Duck Hole to Averyville Road

In the morning, I filled our water bottles, boiled two pots of water, and pack up.    When we put our boots on, we decided to use wet socks, since the boots were soaked.   It was a pretty bad feeling to put on boots, have the cold water squish out of them, and know that you were going to hike 6 hours in them.  Oh well.

The other lean-to, on our way out of Duck Hole.

In the morning, the sun made an appearance for about 45 seconds, and my camera was handy.  We thought our stuff was drying.    Right!

This is the sign we should have read nearly 24 hours earlier.

We headed out about 9.  I decided that Moose Pond being 3.9 miles away, as heavy, tired and wet as we were, we would define having good luck to be if we could make it to Moose Pond in 2 hours.  That would be a good indicator for the day to come.  We made it to Moose Pond in 1:52, so we had good luck.  We grabbed a snack to eat while walking there, talked with a guy who had a pack boat and was boating several of the lakes.    We pushed on, getting to Wanika Falls about noon.  Things were going well.   The only other time we stopped was to re-fill water bottles on a bridge over a stream.  Then we stopped briefly for Bob to fix a toe, and later for me to change socks.  The dry socks actually felt dry inside the boots by this time.   The last couple miles were fatiguing, almost like a death march.  My feet had begun to hurt a lot, but there was only one thing to do - finish.

We got to the trailhead just at 3:00, hiked up to the upper parking lot, changed, and stopped at the first McDonald's on the way to Long Lake for a "civilized" meal.     At Long Lake, we shopped in the general store for a while, then headed home.

We finished the Northville-Lake Placid Trail.