Side Trail Sadness

• Today I traveled 8.4 miles on the AT with 4186 feet of ascent and 1444 feet of descent.
• My total miles for the day and ascent are a bit more than as I started the day off with a pretty lengthy detour. I woke up, bring down camp and headed into the Pinkham Notch Visitors Center for their breakfast buffet. It lived up to the hype. Feeling full and ready to go, I started my hike off with nearly an hour and a half climb. I got to a fork in the trail during my climb and checked my map to see what direction to head. It turns out I had been hiking up a side trail all morning and was completely off the AT. I was devastated. The trail I was on was a straight shot up to Mount Washington for day hikers and I had hiked about half of it. I considered just sticking to the trail, but it cut off 13 miles of the AT. So I took 40 minutes and hiked back down to the visits center to get back on the AT.
• I originally had big ambitions to make it past Mount Washington today, which would’ve put me at 15ish miles. But now that I was behind schedule, a little exhausted and mentally defeated I ended up shooting to end my day 5 miles prior to the Washington summit.
• The next 6 miles of my hike were across east terrain but I felt pretty slow and bummed out. Then I had a 1 mile steep climb that got me past the tree line to a boulder scramble. Being in the sun out on the ridge raised my spirits quite a bit.
• I also ran into a celebrity in the hiking community, Quadzilla, who completed the Triple Crown in a calendar year. He’s one of 14 people to ever complete that and he has a big YouTube following for the hiking world. I knew he was on the AT this year and it was sick to get to meet him!

Peace!