Massachusetts and Montana

This afternoon I took a trip over the mountain for milk. This wasn’t strictly necessary – there is a store a block and a half a way that sells milk – but I had my heart set on milk in glass bottles. I buy it from South Mountain Creamery, a little family business that started back in 2001. They have excellent chocolate milk, thick and full of flavor, which the kids love. To be truthful, I enjoy it, too. But what makes me go the distance is their wonderful, unhomogenized whole milk. (They call it “Creamline,” which is probably better for sales than calling it unhomogenized, which sounds a little too much like unhygienic and would probably be confused with unpasteurized.)
It was an excellent day for a drive anyway, and the house has been crowded and noisy lately (a niece and nephews are visiting), so the trip was as much to escape as it was to get milk. In fact, instead of turning around and taking the quickest route home, I decided to go on into Boonsboro and return by way of Smithsburg, Catoctin Mountain, and Thurmont.
The drive up and over Catoctin Mountain is always a blessing, unless the weather is nasty, in which case it is a holy terror. The road climbs steeply, with sharp twists and turns, through mature forest. Part of the mountain is a state park, much of the rest a national forest and somehwere in the middle of it all is Camp David. Also somewhere through the middle of it runs the famous Appalachian Trail.
I have known about the trail there for years -- probably ever since I first drove that road. There is a sign indicating where the trail crosses, but the trail itself is actually rather difficult to spot. It is really quite narrow, and at this time of year, with all the leaves on, even the white blazes that mark the trail can be hard to spot -- at least from the road traveling 40 miles per hour. Believe me, I tried. And I failed.
But I couldn't miss the two hikers with their thumbs out. Inspired a bit by my recent reading of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, a hilarious account of a middle-aged man's effort to traverse the trail, I took pity and stopped. The two hikers clambered in as quickly as possible, though it took a while to fit their enormous backpacks into my subcompact. They wanted to know how to get to Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, (one was expecting a package at the post office there). I couldn't tell them exactly how to get to Blue Ridge Summit, but I was pretty sure it wasn't far. I said I would take them to Thurmont, where I was confident one of the locals could point them in the right direction.
I didn't ask their names and they didn't offer, but we had a good conversation nonetheless. They both looked about college age, fit and sunburned. The young man was tall and thin with wavy brown hair, the young woman stocky, blonde, freckled and from Montana. They were both through-hikers who had started in Georgia two months ago, though not necessarily together. He was going as far as Massachusetts, which was home. She was planning on finishing the whole length of the trail, all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
He seemed glad for the company, while she was quiet. We talked about the trail, my own (rare) wilderness adventures in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, and the importance of packing light. I also mentioned Bryson's book, which it turned out the young man had read and liked, though he thought Bryson might have exercised a good bit of artistic license. I left them off at the square in Thurmont.
Such was my good deed for the day, which made me feel a little less guilty about using four gallons of gas to get two gallons of milk.