(Written 9/23) We spent last night in Stratton,Maine in a cheap hotel room,eating town food, taking showers,watching tv, and enjoying a few cold ones. Your typical town stay. We pushed 15 big miles out of Stratton today, first double digit miles since The Franconia Ridge in the Whites, way back in New Hampshire. It felt really good. We traversed the entire Bigelowe Range today, The Horn,West Peak, Avery Peak, and the ridge walk of Little Bigelowe, the last major mountains before we reach Katahdin. After several attempts, today I got to feed 2 Grey Jays right out of my hand! They are the Canadian cousin to our blue jays, but they are a muted grey and white color. They would fly in, grab a small morsel of food from my hand, fly to a tree to hide it, then return for another piece til the food was gone. It was quite an interesting experience,and I was able to get a picture of the whole thing. We are 174 miles from Katahdin! I got a message from Birch today, his family will be driving up to pick him up on the 9th and they offered me a ride back to Harpers Ferry all the way from Katahdin ! This will save someone a ton of money because honestly I am unsure if I could afford a train ticket back at this point and still be able to flip. So it seems I will be summiting on or around the 9th and then making my flip a day or 2 later. Talk about trail magic! He should catch up to Dutch and I within the next 2 to 3 days. Tomorrow we plan to do big miles now that we are out of serious mountains. 17 miles will put us at Pierce Pond Lean to,which is near a Maine camp famous among hikers for its 12 pancake lumberjack breakfast for 8 bucks, I don't think I have the cash to spare but we shall see. Either way that's where we'll be tomorrow. I'm already in my bag and I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open. I'm beat from today, we got here to the Little Bigelowe lean to,started a fire for cooking (I've been doing a lot of fire cooking lately to save my fuel),cooked a nice cous cous meal,took a leak, and now I'm going to sleep.

-Fresh and Bella the Mountain Dog
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