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)