June 27

After breakfast Carol, the owner of house, drove me back to the trail head.  I hiked exactly 17 miles on good trail and decided to tent camp near the Happy Hill Shelter mile 1741.2 for the night.  The AT went underneath Interstate 89 today.  Tomorrow I will leave Vermont and enter New Hampshire  👉.  Then it's the White Mountains which are said to be very challenging.  New Hampshire has 161 miles of trail most of which is within the White Mountain National Forest. 

There are many stone walls throughout the Appalachian Trail and New England that I have encountered and which the trail traverses.  These walls were used for anything from animal pounds, to boundary lines, and animal fencing.  Above all they were built to facilitate the planting of crops.  They were built between 1775 - 1825 which, I come to find out, was known as the golden age of stone wall building.  The ice age glaciers trapped many rocks of all sizes within them.  The larger ones, as I showed a picture of in an earlier blog, are known as glacial erratics.  So when the glaciers melted and receded they would dump millions of tons of rocks in random places.  The types of rocks that survived are the harder granites, slates, and gneiss.  And these became the weathered and rounded rocks and small boulders that make up the preserved walls that we see today.