Agile Trekker: MA Appalachian Trail - Section 6 - Goose Pond Road to Baldy Mountain

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
7/9/2017	5.2 miles

Map and Guide: Appalachian Trail Guide to Massachusetts-Connecticut
Parking: Goose Pond Road
Directions: Hike Goose Pond Road southbound to Baldy Mountain, and return back to Goose Pond Road

We ended up with a small 2.6 mile section of the AT to do between sections we had already done. Glen doesn't like to do non-contiguous sections, because this is what can happen. He likes to close up gaps we have. 5.2 miles is a pretty short hike considering the amount of time it takes to drive to Massachusetts. We considered doing this and another short section further north in order to make the drive worthwhile sometime. But today, we didn't have time for a long hike, and it ended up being a good time to fill in this gap.

This was Trek's first hike since his surgery. His wound has finally healed. I still feel the end of a stitch at the wound site. I'm guessing its an internal dissolving stitch, because on the outside he just had staples. I decided not to have him carry a pack today though, because I'm thinking one of the pack straps is going to be right up next to his incision location. I'm kind of paranoid about it rubbing there. Like it's going to make the cancer return. I'll get over this, but until then he's hiking packless.
I'm always grateful when the weather is nice enough to hike in July. It was warm but not to hot, and the humidity was reasonable. Bugs were out, but not overly voracious. We had no big climbs today which I was happy for. It's been a couple of weeks since my psoas injection. My hip pain is back down to pre-injection level, which basically means no big change. I was in much worse pain the first 10 days after my injection, and now its just back to low level pain. Happy to be back to hiking once again. And happy that Trek is able to join us again. I did think about work way too much today while hiking. Usually my mind is pretty empty while hiking, but today's hike was not enough to reduce the stress of putting in so many hours at work.

No views today, but we did have some excitement. We were in the middle of a conversation about needing to look up in order to see bears (we have never seen a bear while hiking). Go figure - in the middle of our conversation we heard a noise in the trees. I figured it was just a squirrel or two trees rubbing together. Glen decided to take a look and find out what it was. We saw an animal climbing a tree! It took us a while to figure out what it was - a porcupine. We've only seen a porcupine once before and it was on the ground. It was much larger than I thought they were, and wow, it was really impressive to watch it climb (it hugs the tree).