167 Stumbles

Finding myself with several free months after college, I had looked around for ways to spend some time alone that were socially acceptable. A section hike along the Appalachian Trail had incubated in the back of my mind for some time, so I figured now was the best time to try it, while I was young and spry.

Before I left, a friend of my parents asked if I had read Into the Wild by Jonathan Krakauer, the story of a recent college graduate who runs off to experience life in the Wild. He is unprepared, and he dies. I had read the book and seen the movie, and I sheepishly sympathized with him. She told me she thought he was the most entitled kid she had ever heard of and that, by putting himself in harm’s way and dying, he ruined his parents’ lives. Ahh, I thought. It would be terribly embarrassing if I died.

As luck would have it, I survived. I hiked for ten days, and I slept under a rain tarp, the rotting top of a lean-to, or the branches for nine nights. I could never say for sure that I had slept under the stars. I hiked just over 140 miles along the Appalachian Trail from Hanover, NH to Gorham, NH, where I split off for an extra few miles to reach the Maine border.

Along the way, I slipped, tripped, or lost my footing 167 times. I carried and ate a small jar of peanut butter, a squeeze bottle of jelly, 30 tortillas, 24 servings of oatmeal, four dehydrated meals, four cups of quinoa, 18 cliff bars, 17 other granola bars, three chocolate bars, six jerky sticks, fifteen ounces of beef jerky, and two packets of mixed nuts. I supplemented these with a handful of delicious gifts from other hikers, the best breakfast buffet of my life, and Appalachian Mountain Club hut leftovers that I didn’t have to carry.

My pack weighed more than 50 pounds for most of the trip because I loaded myself down with unnecessary luxuries like a book I never read, two external phone batteries, and insect repellent I never used. Many who hike the AT from Georgia to Maine, “through hikers,” tend to avoid carrying more than 30 pounds before water, and most find that they have to slow down dramatically in the White Mountains, where I hiked. To feed themselves enough but minimize weight, they go into town every five days or so, but I decided to never head in to resupply. So I found myself in some of the most difficult terrain of the East Coast carrying a bag too heavy with frivolities and too light with food.

I decided that I ought to keep a journal, though I never needed the extra notebook I lugged over mountains and molehills. The notebook remains unopened but has suffered modest water damage, which of course made it heavier. Every ounce seems to count on the trail. A bear bag, by the way, is a second-rate bare safety protocol in which backpackers hang their food and scented items on a branch some 20 feet above the ground and six feet away from a tree trunk. Despite the weight, my journal proved fruitful:

8/2

“I might not have a lot to record in a day-by-day sense because, if all goes according to plan, I’ll wake up, strike my hammock, walk, eat, walk, eat, walk, eat, set up my hammock, and hang my bear bag.”

8/3

“It took me forever to fall asleep last night because I was sure that my bear bag was going to fall down and that I was too close to the everybody else’s food. I jolted awake every time I heard something. I really ought to have taken a tylenol pm.”

“I am waiting for some so-called pasta bolognese to rehydrate and trying to figure out the best way to hang my bear bag without letting my food get all wet. I can’t decide if bears would still be out and about in the rain.

8/4

“Some thoughts from today include: do birds have vocal cords? Why do the pine woods seem less buggy than the deciduous ones? Why are they usually so sharply distinct but both times my campsites have been in a mix?”

“The theme of the day was learning experiences.”

“I have no idea why I’m really out here.”

“I genuinely didn’t think it would rain during this trip. I brought tons of socks and good enough gear, but I totally just figured it wouldn’t happen.”

“Lots of yesterday’s good mood was fueled by insta coffee”

8/5

“On the bright side, I saw what I think was a possum as well as an actual moose! It was right ahead of me on the trail and booked it away as it saw, heard, or smelled me. The craziest part is even though I adore moose my first thought was ‘who brought a horse onto a trail?’”

8/6

“One’s pack is always heaviest when one might be lost and in the last quarter mile to a shelter.”

“There are creaking trees, and every time I am sure it’s my bear bag about to fall. As usual, I had a hard time and spent like 10 minutes trying to untangle a knotted cord stuck in like four parts of a branch with a hiking pole.”

“Today’s learning experience: the only thing worse than carrying your full water all the way up a mountain is not doing so.”

8/7

“The through hiker I showed my blister to said he thought I should drain it. I’m not sure what apparatus that requires, nor am I sure I should take medical advice from somebody who’s spending five months walking.”

“An interesting study: one sign pointed off the trail and said Zealand mountain .1 mile or something. Another said view that way with an arrow pointing towards a swamp. I took the view one and didn’t even consider the first one. I stood above the valley below on the edge of a cliff and stared at all of the ridge lines and the sheer drop off. I still had my pack on, which was low key super dangerous because it would be pretty easy to lose my balance. I probably had to walk over .1 miles to get there, but I was afraid to not stop for the view once I knew it was there.”

“Today’s wisdom was about managing goals and expectations.”

8/8

“Somebody just said there should be a Trader Joe’s on the trail.”

“The guy who said he had been carrying hummus powder since Harper’s Ferry ate some of it tonight, which I guess is good.”

“I guess I’m really also doing this for the mountains, the physical and mental challenge, and just to occupy ten days or so. There would be better places to be totally alone, and it’s pretty fun talking to and getting to know other hikers. It’s crazy to me that some of them see each other pretty regularly for months on end but only know each other by fake names.”

“One of the little girls from this family was farther down the trail, and they told her to come back to the top, to which she responded that she was stretching. They told her to stretch up here, and she said, genuinely, ‘This is the only rock.’ The only rock! In the mountains!”

“The crazy thing is I’m kind of nostalgic about this trip already.”

8/9

“I woke up no longer nostalgic.”

“Morale is low.”

“There was just a minute of clear sky, but who can you trust?”

“At one point, somebody had stuck a big stick into a cairn and then another stick horizontally through a split in the original one, making a cross that just kind of magically showed up through the fog/cloud/rain. It was real spooky. I thought I could just move into this ready made grave. There was also a huge cairn opposite it that was similarly haunting. I really felt like I was on the moon or something way out there.”

8/10

“Morale is high.”

“Today was a very good culinary day considering I ran out of gas last night. I was totally starving when I made it the ~2.5 miles from my stealth spot to Pinkham Notch. At the visitors center, I hoped at best to buy a ton of cliff bars, but I found to my disbelief and elation that they had a breakfast buffet.”

“I ate so much that my waist strap actually changed the shape of my stomach.”

8/11

“I sit now hopefully visible on the side of the road on US rt. 2 in Shelburne, NH, having just walked across the border into Maine.”

“The only trouble now is that it is threatening to rain, I have no cell service, and I am a few miles up the road from the trailhead where the AT would have let out.”

“I can’t say for sure yet if I learned anything.”

While I had to spend a lot of time alone, these don’t quite appear to be the deranged scrawlings of a madman. I found it remarkable how much time I spent thinking “just walk, just walk, just walk” and “Keep going. You’re not almost there, this is probably going to be a false summit, but keep going.” One of the biggest things that I learned about myself was that I am something of an optimist. Most times after a long climb, if the trees cleared and offered a view or a large exposed rock, I decided I had reached the summit.

Such was seldom the case. The White Mountains seem to offer on average three false summits per peak. The more tired I was, the more false summits I tended to find. I convinced myself that each successive day would be easier than the prior one. This wasn’t untrue, as I ate food to lighten my pack and my legs got stronger. However, the climb up to the top of the Wildcats, the second to last climb of my trip, was notorious as one of the hardest in the Whites. I convinced myself, though, that such misinformation came from SOBOs (southbound through hikers starting in Maine and ending in Georgia) whose first encounter with the rough Whites was the Wildcats. I might by that same logic claim that Mount Moosilauke is some of the hardest hiking in the area. The hardest climb in the trip turned out to be whichever I trudged through at a given moment.

A second lesson I learned nightly was that any bed is most comfortable bed if it’s time to wake up. Frivolous as I was, not even I brought a pillow. I could therefore never sleep on my side. In a lean-to, my head drooped down the length of my shoulder at an acute angle. In my hammock, I could never balance on my side without swinging. I could have slept on my back, but hours of walking made my heels sore from my usually wet boots, and my lower back developed a callous-bump combination known as pack rash. Nevertheless, I did not become a morning person. I never wanted to leave my warm, luxurious sleeping bag for the cold hard trail. To top off my reluctance, I found that the first person to walk down the trail in the morning catches every new spiderweb. The hike equivalent of first tracks on a ski slope was less pleasant.

During breaks and gentle stretches, I tried to take photographs or to write, but every time I fell short of capturing it. The sky dwarfed the mountains in my photos, and I couldn’t remember the words from my walking daydreams. I found ten days worth of the best views, smells, and senses of accomplishment I have ever had.

I looked down at Crawford Notch from the first false summit along the Webster Cliff Trail. That cars had become the size of ants in two hours astounded me. Mount Webster had looked impossibly high—how could it be less than 4,000 feet?—from the valley. A few days earlier, I had stared off from Mount Kinsman towards Franconia Ridge, wondering how I could expect to go somewhere so far away and so high that same day. I don’t expect to forget the cliffs and brooks the “View that way” sign brought me to from the Twinway, but I didn’t even try to take a photo.

I had never smelled a breakfast like the one at the Pinkham Notch visitors center, and each time I walked through a pine grove I understood what they were trying to do with urinal cakes and that they didn’t succeed. When my sister picked me up, I found out how badly I and all of my gear smelled, too. I felt grateful my brain decided which smells to enjoy and which to ignore.

I really didn’t think it would rain so much. I knew that Mount Washington has the world’s worst weather, but I didn’t plan to stumble through sideways rain, hail, and 30-50mph winds with clouds obscuring each successive trail-marking cairn. I did not anticipate the pain and uncertainty of my first three steps each morning as my knees, hips, and ankles unfroze and prepared for another day of overtime. The through hikers I met seemed to have lost their capacity for cynicism and learned to focus on finding comforts in their barebones, goal oriented life. My trip wasn’t quite long enough for such inner peace.