Tuesday, August 25th (day 13)
Last night was my best nights sleep on the trail so far. I'm not sure how. I slept in the shelter with Zippy, and it started raining hard with thunder and lightning at about 1:30am. By 2am, we had to move our beds to the back wall of the shelter because the roof started leaking on us. Somehow, even with all the scrambling around, I went right back to sleep and slept like a baby. We stayed dry. After an unexpected difficult day yesterday on Mt. Horrid (yes, that was the actual name, and it lived up to it for sure), we really studied the maps and mentally prepared ourselves for an even more difficult day today. It had stopped raining, but started up again 20 minutes into our hike. It wasn't too bad. It cooled us down for the steep mountain we had to climb first thing in the morning. All day was a bit dark and hazy, but still beautiful.

The worst thing to me about hiking in the rain is that you don't have a nice place to sit down and take a break. We take our packs off for a break usually every hour or hour and a half. When raining, those breaks become fewer, and it's very tiring. Fortunately, almost two hours into our day, we came across a ski lift that wasn't mentioned in the guide book.

There was a very small unlocked room/closet that the lift operator probably uses. We all three huddled in there out of the rain for a dry seat and a snack.
The rain stopped but the sun didn't really come out until the end of the day, keeping us from being so hot. We had a couple more nice breaks at shelters along the way.

We made it to the Emily Proctor shelter after 12 miles of difficult terrain.

We have two ladies also staying in the shelter as they hike a few days. One of them talked non stop until her head hit the pillow. She is now snoring, which is actually better.
The hiking today reminds me of the White Mountains. It's fun, but difficult, so I am glad we are hiking together to help one another. It was a good day. We also passed our halfway point today! 140.9 miles hiked out of 274. Yay!