Mills, NY in the middle of the afternoon. That left me with maybe 3 miles of roadwalk to get to the trail, and then about a mile or so on the trail to get to Hoxie Gorge leanto for the night.

The predicted foot of snow isn't here, but I an still postholeing through several inches of icy snow, which is slowing me down quite a bit.

The shelter is nice, with a good supply of firewood. I ended up making a small fire to cook dinner with, and then turned in for the night.

One last night

I decided a little while ago that I would be temporarily ending my bike trip, for a couple of reasons. Originally I was going to be working in Florida for the winter, but that fell through. The company wasn't able to figure out if they could insure me or not, since their insurance company never responded to more than a month of calls and emails.

Ending the trip is a bit more complicated than I had originally thought. I had to figure out where I was going to end it, try to set up a warmshowers host, tear apart and box up the bike, and buy a greyhound ticket. Boxing up the bike was definitely the most complicated part of the process.

I ended up deciding on Roswell NM partly because of the greyhound schedules and partly because of warmshowers. If I had ended the trip in Carlsbad it would have meant an extra day on the bus, since the first bus schedule would have taken me back to El Paso, then a roundabout route from there. Instead, I can go more directly from Roswell, and save myself that extra day.

Then came the dilemma of the bike. I figured that any bike shop would be able to supply a bike box, so I wasn't too worried about that aspect. However, when I got into town there was only one small bike repair shop, and they were closed. It seemed likely that they wouldn't have a box anyways, given the type of shop.

I tried behind a Sears, but all of their cardboard was crushed right away, so I went to the dumpsters next door behind a family dollar. Their cardboard wasn't crushed, but it was smaller boxes than I would have liked, but I would have to make due. I ended up grabbing a couple of bigger boxes and tying them on the back of the bike.

Fortunately when I got to my warmshowers host she had planned ahead a bit, since I had emailed that I was hoping to box up the bike. My host had saved several boxes, including a wheel box left behind by previous bikers when they had ordered a new wheel online. Probably the best part though was that her neighbor was visiting her, and mentioned that she had just gotten a mattress, and still had half of the box left over.

I ended up using the mattress box, plenty of packing tape, and a bit of rope to keep the box together. It wasn't a perfect packing job, but after taking the bike all apart the box fit relatively well. The torn apart bike was all taped together, in hopes of reducing damage from greyhound baggage handlers.


And the next morning was a perfect ending to the trip. I had avoided snow the entire trip, and on the last morning I woke up to a wonderful view: