June 28 1973 - Winsor Furnace Shelter - 5 miles

(this daily journal was kept and rewritten by my sister Laurie and presented to me as a gift - I now rewrite it here for you)

Got up at 8:00. John went to the post office and got his package. Jay was getting ready to hitch home. We all went down for breakfast and gorged ourselves on bacon, eggs, toast and OJ - so much that Don's stomach was in an uproar. Jay left for Mass, I went to PO and store, John got ready to go and Don didn't do anything but lay on the bed and groan. Said goodbye to john, knowing that we wouldn't be catching up with him. We'll miss his optimism. Don and I left the Hotel at 11:30. Ascended steeply and then couldn't find the shelter, but a guy from the Hamburg Water Supply gave us a ride cause it started to rain hard. A guy named Dave (hiking for a week) came in and showered in the rain - it was really pouring. The next drowned rats that came in were two more thru-hikers - Fred Elliott and Mike DiNunzio. The stream water was muddy so we creeped up past the $500 fine signs and got water from the Hamburg Reservoir. These guys are crazy. We played attacking the Germans and were then apprehended by the Dobermans. Met Dan Welch (Ga.-Me.)

(Mike & Fred - as they were exclusively referred to - dressed like wild bikers, intentionally to spook off day-hikers who might infringe on limited shelter space. When they approached a campsite and detected Boy Scouts or other groups of campers, they would stop and wait while another thru-hiker friend preceded them into camp and started talking about the crazed hikers who were heading to camp here soon, which caused more than one group to relocate their gear at a safe distance.  Later the story was told about them in the White's of NH, where at a shelter that displayed a poster acknowledging the efforts of thru-hikers and their need to travel light and how other hikers should make accommodations for them, Mike grabbed a guy by the collar, pushed his face to the sign and growled "got a tent Jack? Use It!". A few years later, Laurie, Wes and I visited Mike in the Adirondack's where he was an environmental scientist taking water samples in local lakes testing for acid rain.)