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...