Mistakes were made: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing meaningful can come of the story I am going to relate.
I’m not even supposed to be here, telling you what happened. I’m supposed to be deep in the North Woods fending off marauding moose and subsisting on stale beef jerky and inadvertently swallowed blackflies. But instead, as I write this on July 7, Mica and I are back home on Peaks Island. It’s not the end, it’s just a brief setback.
The mistakes in question are an instructive combination of errors of inexperience and errors of overconfidence, so I’ll point them out as we go.
On June 30 we drove up to Baxter State Park and hiked the comically rocky 3.3 miles from Roaring Brook to Chimney Pond. I wanted my family to see Chimney Pond, perched halfway up the north side of Mt. Katahdin in a spectacular bowl of cliffs.
I’ve spent a lot of time at Chimney Pond campground on volunteer search and rescue duty, and it’s a place that means a lot to me, so I shamelessly exploited the opportunity to convince my wife to come up and see us off. She loves walking, but she hates hiking. She did it and now she never has to do it again, a promise which I put down here in writing before the whole world.
We stayed overnight at the bunkhouse, and the next morning, Christina and our 11-year-old, Ash, headed back down to drive the truck to meet us at Katahdin Stream Campground. Mica and I set off to climb Katahdin, because our Appalachian Trail starts at its summit.
At 5,269 feet, Katahdin is big but not especially big, even by Appalachian standards. But it is, out of all proportion to its height, a difficult mountain to climb. We ascended the Saddle Trail from Chimney, which is the easiest way up because you’re already halfway up the mountain and from there, it’s only about 1,350 vertical feet of ascent in one mile to the tableland, a broad, more gently sloped rubble field that constitutes Katahdin’s upper plateau. But the last four-tenths of that mile is straight up a loose sand and gravel landslide scar, on a continuous forty-degree slope.
Despite that, I’ve seen more than one person climb Katahdin in Crocs. On a sunny day in the summer, Baxter Peak is crowded with climbers of all ages, abilities and levels of general seriousness, from groups of teens who look infuriatingly fresh and unbothered to people who do not appear to climb many mountains but set Katahdin as a stretch goal for themselves, and who are just now beginning to contemplate the need to descend the harrowing cliffs they just dragged themselves up.
It’s a Katahdin tradition to climb up on the big summit sign and look triumphant, so Mica and I did. Our picture was taken by a beaming gray-haired gentleman who, along with his wife, was clearly very proud of having summited.
After 6.88 miles that took us almost 7½ hours, we arrived at Katahdin Stream, where I had booked a lean-to on the river, which was one of the nicest campsites we’d ever stayed at and somewhat made up for emotionally blackmailing my wife into hiking up to Chimney Pond. Then in the morning Christina and Ash drove off and left Mica and me with just our packs and our feet.
Mistake Number One: Have you spotted it yet? I sure hadn’t. The mistake was underestimating how much energy climbing Katahdin took out of me. This was a mistake of overconfidence on my part, as this was my fourth or fifth time at the summit. I felt wide-awake and ready to go, but the fact is I was already tired, which would become more apparent later.
We headed out of Katahdin Stream and almost immediately went the wrong way, following an older A.T. map up the Baxter tote road to Elbow Pond. The trail is lovely, as are all the trails in Baxter except the busy ones. The whole rest of the park is full of smooth, quiet routes that wind among peaceful pine woods and occasionally pass a flagrantly charming backwoods pond, where a canoe has been thoughtfully placed for you to paddle out and look for moose. It’s one of the best places in the world.
Just outside the park boundary after about 10 miles of easy trail is the Abol Bridge store, the last place to resupply before entering the 100-Mile Wilderness proper. It did have ice cream cones, but it always seems like they could be trying harder. We enjoyed our ice cream, and I drank a cold liter of Gatorade, then we pressed on about three more miles to Hurd Brook, the first campsite heading southbound. This was, in hindsight, the last time I felt okay.
We planned to get to Hurd Brook and take a little break, then probably continue to the next campsite about eight more miles on. But by the time we got to Hurd Brook I was wiped out. I told Mica we needed to stay there, that I didn’t have another eight miles in me. It was hot and humid, and the air under the thick tree cover was very still and roughly the consistency of an unventilated bathroom after a long shower. Every time I bent down trying to set up my tent I felt like I was about to blackout.
We also realized that we hadn’t really strategized exactly how far it was to our food drop, where we were scheduled to pick up five more days of food at a certain road crossing three days from now. To accomplish that, we’d need to cover almost 40 miles in the next two days. There was a lean-to, a fairly flat 20 miles away, so we decided that we’d aim for that the next day and see how far we could get. Meanwhile, feeling hungry but also nauseous, I had a small packet of mac and cheese and some hot chocolate for dinner. I’d feel better in the morning, I thought.
Mistake Number Two: If you already feel bad after a 12-mile day, is it a good idea to follow it with a 20-mile day? No! Of course not! This is the kind of thing only an idiot would do, and I make no excuses for myself. Furthermore, rushing to make a food drop when I can’t even eat what I have? Lunacy.
I woke up still nauseous, but forced myself to choke down half a packet of fried rice and some more hot chocolate. Mica and I packed up and headed out of camp toward Wadleigh Stream, 19.7 miles away.
Despite having told everyone for years how bad the trail in the 100-Mile Wilderness is, I forgot how bad the trail in the 100-Mile Wilderness is. If you get tired of the roots, there’s always the rocks. If you don’t like the roots and the rocks, don’t worry, pretty soon there will be deep mud. If you want something other than roots, rocks and deep mud, then I hope you like fording streams, because that’s all we’ve got. There is not a foot of level trail surface to be found. The whine of mosquitoes probing for just one millimeter of flesh undefended by DEET was constant, set off by a counterpoint buzz of horseflies circling my head. I became a moving ecosystem, with entire generations of blackflies meeting, falling in love, mating, raising their young and dying within a three-inch radius of my eyeballs, which apparently weep the sweetest nectar imaginable judging by how many of them gave their lives to taste it just once.
It rained for a while in the morning, which was a great relief from the heat, but then the rain stopped and the forest reverted to a proofing oven. The rain and mud left my socks hopelessly wet, and the skin under the balls of my feet decided to give hot spots a miss and proceed directly to open blisters with no warning. “Stop and take care of it at the first sign of a hot spot!” they all say. Ha! My first sign was the unmistakable sensation of the thick skin on my soles parting ways with my toes.
My nausea was worse now too. All I could eat were a few Triscuits. We stopped for lunch and I had half an apple. I couldn’t eat, and at the same time, I was so hungry. The calorie deficit was starting to loom.
But for all that, the 100-Mile Wilderness is still so beautiful. It is insanely packed with mossy glades, slopes softly carpeted in hemlock needles and pristine lakes that look like no one has ever set eyes on them before. I know this is all second-growth logging land; none of it is actually wilderness. But it’s impossible not to feel like Legolas is about to step out from behind a huge ash tree and say, “Halt, traveler!” in Elvish.
In the afternoon, we stopped at a high lake with an unofficial tenting area and considered staying there, but it was only four more miles to our destination, which had a shelter and a privy. We decided to continue. We got into camp after 12 hours on the trail, and Mica made his dinner and then discovered he couldn’t eat either. I managed a few sips of hot chocolate before an extremely ill-advised swig of Propel sent me running into the bushes to puke behind a tree. I came back and Mica looked at me and said: “Okay, we’re going home.”
I spent that night in a glacially slow satellite text conversation with first the hostel that was doing our food drop and then a shuttle driver and Christina. We left camp just before 8 a.m. on Friday, and made it to the road by 9:30 a.m. For all my struggle, we had been making good time — a steady 2 miles an hour every day.
We had at least two hours to wait at the little dirt parking lot near the end of Nahmakanta Stream Road, so I unrolled my foam mat and laid down with my head on my pack. It was still hot, but there was some shade and a bit of breeze. We didn’t see a car go by for an hour. Mica read me a Kafka story from an e-book I had on my phone, “The Village Schoolmaster” (or “The Giant Mole”), which is very funny. The nature and circumstances of the giant mole itself are never explained. Then I fell asleep for a while. It was nice. Looking back, lying in the sun at the parking lot on Nahmakanta Stream Road for two hours was one of the nicest parts of the whole trip so far.
The shuttle came precisely on time. I ate some Saltines when we got home, and Saturday, I had some ramen, and then slowly more food. I rested. I treated my blisters. We considered what comes next.
With food and rest I am feeling much better, which I think tends to reduce the likelihood there’s something drastically wrong with me. I will see my doctor this week, but I think what happened was some vicious spiral of heat, dehydration and possibly a touch of food poisoning, all greatly exacerbated by simply pushing too hard, too soon.
Mistake Number Three: Doing the exact thing that literally every source of advice about hiking the A.T. southbound starts by vigorously warning you against. They weren’t talking about me, though, right? Reader, they were talking about me.
Mica and I are taking this opportunity to swap out some gear that we found wasn’t going to work. And I’m developing a trail menu that I think I’ll find more appealing than freeze-dried meals. The plan is to head back up north at the end of the week.
This time we’ve looked carefully at the map together and made an eight-day plan to get ourselves to Monson, which will have us hiking no more than 8-10 miles a day. I think now we’ve seen the difference between miles we can technically accomplish and miles we can sustainably enjoy. We both have a better idea of how much we still have to learn. And we plan to do less walking each day and more swimming in lakes and lying in the sun reading.
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