“And in the meantime I’ll start saving money for the recording equipment I’ll need to start the podcast for when you inevitably go missing in the woods”
Oops, I’m behind. Time to catch up.
Challenges abound
Glastenbury Residency part two faced some headwinds. I got a truly nasty bout of poison ivy that affected me for nearly four weeks. Lap 6’s hike was a Benadryl-fueled haze fest with large parts of the weekend lost to an antihistamine-induced brianfog. Good for muscle memory training, I suppose.
Auntie came and rejuvenated our mission on lap 7. Fun(?) fact: this overnight was the only time this entire 6 month lead-up to ITI that I trained with another human. Some people would find this lonely or difficult to maintain, but I find the total freedom to do it how i want, when I want, at the pace I want, much easier to manage, and therefore to commit to and actually execute. Shelt is one of few people I will adventure with, and we don’t do much in the winter because she really struggles in the cold. Probably undiagnosed raynaud’s. I used to bully her a bit about it, but once I realized she wasn’t just being a wuss, I accepted our collective fate and started lending her my better gear instead. I only exaggerate a bit about the forecast, to secure her attendance. The dogs adore her and have so much fun running back and forth between our tents to say “hey!” repeatedly.
The next week, I mobilized and drove an hour before admitting to myself I was far too sick to have any business heading out solo into a wilderness area. That trip ended with a short easy romp around the base of Wachusett, a Dunkin’ run, and arriving home by lunch [I didn’t count it.]
I dubbed lap 8 the Uffda Lap. That weekend was rough. Along with ivy and illness, I had also traveled to Atlanta for a few days for a work conference. A decided lack of recent training and shitty weather combined to give us a challenge on our ‘hard reset’ weekend. I legitimately wasn’t sure if we’d make it to summit camp—Ill push myself until my legs give out, but will call camp the second a dog is struggling. Thankfully they both pulled through and powered to camp for a nice sunbathing nap.
The freezing rain started about midnight and came down steadily through all night and most of the morning. The toughest part about freezing rain is working in breaks. You chill really quickly when you’re wet and stop moving, especially when exposed to blustery winds on a ridgeline like we were for most of the morning. We got a couple of short, well timed pauses in, but mostly we powered straight through on day-two tired legs, soaked feet, and the knowledge that “the only way out is through”. UFFda! This weekend kicked our butts, but we did it.
Facing, and not Facing, the End
The entire impetus behind the Glastenbury Residency was to hike until there was enough snow that I could ski. In finicky New England, that demarcation line can vary wildly, sometimes by months in successive years. This is why I didn’t have a set length to the Residency. In my mind, if I was skiing by early December, I’d be lucky. But I knew full well I could be hiking through New Years. That would equate to somewhere between 10 and 14 laps. For training purposes, the less the better. So on paper, the massive, mid-November Vermont snowfalls this year were absolutely ideal. But they filled me with a heavy weight I couldn’t immediately place. I was loathe to give up Glastenbury so soon. Surely we could make it up one more week?!
Nope. I hung on for probably one weekend too long, not wanting to face the fact of transition to the next phase of training. Short term, it meant I was slowly running out of time to train for ITIAlaska. While that was both scary and exciting, I know it’s not the real reason that I hung on.
It didn’t take much soul-searching to unravel—It also means I’m running out of time to visit these special places with Wy&Wo. Glastenbury is one of my favorites. I call it ‘the Mountain that made me love Mountains.” Time keeps moving, dogs get old. Wolfy is slowing down and Wylie’s arthritis is both progressing and spreading. Under doctor’s orders, the level of activity we do and the pace we do it is authorized and actively encouraged (nobody call MSPCA on me, plz). But, as I have written about here, the writing is on the wall for our little adventure crew. [and now I am crying on the airplane as I type this]. Each season we finish up now, I know that when it comes around next calendar year, its gonna look different for us. They love being out there so much, but it won’t be fair for me to ask too much of them, for too long.
It’s so important to me that I never push the dogs past what they can handle. So when we made the first ridge-line a mile into lap 9* and were already in eight plus inches of fresh powder, I already knew we weren’t summiting. we ended up turning around at the top of Maple Hill, mile 2.0. I considered to camp at the early shelter, just for fun, but opted to come home for them to rest and so I could face the transition head-on and get out there on my death sticks the next day. The short hike was STUNNING out there and we so enjoyed the snow—worth nearly 6 hours of driving for the 2.5 hours of hiking. We decided to call it lap 8.5, to celebrate a successful, if not summit-reaching, end to our challenge.
That’s a wrap on the Glastenbury Residency.
If the three of us never make it up Glastenbury together again…we’ll always have had this 🤍.
The TypeTwoFun Club 
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