Boost from Branchville

May 21, 2025

Branchville, NJ to Mashipacong Shelter

Mile 1334.8

I was up early and ready to go long before my ride was. He dropped me off at a parking area near Branchville, and we said our goodbyes. Before I knew it, I was back into the routine of hiking once again. Accepting the ride took me beyond the Catfish Tower and Crater Lake, and I was sorry to miss them, but I’d told Tom I would be close to the NY border by Memorial Day Weekend. Having stayed the extra day at Mohican, I was unlikely to make it on time without a little help.

There was another fire tower about 2 miles out, and today I met Elaine and Brian ( no trail name yet) there.

There were a lot of little paths around here—it took me a bit to find the actual trail out

Elaine was a teacher, too, and they’re from near Lancaster.  Her trail name, recently given, was Bionic Woman; she’d planned for years to hike the AT, but was continually sidelined by injury while training, once she’d retired. Most recently, she’d been recovering from a rotator cuff injury, but she and her husband had decided to stop waiting for ideal conditions and go for the full hike this year. (In a side note, I am continually impressed by all the folks I meet out here who are hiking with new knees, new hips, and the like.) Elaine didn’t seem certain about accepting Bionic Woman as a trail name–I got the sense that she didn’t want injury to define her narrative. I decided to just use her name until I heard her introduce herself as Bionic Woman to others, just in case. Brian had retired from his work as a cabinet maker to accompany his wife. He didn’t have a trail name yet, and he didn’t seem too bothered.

We kept passing each other all day, and ended up staying at the Mashipacong shelter together tonight. They’ve got their days planned carefully, and on paper—they knew so much more about where they were staying, how much mileage they wanted or needed to cover, and they’d arranged for meal supply through package drop on the way, although injuries had set them back a bit recently. This impressed the crap out of me, of course, and I picked their brains a fair bit about their strategy and their game plan for New Jersey. Over several smaller meetings, we fell into several of those deep conversations that you get sometimes with total strangers. They seem cool, and it looks like we are on a similar path for the next few days at least. I imagine I’ll run into them again. 

I had thought to stop for lunch and a privy break at Gren Anderson Shelter, but there were volunteers doing work there. They’d removed the steps to the privy, but as soon as they saw me roll in, they insisted on moving away and giving me space and time to use the facilities. With a little embarrassment, I accepted, and climbed up into the privy without benefit of stairs–a first for me. Afterwards, they warned me about snake nests near the pavilion I was headed towards, and like several others I’d heard from, advised against ending my day at Rutherford shelter. Rutherford was only a couple of miles beyond the next shelter, but apparently was not only way off trail, but full of ticks and mosquitoes, with unreliable water. Mashipacong, the shelter before, was right on trail, and the volunteers were planning to leave gallons of water in the bear box right after their work here finished. With that, my decision was made. As I headed out, I passed an unhappy-looking man and his dog. The man was on his phone, apparently making arrangements to get off-trail.  The volunteers had told me that the hike up to the pavilion would be difficult, but it wasn’t bad at all. I didn’t see any snakes, either. I did, however, run into Elaine and Brian again, and we enjoyed the shade of the pavilion for a while before moving on.

Mashipacong shelter is literally right on the trail–you walk through the shelter area itself as you’re on the trail. The bear box is visible from the hiking trail as well, and there’s a privy only a short distance away behind a small cluster of trees. Since it’s directly on trail, it isn’t obvious which paths lead to tenting areas, privy, etc. and which is the actual trail north, and I was tickled to see signage which meant that a lot of folks had gone wrong in the past.

The inside of the privy is painted a cheery Pepto Pink, with a plexiglass skylight above and a little shelf built into the wall to hold an extra-large bottle of hand sanitizer. The hand sanitizer is walled in with wood and screws to prevent the bottle from going anywhwere–my guess is that the volunteers remove the front panel entirely when they want to replace things. I immediately christened this privy the Pink Palace in my mind. By the time I got there, the volunteers had already been by with the water supplies, and there was a lone tent sitting on the lawn next to the trail.  It was late afternoon, so the man in the tent was getting a pretty strong greenhouse effect there, but although he was clearly not into the heat, he didn’t want to move his gear. From the sound of it, he had just started hiking. Later that day, he would offer us his power bank.

It was a fairly early end to the hiking day for me, with plenty of light left before nightfall. Several people came through on the trail but moved on. The fellow in the tent retired to his shelter and didn’t come out again. I talked over plans with Elaine and Brian as we got our respective dinners ready, and heard about several options for shelter that weren’t in my guide or on FarOut. Since I had time and the signal was good, I was also able to start nailing down plans to meet my friend Tom and his family over Memorial Day weekend—man, it’s hard to believe that’s right around the corner—and that led to some planning to make sure I would be able to make the miles and get to the meeting place on time. Vancouver showed up later that afternoon—she said Fairchild and Trash Tye were coming, too, and eventually, they did. It was good to reconnect with them, as I imagine they’ll start doing longer miles soon. No one is looking forward to the rain coming back tomorrow, but at least we’re in a shelter tonight.