This coming holiday weekend, I'm going to be doing an ambitious hike to red-line a few more trails.  First, I am going to hike in to Panther Gorge from Elk Lake on the afternoon/evening of July 3.  Right now the weather looks like thundershowers, but nothing too bad.  This is going to be the first time I have ever hiked this trail, and the 8.75 miles will be interesting as it is going through Marcy Swamp, that supposedly has a lot of boards and low bridges that sometimes are out.  I'll be doing this with a full pack, twice.  

After spending 8 hours sitting at a drizzly trail head at the base of Cascade doing trailhead stewarding on an extremely slow Memorial Day Saturday (didn't even break 50 people).  I went up the trail.  As I was expecting, the trail was wet and muddy.  We had reports of some snow earlier in the day, but it was gone by the time we got up.  About 1/3 of the way up, I stripped down to my tee shirt.  When we got above tree line, I started to get a little chilled, so at the second cairn I put my shell on since that was the most handy layer.