The boulder scramble continued ever so slowly.
At times it took me several minutes to figure out where I was going to go next. Sometimes I also needed a little extra time to summon courage to make the next step.
One such spot was where I stood on a narrow rock ledge. Below me was a gap in the boulders, which dropped about six feet to a pile of jagged rocks. Ahead of me was the narrowest of cracks, where I thought I might be able to get a foothold. Unfortunately, it was too far away to simply step over the gap to reach, and had no obvious place to hang onto when I got there.
After taking time to survey my options I only saw one way to do this. I decided I could leap over the gap and reach up and grab the top of a boulder before placing my feet on the narrow ledge.
The problem here was I couldn’t see the top edge of the boulder I was intending to grab. Was it rounded, giving me nothing to grip? Or was there enough of an edge to grip long enough so I could set my feet down without falling into the gap below?
With no small measure of foolish hope, I made the jump, grabbed the rock, and made a perfectly balanced landing.
Then I said to myself, “I should not have done that."
Moving on, I came upon another spot with a deep gap in the rocks. For this one I had to stretch my toes to reach into the next rock, hoping there would be enough room for my foot to stay wedged while I looked for the next step to take. I surprised myself when I was able to do it.
It should be no surprise that it took Stick, Tengo and me about 3.5 hours to get through Mahoosuc Notch.
When we reached a small tenting area on the other side of the notch we stopped for lunch. Frodo, Samwise and Gimli decided they were done for the day and planned to camp here.
We decided we had enough daylight and enough energy to get to Speck Pond Shelter, a distance of just 2.4 miles.