September 16 - 19
Last note from the trail. I ended up skipping about 130 miles of Maine, all the way to Monson. I feel kind of bad about this, for all the obvious reasons - namely that this means my hike will end up only being something like 1900 miles, and that I'm missing some of the most beautiful stuff. But the reasons for skipping are equally obvious - if I hiked all of Maine, I'd be getting home less than a week before I would need to get back to work, and that would have been really bad. Even with two weeks' R&R, I have a feeling it's going to be ugly. The consensus seems to be that it takes a few months after a thru-hike before you're back to whatever approaches normalcy.
It took me two full days to hitchhike up to Monson, and the time has been a reminder that many of the best parts of this experience have come off the trail. Most of my hitches have been from one flyspeck town to the next, ten or so miles at a time, spending a few hours in little places with a store, a post office, and a population well short of four digits.
Monson is the last of these, and it's the last of the trail towns. It's got a main drag running through the center and just a few side streets. I count two small churches, and about a half-dozen businesses. There's an antique/gift shop with a sign that gives you a number to call "If we're closed and you want to come in." There's a gas station (one pump) which is also the convenience store, pizzeria and deli. There's a pub which is also the restaurant, laundromat, and guesthouse, and Shaw's boarding house, which is an AT institution. No crappy hostel linens here; the beds have clean, new sheets and thick comforters. Breakfast is all-you-can-eat eggs, home fries, bacon, sausage and blueberry pancakes. And then there's the Monson General Store, which is about twenty feet wide by sixty feet deep, and where you can pick up some Spaghetti-O's, a garden hose, a tube of toothpaste, a scoop of ice cream, and an egg salad sandwich, while also getting your keys duplicated and renting a DVD. It's sort of like a Wal-Mart supercenter, without all the big-city fuss and pretension.
If you come to Monson, do it on a Friday. The pub has a Fish Fry - all-you-can-eat, of course - and the General Store has bluegrass night. Actually, the music depends on who shows up to play any given Friday. Last night, it was several guitars, a banjo or two, three fiddlers, a dulcimer, and a harmonica, and the music ran from John Denver to Janis Joplin to Gospel to Irish Folk tunes. The audience was mostly seniors with more than a handful of hairy hiker types mixed in. (I'm told they get a lot of families with kids in the summer months). Folks join in singing or clapping along as the mood strikes - the chorus to "Country Roads" brought nearly everyone to full-voice. A glass jar of corn kernels made the rounds as a shaker percussion instrument, and I took a turn. Folks drifted out as the night went along, and things finally wound up around 10:30. I walked out into a cold, clear night, where a half-moon hung in the blackness and a breeze promised that winter was coming but not yet, not yet. And I thought that if someone came down from Pluto, and they wanted to know what human life was supposed to be about, you could do a hell of a lot worse than taking them to Monson, Maine on a Friday night.
But that was last night, and this is today. Today I'm back on the trail, and heading into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. It's a little bit of a misnomer, but north of Monson it's 100 miles to the nearest store; and after that it's only 14 miles to the summit of Mt. Katahdia, and the end of the trail, and the beginning of the trip home - which will take about 2 days, roughly 1/100th of what it took to get here.
Of course, "home" is always a loaded term. I've lived in Florida for eight years, but I still don't always really think of it as "home" in a sense deeper than "it's where I keep my other pair of shoes." I've lived so many places in my life, that it's been hard to ever get that feeling of homeness at any of them.
And now, I'm getting ready to leave another home. In a lot of ways, the trail - especially the trail when experienced along it's length during a season - has a lot in common with these little towns I enjoy so much. Everyone knows everyone else, mostly. Everyone shops at the same stores and drives the same roads and knows the punchlines to all the same jokes. Everyone trusts each other, and occasionally may even need to rely on each other. It's a 2000-mile long village, and I have lived there. When I come back to Monson - or Damascus, or Unionville or Max Patch or Mt. Washington or any of a hundred spots on the trail that I loved - these places won't feel like somewhere I've visited, but like a place I've lived in.
For the last month, as I've gotten more and more worn down by the trail, I've been thinking more and more that "I just want to go home." Only now am I starting to realize that once I'm safely on my couch in Florida, I'll be thinking of the woods and saying the same thing.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Why I hike so slow:
I'm not the slowest hiker on the Appalachian Trail, but I'm definitely on the slow side of things. There's several reasons for this, starting with the fact that I'm still basically a lazy person who doesn't push himself to go longer or harder even when I could. Another reason is that when I am walking, I tend to amble or stroll more than really hike. Those aren't really good things, and I wish I had a bit more of an athlete's mentality. But part of why I'm slow is that I stop and sit still so much, and I don't regret that at all.
In the springtime, in Tennessee and Virginia, the woods were full of butterflies. I kept trying to get pictures of them, but they never were still enough, and they fly so elliptically that all I succeeded in doing was looking like an idiot as I chased them from down the trail, pack on, camera in hand, hoping to get one good picture. This went on for a couple of weeks. One day in May, I stopped at a shelter to take a break. I sat down on the picnic table, and laid my sweat-soaked yellow bandanna in the sun to dry, while I sat still, catching my breath. After a few minutes, a yellow butterfly came down and landed directly on the bandanna, yellow on yellow in a bright afternoon sun. He stayed there long enough for me to get a few pictures, but then I made a sudden move and he was gone.
Chipmunks are probably my favorite animal in the forest; I'd love to someday have a tame pet chipmunk. Unfortunately, they also are pretty hard to get a good look at, as they tend to suspect that anything larger than they wants to eat them. But are day in Vermont, as I sat still on a rock, a chipmunk started walking around my feet. Every time I moved so much as a muscle, he seemed disposed to run away, but so long as I was totally motionless, I could watch him.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I summitted a mountain around noon only to find it soaked by the clouds, with absolutely no visibility at all. I started to go down, but something told me to stop. "Wait. Just wait," it seemed to say. I did. A minute or two later, I felt the wind from the west pick up. I set my face to it, and it blew stronger. Suddenly, the clouds opened (more accurately, the cloud moved off the mountain), and I was leaking down on the deep valleys and sister mountains, a choppy sea of granite and pine. I looked back east and for a few moments that direction was still in the clouds; but as the cloud kept moving, soon all was clear in that direction as well, and I had my first view of the summit of Mount Washington then still several days walk away. With the cloud gone, I found myself on top of a mountain and warm in the sun.
We are told that the shame we feel at our nakedness is a consequence of the fall from Eden. We are also told that when mankind fell, all of creation shared in that fall. Logic, then, seems to suggest that the rest of creation would feel some of the fear of nakedness that we do. And I think it does. It seems like nature is a shy bride, waiting for our patience and stillness before she will show herself.
September 8 - 15
Heading North from Gorham, NH is sort of a good-news/bad-news sort of deal.
The good news is that, especially now in the fall, it's beautiful. The woods are tremendously thick with close-growing trees and dense undergrowth of ferns making bushwhacking for off the trail impossible in most places. At the lower elevations, it's a mixed forest, and the leaves are starting to change, the birches turning yellow, the maples red. As you go higher, the forests are deep green, with moss covering nearly everything, and thick spruce and pine creating a heavy scent. Finally on the very high elevations - above 3800 or so, the trees are shrunken or non-existent, and alpine grasses and mosses dominate. It's not all ridge-walking, and when you get down to the notches, as often as not there's a stream or a creek running through the woods.
The bad news is, as beautiful as it is, it's also very tough walking. The trail is really rugged, with lots of places where you're using your hands to pull yourself up, or dropping to your butt to slide down on a smooth stone face, and others where you're climbing over, and around and occasionally even under huge boulders (I tore out the butt of my pants this week - have to find news ones). It's the hardest section of the entire trail.
The climax of this is Mahoosuc Notch, pretty much universally regarded as the toughest mile on the entire trail. It's got cliffs on both sides, so you're funnelled into this narrow gap in the mountains, where you climb across boulders ranging in size from refrigerators to mini-vans, to bedroom-sized. In a few places, you're obliged to crawl through openings so narrow you need to pull your pack off and push it ahead of you. It's especially dicey when you go through it as I did, on a rainy day. It's actually a lot of fun, but as you can imagine it kills your chances of making good time; really, you could say that about the whole stretch from Gorham, NH to Andover, Maine.
Which has left me with a real problem. As I write this I have 246 miles of trail left to go. Unfortunately, I'm due back at work in about a month. I'm definitely going to need at least a couple of weeks of R&R before I'm in shape to go back to work, so that really only leaves me about 2 weeks to cover the rest of the trail. That's not going to happen, especially given that conditions around Mt. Katahdin at the end make it necessary to allow several days in case of weather. So, I'm going to have to skip about 100 miles of trail. It kind of bothers me in that I can easily think of lots of places I'd rather skip than Maine in September. But it is what it is, and frankly, after 6 months, I'm very tired. I already knew that my hike would be short of the full 2,175; this just means I'll end up with something like 1900 miles instead of 2000. And it gives me a section to look forward to doing in the future. I'm not sure where, exactly, I'll be skipping to; at this point I'm guessing Manson, at the start of the "100 mile wilderness." After that Katahdin, and home.
UPDATE: I've been having camera problems, and the disposable I ended up having to use in Mahoosuc Notch got some water in it and was ruined. So unfortunately I have no pics of the Mahoosuc Notch. But I'm sure you can do a Google image search and find scads. (Actually I did a youtube search and found some interesting videos. - Dee)
I'm not the slowest hiker on the Appalachian Trail, but I'm definitely on the slow side of things. There's several reasons for this, starting with the fact that I'm still basically a lazy person who doesn't push himself to go longer or harder even when I could. Another reason is that when I am walking, I tend to amble or stroll more than really hike. Those aren't really good things, and I wish I had a bit more of an athlete's mentality. But part of why I'm slow is that I stop and sit still so much, and I don't regret that at all.
In the springtime, in Tennessee and Virginia, the woods were full of butterflies. I kept trying to get pictures of them, but they never were still enough, and they fly so elliptically that all I succeeded in doing was looking like an idiot as I chased them from down the trail, pack on, camera in hand, hoping to get one good picture. This went on for a couple of weeks. One day in May, I stopped at a shelter to take a break. I sat down on the picnic table, and laid my sweat-soaked yellow bandanna in the sun to dry, while I sat still, catching my breath. After a few minutes, a yellow butterfly came down and landed directly on the bandanna, yellow on yellow in a bright afternoon sun. He stayed there long enough for me to get a few pictures, but then I made a sudden move and he was gone.
Chipmunks are probably my favorite animal in the forest; I'd love to someday have a tame pet chipmunk. Unfortunately, they also are pretty hard to get a good look at, as they tend to suspect that anything larger than they wants to eat them. But are day in Vermont, as I sat still on a rock, a chipmunk started walking around my feet. Every time I moved so much as a muscle, he seemed disposed to run away, but so long as I was totally motionless, I could watch him.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I summitted a mountain around noon only to find it soaked by the clouds, with absolutely no visibility at all. I started to go down, but something told me to stop. "Wait. Just wait," it seemed to say. I did. A minute or two later, I felt the wind from the west pick up. I set my face to it, and it blew stronger. Suddenly, the clouds opened (more accurately, the cloud moved off the mountain), and I was leaking down on the deep valleys and sister mountains, a choppy sea of granite and pine. I looked back east and for a few moments that direction was still in the clouds; but as the cloud kept moving, soon all was clear in that direction as well, and I had my first view of the summit of Mount Washington then still several days walk away. With the cloud gone, I found myself on top of a mountain and warm in the sun.
We are told that the shame we feel at our nakedness is a consequence of the fall from Eden. We are also told that when mankind fell, all of creation shared in that fall. Logic, then, seems to suggest that the rest of creation would feel some of the fear of nakedness that we do. And I think it does. It seems like nature is a shy bride, waiting for our patience and stillness before she will show herself.
September 8 - 15
Heading North from Gorham, NH is sort of a good-news/bad-news sort of deal.
The good news is that, especially now in the fall, it's beautiful. The woods are tremendously thick with close-growing trees and dense undergrowth of ferns making bushwhacking for off the trail impossible in most places. At the lower elevations, it's a mixed forest, and the leaves are starting to change, the birches turning yellow, the maples red. As you go higher, the forests are deep green, with moss covering nearly everything, and thick spruce and pine creating a heavy scent. Finally on the very high elevations - above 3800 or so, the trees are shrunken or non-existent, and alpine grasses and mosses dominate. It's not all ridge-walking, and when you get down to the notches, as often as not there's a stream or a creek running through the woods.
The bad news is, as beautiful as it is, it's also very tough walking. The trail is really rugged, with lots of places where you're using your hands to pull yourself up, or dropping to your butt to slide down on a smooth stone face, and others where you're climbing over, and around and occasionally even under huge boulders (I tore out the butt of my pants this week - have to find news ones). It's the hardest section of the entire trail.
The climax of this is Mahoosuc Notch, pretty much universally regarded as the toughest mile on the entire trail. It's got cliffs on both sides, so you're funnelled into this narrow gap in the mountains, where you climb across boulders ranging in size from refrigerators to mini-vans, to bedroom-sized. In a few places, you're obliged to crawl through openings so narrow you need to pull your pack off and push it ahead of you. It's especially dicey when you go through it as I did, on a rainy day. It's actually a lot of fun, but as you can imagine it kills your chances of making good time; really, you could say that about the whole stretch from Gorham, NH to Andover, Maine.
Which has left me with a real problem. As I write this I have 246 miles of trail left to go. Unfortunately, I'm due back at work in about a month. I'm definitely going to need at least a couple of weeks of R&R before I'm in shape to go back to work, so that really only leaves me about 2 weeks to cover the rest of the trail. That's not going to happen, especially given that conditions around Mt. Katahdin at the end make it necessary to allow several days in case of weather. So, I'm going to have to skip about 100 miles of trail. It kind of bothers me in that I can easily think of lots of places I'd rather skip than Maine in September. But it is what it is, and frankly, after 6 months, I'm very tired. I already knew that my hike would be short of the full 2,175; this just means I'll end up with something like 1900 miles instead of 2000. And it gives me a section to look forward to doing in the future. I'm not sure where, exactly, I'll be skipping to; at this point I'm guessing Manson, at the start of the "100 mile wilderness." After that Katahdin, and home.
UPDATE: I've been having camera problems, and the disposable I ended up having to use in Mahoosuc Notch got some water in it and was ruined. So unfortunately I have no pics of the Mahoosuc Notch. But I'm sure you can do a Google image search and find scads. (Actually I did a youtube search and found some interesting videos. - Dee)
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
New photos -
New photos up at trailjournals.com http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=387084 and keep clicking next. Some of 'em are messed up; been having camera problems. Also, they're out of order.
Mailed out journals today, you'll be reading about it in a few days.
In the meantime, check out the awsome blog of two freinds of mine at www.walkingtomaine.blogspot.com.
Be sure to tell them that Chainsaw's blog is way better.
New photos up at trailjournals.com http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=387084 and keep clicking next. Some of 'em are messed up; been having camera problems. Also, they're out of order.
Mailed out journals today, you'll be reading about it in a few days.
In the meantime, check out the awsome blog of two freinds of mine at www.walkingtomaine.blogspot.com.
Be sure to tell them that Chainsaw's blog is way better.
Friday, September 12, 2008
The Low and the High
August 24 - September 6
Obviously, I've been really late getting an update on here; what can I say, you get what you pay for. (Although I do especially apologize to those of you who have hit the "donate" button.)
To try to recap a very full 2 weeks; when last I left you, I was in Hanover, NH, waiting for my maildrop of my cold-weather gear so I could head up into the White Mountains. To make a long story short, it never arrived. It was mailed on time via Priority Mail, but where the USPS sent it, we have no idea. More frustrating as the gear not coming was the fact that I spent 5 days sitting on my butt doing nothing waiting for it to come.
There are certainly worse places than Hanover to be stuck - despite being a pretty upscale kind of town, it was very hiker-friendly, and the presence of Dartmouth U and it's library helped.
I finally gave up and decided I would need to buy new gear, so I hitched 10 miles to the nearest outfitter and got what I needed. Unfortunately, in the process I managed to make a bad situation worse by managing to lose my wallet about five minutes after buying all the gear. We looked all over the store, to no avail. Over $100 in cash, two credit cards, debit card, health insurance card, and driver's license, all gone. And no idea how to replace them.
Finally, after bumming a meal and hitching an hour to get back to Hanover, I realized that the store had given me mismatched shoe sizes.
Before I started, I knew there were going to be days I wanted to quit the trail; I envisioned sitting down in the middle of the trail, exhausted and just wanting to go home. I have had quite a few of these moments -- almost every day in Vermont, in fact. But I never guessed that my lowest point on the whole entire trail would be sitting on the sidewalk on Main Street in Hanover, NH, holding one size 11 and one size 12, and not wanting to have to hitch back to the store and try to exchange my shoes without having the credit card I used to buy them.
I've been tired, sore, depressed, and often lonely for several weeks; now I was broke, too. I didn't cry, but baby I was close. The worst part was knowing that if I really wanted to, I could be home and on my sofa in 48 hours. I could get my credit card numbers over the phone, and use them to book a bus and then a train or something and get the hell home. There was a miniature devil in my ear: The pain will stop. You will have hot coffee and cold beer and showers and television and a couch. All of this could be yours...
A week later, I don't know why I didn't quit. Maybe it was me being brave, maybe it was me being pigheaded, maybe it was some kind of Grace. Maybe it was a little bit of all those things.
But what I did was call my brother in Florida, with whom I'd left an "Emergency Box,"the contents of which I'd pretty much forgotten. A spare driver's license and a credit card, as it turned out, which he would send overnight mail. I called my other credit-card companies and got the cards cancelled or replaced. I hitched back to the store and got the shoe sizes sorted out.
And while waiting for all that, I did a dayhike up Mt. Moosilauke.
Moosilauke is the first mountain above treeline, and it is spectacular. I approached it from the North where the trail runs parallel to Beaver Brook for about a mile or so. But the trail is so steep here - rising something like 3000 feet in 2 miles, - so the brook is really a long series of waterfalls, all just a few yards from the trail. Actually "trail" is even a bit of misnomer; those 2 miles are so steep that it's really more like a staircase in most spots, occasionally broken up by hand-over-hand climbs. But you finally come to the end of that and at about 4500 feet, you're above treeline. It was a warm day in the valley - 80ish or so, but temperature drops about 5 degrees for every 1000 feet in altitude, and with the wind whipping over the peak, it was wonderfully cool up there. The clouds were high, so we had views forever, mountains surrounding on all sides, sitting in ranks like an audience, fading into blue with distance like they were old memories. Off in the distance, one peak was invisible - Mt. Washington, masked in clouds as it is some 300 days a year. But that was a week away; for the moment Moosilauke was more than enough. I stayed up there over 2 hours, enjoying the cold and the wind and the views and talking to various thru-hikers as well as the locals who had come up to the peak. The sun shone, white clouds pillowed the farther mountains, the chipmunks danced after the peanuts I threw to them, and it seemed I saw a smile and heard a laughing voice behind the wind. See? This is what was ahead; what you almost missed. This was always what was ahead of you.
Up above treeline, it can be easy to get lost if the clouds come down and reduce visibility, so the route is often marked by cairns, 4-or-5-foot-high piles of stones placed every 40 yards or so next to the trail. On a clear day, you can see them lining up ahead of you as far as the slope of the land will allow, but in the mist, you might only be able to see to the one immediately ahead.
In addition to the cairns put there by the trail maintainers, there are the smaller piles of rock put here by the people who travel through, often bringing up pebbles from the base of the mountain to place at the top, marking their passage. Both kinds of cairns make me think of the Israelites, wandering through the wilderness, constantly told by God to build altars. Manna falls, rain comes ... build an altar, they are told. So that when you come this way again, you will remember that something good happened here.
I sit on Moosilauke and think about this, and I realize that it is less than 48 hours since I thought about how I could be home on my sofa in less than 48 hours.
I did not take a stone from the bottom to the top; but I take a pebble from someone else's altar and dropped it in my pocket before I walked down. Mt. Moosilauke has been the high point of my trail.
After Moosilauke, the trail keeps going deeper into the White Mountains. This section is generally regarded as both the most difficult and the most beautiful part of the entire trail. Having just come through it, I can only agree. The climbs here are intense, repeatedly going up two or three thousand feet in the space of a few miles, then back down again. That's about a half-mile vertically. As a result, in a lot of places the trail is basically a rock scramble, and you're using your hands nearly as much as your feet, grabbing rocks, and roots to pull up or ease down. In many places, it's all over boulders, so your feet take the pounding that comes from walking on rock all day. (Bhrama describes it as "like Pennsylvania, but vertical") It's hard to make good time like this - impossible actually - but when you get to the top, it's all worth it. First, it's the Franconia Ridge, with a couple of miles of ridge walking at about 4800 feet, again above treeline, around Mt. Lafayette. Again, the views are tremendous and the cold, clear air exhilarating. After a steep downhill into Crawford Notch, it's then another steep climb, up up up into the Presidential range, where a section of something like 16 miles above treeline.
Camping up this high presents a number of problems. First off, a hammock hanger like me is pretty much out of luck above treeline. But even people with tents are pretty reluctant to try to pitch in an area that routinely gets winds of 30,40,50 mph. or more. Finally you're technically not allowed to camp in a lot of places. Part of the reason for this is that the Appalachian Mountain Club runs a series of "huts" up here, that are basically high-altitude hostels where tourists from the city spend $80-90 a night for dinner, a bunk, breakfast and a privy. (More crucially, I guess, they enable tourists to hike hut-to-hut without heaving to carry their shelter with them.) Thru-hikers generally have the option of doing a work-for-stay in the huts - do some sweeping or some dishes and they'll let you eat the paying guests' leftovers and sleep on the dining room floor. The pros and cons of this arrangement are all pretty complicated, but I think it's safe to say most of us are not fans.
At the end of the day, though, you put up with what you have to to hike the Presidential range. The mountains here get higher, the winds stronger, the views more spectacular. The weather up here is notoriously ugly - snow can fall in any month, and Mt. Washington is home to the highest wind speed ever recorded on earth, 231mph. But doing my time up here, it's just about perfect temperatures of about 55-60 degrees, with strong but not overwhelming winds most of the time (call me crazy, but I love being out in a 40 degree wind-chill). Best of all, the sky is crystal-clear on the day I summit Washington at 6,288 feet - a really rare thing. The weather is so good, and the forecast, that I do something a little crazy - I cowboy camp at 5500 feet. I'd previously worked out my emergency above-treeline plan - using my hiking poles as supports, I make my tarp into an improvised pop tent, and sleep on a bed of strawy high-altitude grass. During the night the winds picked up quite a lot, and I woke up inside a cloud, but all-in-all, it was a pretty awesome experience. After the Presidentials, it's another steep, brutal downhill, dropping almost a mile in half-a-day. I eventually make it into Gorham, NH, simultaneously re-energized and exhausted. The week of sitting in Hanover made me soft enough that the Whites really wore me out.
But Gorham's been good to me, and I've just spent the last few hours sitting in a bar, eating lunch, watching football, avoiding the remnants of a hurricane, and drinking beer bought for me by a pair of locals who tell me to call them Hammer and Slick.
Sun's coming out, though, and I need to get moving on. It's only a day's walk to Maine. 300 more miles to go, and then it really be time for the sofa...
Obviously, I've been really late getting an update on here; what can I say, you get what you pay for. (Although I do especially apologize to those of you who have hit the "donate" button.)
To try to recap a very full 2 weeks; when last I left you, I was in Hanover, NH, waiting for my maildrop of my cold-weather gear so I could head up into the White Mountains. To make a long story short, it never arrived. It was mailed on time via Priority Mail, but where the USPS sent it, we have no idea. More frustrating as the gear not coming was the fact that I spent 5 days sitting on my butt doing nothing waiting for it to come.
There are certainly worse places than Hanover to be stuck - despite being a pretty upscale kind of town, it was very hiker-friendly, and the presence of Dartmouth U and it's library helped.
I finally gave up and decided I would need to buy new gear, so I hitched 10 miles to the nearest outfitter and got what I needed. Unfortunately, in the process I managed to make a bad situation worse by managing to lose my wallet about five minutes after buying all the gear. We looked all over the store, to no avail. Over $100 in cash, two credit cards, debit card, health insurance card, and driver's license, all gone. And no idea how to replace them.
Finally, after bumming a meal and hitching an hour to get back to Hanover, I realized that the store had given me mismatched shoe sizes.
Before I started, I knew there were going to be days I wanted to quit the trail; I envisioned sitting down in the middle of the trail, exhausted and just wanting to go home. I have had quite a few of these moments -- almost every day in Vermont, in fact. But I never guessed that my lowest point on the whole entire trail would be sitting on the sidewalk on Main Street in Hanover, NH, holding one size 11 and one size 12, and not wanting to have to hitch back to the store and try to exchange my shoes without having the credit card I used to buy them.
I've been tired, sore, depressed, and often lonely for several weeks; now I was broke, too. I didn't cry, but baby I was close. The worst part was knowing that if I really wanted to, I could be home and on my sofa in 48 hours. I could get my credit card numbers over the phone, and use them to book a bus and then a train or something and get the hell home. There was a miniature devil in my ear: The pain will stop. You will have hot coffee and cold beer and showers and television and a couch. All of this could be yours...
A week later, I don't know why I didn't quit. Maybe it was me being brave, maybe it was me being pigheaded, maybe it was some kind of Grace. Maybe it was a little bit of all those things.
But what I did was call my brother in Florida, with whom I'd left an "Emergency Box,"the contents of which I'd pretty much forgotten. A spare driver's license and a credit card, as it turned out, which he would send overnight mail. I called my other credit-card companies and got the cards cancelled or replaced. I hitched back to the store and got the shoe sizes sorted out.
And while waiting for all that, I did a dayhike up Mt. Moosilauke.
Moosilauke is the first mountain above treeline, and it is spectacular. I approached it from the North where the trail runs parallel to Beaver Brook for about a mile or so. But the trail is so steep here - rising something like 3000 feet in 2 miles, - so the brook is really a long series of waterfalls, all just a few yards from the trail. Actually "trail" is even a bit of misnomer; those 2 miles are so steep that it's really more like a staircase in most spots, occasionally broken up by hand-over-hand climbs. But you finally come to the end of that and at about 4500 feet, you're above treeline. It was a warm day in the valley - 80ish or so, but temperature drops about 5 degrees for every 1000 feet in altitude, and with the wind whipping over the peak, it was wonderfully cool up there. The clouds were high, so we had views forever, mountains surrounding on all sides, sitting in ranks like an audience, fading into blue with distance like they were old memories. Off in the distance, one peak was invisible - Mt. Washington, masked in clouds as it is some 300 days a year. But that was a week away; for the moment Moosilauke was more than enough. I stayed up there over 2 hours, enjoying the cold and the wind and the views and talking to various thru-hikers as well as the locals who had come up to the peak. The sun shone, white clouds pillowed the farther mountains, the chipmunks danced after the peanuts I threw to them, and it seemed I saw a smile and heard a laughing voice behind the wind. See? This is what was ahead; what you almost missed. This was always what was ahead of you.
Up above treeline, it can be easy to get lost if the clouds come down and reduce visibility, so the route is often marked by cairns, 4-or-5-foot-high piles of stones placed every 40 yards or so next to the trail. On a clear day, you can see them lining up ahead of you as far as the slope of the land will allow, but in the mist, you might only be able to see to the one immediately ahead.
In addition to the cairns put there by the trail maintainers, there are the smaller piles of rock put here by the people who travel through, often bringing up pebbles from the base of the mountain to place at the top, marking their passage. Both kinds of cairns make me think of the Israelites, wandering through the wilderness, constantly told by God to build altars. Manna falls, rain comes ... build an altar, they are told. So that when you come this way again, you will remember that something good happened here.
I sit on Moosilauke and think about this, and I realize that it is less than 48 hours since I thought about how I could be home on my sofa in less than 48 hours.
I did not take a stone from the bottom to the top; but I take a pebble from someone else's altar and dropped it in my pocket before I walked down. Mt. Moosilauke has been the high point of my trail.
After Moosilauke, the trail keeps going deeper into the White Mountains. This section is generally regarded as both the most difficult and the most beautiful part of the entire trail. Having just come through it, I can only agree. The climbs here are intense, repeatedly going up two or three thousand feet in the space of a few miles, then back down again. That's about a half-mile vertically. As a result, in a lot of places the trail is basically a rock scramble, and you're using your hands nearly as much as your feet, grabbing rocks, and roots to pull up or ease down. In many places, it's all over boulders, so your feet take the pounding that comes from walking on rock all day. (Bhrama describes it as "like Pennsylvania, but vertical") It's hard to make good time like this - impossible actually - but when you get to the top, it's all worth it. First, it's the Franconia Ridge, with a couple of miles of ridge walking at about 4800 feet, again above treeline, around Mt. Lafayette. Again, the views are tremendous and the cold, clear air exhilarating. After a steep downhill into Crawford Notch, it's then another steep climb, up up up into the Presidential range, where a section of something like 16 miles above treeline.
Camping up this high presents a number of problems. First off, a hammock hanger like me is pretty much out of luck above treeline. But even people with tents are pretty reluctant to try to pitch in an area that routinely gets winds of 30,40,50 mph. or more. Finally you're technically not allowed to camp in a lot of places. Part of the reason for this is that the Appalachian Mountain Club runs a series of "huts" up here, that are basically high-altitude hostels where tourists from the city spend $80-90 a night for dinner, a bunk, breakfast and a privy. (More crucially, I guess, they enable tourists to hike hut-to-hut without heaving to carry their shelter with them.) Thru-hikers generally have the option of doing a work-for-stay in the huts - do some sweeping or some dishes and they'll let you eat the paying guests' leftovers and sleep on the dining room floor. The pros and cons of this arrangement are all pretty complicated, but I think it's safe to say most of us are not fans.
At the end of the day, though, you put up with what you have to to hike the Presidential range. The mountains here get higher, the winds stronger, the views more spectacular. The weather up here is notoriously ugly - snow can fall in any month, and Mt. Washington is home to the highest wind speed ever recorded on earth, 231mph. But doing my time up here, it's just about perfect temperatures of about 55-60 degrees, with strong but not overwhelming winds most of the time (call me crazy, but I love being out in a 40 degree wind-chill). Best of all, the sky is crystal-clear on the day I summit Washington at 6,288 feet - a really rare thing. The weather is so good, and the forecast, that I do something a little crazy - I cowboy camp at 5500 feet. I'd previously worked out my emergency above-treeline plan - using my hiking poles as supports, I make my tarp into an improvised pop tent, and sleep on a bed of strawy high-altitude grass. During the night the winds picked up quite a lot, and I woke up inside a cloud, but all-in-all, it was a pretty awesome experience. After the Presidentials, it's another steep, brutal downhill, dropping almost a mile in half-a-day. I eventually make it into Gorham, NH, simultaneously re-energized and exhausted. The week of sitting in Hanover made me soft enough that the Whites really wore me out.
But Gorham's been good to me, and I've just spent the last few hours sitting in a bar, eating lunch, watching football, avoiding the remnants of a hurricane, and drinking beer bought for me by a pair of locals who tell me to call them Hammer and Slick.
Sun's coming out, though, and I need to get moving on. It's only a day's walk to Maine. 300 more miles to go, and then it really be time for the sofa...
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