Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  They had graduated from college in New York the previous year and had begun thru-hiking on March 7. Noting their early start, but delayed progress, Baltimore Jack had asked to their indignation, “What are you on—the Katahdin by Christmas plan?”

  Looking up at the threatening skies I asked, “How far are you planning to go today?”

  “We’re going to try to make it to Thistle Hill Shelter, if there’s time,” they said.

  “I’m a fair-weather hiker,” I replied. “Do you mind if I hike along with you?”

  “Sure,” they replied.

  Like so many others their age on the trail, the Joy Machine was brimming with youthful idealism, especially environmentalism. Cackles had that rare ability to maintain a conversation while climbing mountains, while my normally voluble self shut off on ascents. It had taken me seventeen hundred miles to figure out downhills were the best places to reply.

  The trail traversed open pastures and wooded forests, and when the Thistle Hill Shelter appeared just before dark, Box-of-Fun gave me a leaping high-five. Had I not joined with them, I probably wouldn’t have tried to go so far. As it was, it proved to be my last twenty-plus mile day, for reasons that would soon become very apparent.

  I volunteered to hike down a steep hill to retrieve water for everybody. However, my headlight battery was running low as I bushwhacked to get to the bottom spring—the only one that still held water. I had my long legs spread-eagled to hem up the running water in the creek when I tipped over, completely backwards, into the muddy stream. When I got back up the hill to the shelter, with mud all over me, Cackles said, “You don’t look like a fair-weather hiker to me.”

  The Joy Machine shared a tent and seemed perfectly congenial. “People have asked if we’re a couple,” Cackles said with her inimitable laugh, “But, actually, we both have steady boyfriends.”

  The following day I wound through a tree plantation at Bunker Hill that felt like a slalom course. Then the trail crossed the Connecticut River to enter Hanover, New Hampshire, a leafy New England town, dominated by the broad lawns and academic citadels of Dartmouth University. The white blazes run right by the university on its main street. This privilege may soon be gone as the desirability of hordes of sixteen-hundred-mile-ripe hikers trooping through this pristine town has been hotly debated. But it’s only humane that hikers retain access to this last outpost of civilization given what lies immediately ahead.

  Part IV

  “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”—Henry David Thoreau

  Chapter 18

  New Hampshire opens up a whole new chapter on the AT. Dan “Wingfoot” Bruce, seven-time AT thru-hiker, wrote, “When you reach New Hampshire you have completed eighty percent of the trail, but fifty percent of the effort and difficulty lie ahead.”

  It’s a forty-four-mile trip from Hanover to Glencliff, where the kickoff into the Whites begins. The excitement was palpable on the trail. The trail was already becoming more jagged, steep, and rocky than the lofty-but-more-pliable Green Mountains we had just left behind. Further, switchback did not seem to be a word that existed in the stern Yankee character. After a steep twenty-five hundred-foot climb straight up the face of Smarts Mountain, English Bob, in his understated British way, said, “Perhaps that’s why the Yankees sorted you southerners out in your Civil War. They were used to a bit tougher terrain.”

  Perhaps.

  Firewarden’s Cabin Shelter—mile 1,651

  8-15-05: Rock out with your cock out.—Jude

  8-16-05: It appears that Jude thrived on that climb up Smarts Mountain more than I did.—Skywalker

  We arrived in Glencliff after a three-day trip from Hanover and were immediately sobered by the peaks looming just ahead. Glencliff is just a tiny hamlet with a post office and a hiker hostel across the street. A couple weeks before, I had ordered online my third pair of brand-new trail shoes, to be sent there. I rushed over to the post office, but they hadn’t arrived. I was disconsolate. The front of my second pair had been demolished in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York rocks. I had timed the order specifically to get a new pair before entering the Whites.

  I walked across the street, where a trail wag named Fat Chap was holding court. “The Whites are like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he stated confidently. But just as confidently he added, “But you’re in the best shape of your life and have trail legs now.”

  At dark a mail truck pulled up to the hostel and asked for me. He had dropped off the mail at the postmaster’s house, and the postmaster had informed him of my predicament. Over the next couple weeks I would find out just how important this piece of luck was.

  The White Mountains were far and away the toughest thing I had ever encountered. They get their name from the masses of whitish rock above treeline, as well as the snow on top of them most of the year. Mount Moosilauke is the gateway to the Whites, and the trail ascends thirty-five hundred feet steeply up a rock staircase for five miles. It required long, decisive steps, even for my gangly legs. My quads felt roiled and my knees jarred. English Bob and I spoke little.

  Here in the northern Appalachians the geography takes on a different cast. Fine, white pines and spruce mix in with the hardwoods to provide a more exotic, even whispering feel. Balsam firs densely populate the higher altitudes, giving one the feel of walking in Christmas-tree land. Finally, these trees begin to get more stunted, and give way to dense thickets of krummholz (a German word meaning “crooked wood”). It’s low-lying, but hardy alpine shrubbery that’s often slanted from the inexorable battering of the wind. However, these stunted trees have provided the resistance to save the lives of many a hiker caught above treeline in dangerous weather.

  The tree line in the southern Appalachians is estimated to begin at seven thousand feet. But here, much farther north, treeline begins at just more than four thousand feet, which is an altitude many mountains in White Mountain National Forest exceed.

  Hikers and mountain climbers often say, “It’s a different world up there,” referring to above treeline. “It can be heavenly, or it can be deadly.” When English Bob and I had finished climbing the rock staircase past the remaining stunted Balsam firs and Krummholz we were faced with a harsh, new world. A cold, stiff wind dominated the summit, and I immediately put on two extra layers to cover my lean physique. Just a few minutes before, I had been covered in sweat.

  The growing season in an Alpine setting runs about seventy days. Lichens, wildflowers, and moss, all tough plants, suitable to the cold, windy conditions, form the Alpine landscape. And rocks dominate—rocks of every conceivable form, from tiny pebbles to gigantic boulders. Indeed, the trail in the Whites above the treeline is marked by cairns, which are piles of rocks formed by dedicated volunteers.

  The view at the summit of Mount Moosilauke includes the famous Presidential Range, which lay ahead. The panorama was one of rugged bleakness. Soon English Bob and I were forced to take refuge, crouched down behind a low wall of rocks built to protect hikers from the wind.

  The descent from Mount Moosilauke is considered by many to be the single most dangerous section of the entire AT. “I’m surprised more people don’t get killed here,” Warren Doyle had said very emphatically.

  The trail is, for miles, a jumble of rocks that run parallel to a creek with several cascading waterfalls. There was nothing particularly dangerous about this, except it was laborious, picking from one rock to another. But then the trail amazingly went straight down some smooth, wet rocks with wooden ladders and steel rungs built into the rocks to aid in the descent. It required getting one’s body perpendicular to the rock being descended and moving at a snail’s pace. One misstep could and would result in serious injury, or even worse.

  Fortunately, it was a nice day, and we reached the bottom at Kinsman Notch without incident. What is referred to in the South as a “gap” is a “notch” in New England. Gordon and Sue were at the bottom, exchanging goodbyes with the Troll family with whom they had been so close.
It was a logical place to stop, for there were few places in the Whites to drive their van to meet hikers. It was their twentieth year as trail angels, and, sadly, would be Sue’s last. She was placed in a nursing home three months later, ending her long career as a trail angel (and hiker before that).

  The next day was an Attila bitch, pure and simple. English Bob and I spent all day going up and down, five thousand feet of three peaks. We rarely talked other than to express disbelief at what kept popping up in front of us. “Bloody hell,” English Bob would softly remark when an especially nasty boulder ascent or descent would appear. “This is a cruel hoax?”

  At various points trail maintainers had installed metal handholds into the rock to enable hikers to haul themselves up. Often we would throw our hiking poles up to a ledge on top of the particular rock being scaled in order to allow us use of our hands to grab a rock or tree to propel us over. The descents were even worse. Usually, they involved hanging on to some tree off to the side of the boulder and jumping down to some narrow area for a landing. These steep, rocky chutes through narrow areas jolted on my knees.

  For months afterwards I lived with the feeling of deeply jarred knees. Worse yet, it began to rain, and the rock scrambles became all the more treacherous. My secret weapons were my new Vasque Trail Shoes. They have a special type of stealth glue on the soles that performed fabulously in these settings. Many times I was able to rush straight up a rock slab bent forward instead of having to go to all fours.

  Several times along the way the Troll family had earned my admiration. But none more so than on this day. As a group, the Trolls weren’t able to do as many miles as most people who had made it this far. Most who traveled at their pace had dropped out long ago.

  As usual they had left from the campsite before everybody else. English Bob and I had caught up with and passed them midday. We stopped for lunch at the Eliza Brook Shelter, and they arrived twenty minutes later. “This fucking trail,” Troll had shouted out, “what’s with it? Straight up, straight down, all day, you never feel like you’re getting anywhere.”

  “Welcome to the Whites,” Anchor said trenchantly.

  They left after only a ten-minute break at the shelter to head straight up Kinsman Mountain. English Bob and I followed a half-hour later. At the top of South Kinsman Mountain we spotted the Troll family in their inimitable Scottish kilts, laboring halfway down the mountain.

  I again shouted, “Bear, bear, bear.” It didn’t get the usual return shouts, as they were struggling gamely down yet another rock scramble.

  There were bear boxes for hikers to store their food all over the Whites, just as there had been in New Jersey. However, I had honestly wondered what bear in his or her right mind would choose to travel in this type of rocky terrain and dense forest.

  It was a good thing they didn’t because I had another worry: making it over the third mountain, North Kinsman, before dark. We had plenty of time, but the sky had a dark, forbidding feeling so deep in the woods. One otherwise adept hiker, Afraid of the Dark, had said, “Darkness is the ultimate reality. You have to respect it.” As it began drizzling and the fog socked in, the depths of my fears stirred. Weather in the Whites is famously unpredictable. What’s more I was worried about the Trolls. There was nowhere remotely hospitable to camp on this rocky, jagged mountain.

  When we passed them on a ledge between rock scrambles Troll said, “Can you believe this?”

  “I could if it was two o’clock in the morning,” English Bob said. Even Oblivious for the first time seemed to have lost his happy-go-lucky ways. He was no longer oblivious. But there wasn’t much discussion as we passed them for the second time of the day. Everybody was struggling as hard as they could with the mountain.

  Finally, English Bob and I made it over and down North Kinsman, the third mountain of the day. An AMC shelter was off on a side trail and a caretaker collected our eight dollars. For this price one apparently receives a weather report. The forecast was dire.

  “The one place you don’t want bad weather is in the Whites,” I lamented.

  English Bob said, simply, “We’ll ride it out mate.”

  “You damn British, what is it with you?” I asked. “Is it true you put Viagra in your toothpaste in order to maintain a stiff upper lip?”

  That elicited a laugh. But no laughing matter was that North Kinsman Mountain, which we had just descended, was at this point completely enveloped in fog, and the rain was picking up. The Troll family was still out there somewhere in that soupy mess, and I felt a bit guilty for not having hiked along with them. I briefly considered going back up there to see if I could find them, but my chances of getting lost were as great as theirs. Besides, I was bone tired. It had taken us ten hours to hike twelve hellish miles. But it had required more effort than almost any twenty-mile day I had done. I set up my tent inside the shelter to keep me warm from the engulfing cloud, and hoped I would soon hear the Troll family’s footsteps.

  But the Trolls never arrived. For the first hour the next morning we expounded various theories of what could have happened to them. Finally, we came up on them camped out at the edge of Lonesome Lake. “Are ya’ll self-hating, or what?” I wanted to know. Troll gleefully recounted their refusal to pay the shelter “ransom,” and told of their harrowing trip by headlamp down to the edge of Lonesome Lake. There, in the pitch black dark the previous evening they had, with great relief, found the perfect camping spot, albeit right in the middle of “No Camping” signs. They had struggled over the most difficult terrain from the crack of dawn to nighttime. It was the single-most impressive one-day effort I was to witness on the AT. They had covered about fourteen miles in approximately fourteen hours.

  Two days later English Bob and I hiked out of Franconia Notch. Bode Miller, the two-time World Cup downhill ski champion and noted free spirit, had grown up in the hamlet at the base of the mountain in a house with no electricity. By the end of the day we were to see how this area could produce such a world-class alpine athlete. The topography and terrain were ferocious, almost macabre. The trail was flat for approximately two straight steps the entire day.

  It began with a steep, rocky thirty-eight hundred-foot climb straight up the face of Mount Liberty, Little Haystack, and Lincoln Mountains. This was the longest climb yet on the AT, and once again the weather seemed to be alternating between fits of rain, howling wind, and supercooled clouds. Had we known what lay ahead we might have waited for a better day. But English Bob was no summer soldier, and on this day I was his reluctant foot soldier.

  When we finally cleared treeline and emerged onto the rocky, barren Franconia Ridge, its ominous nature immediately revealed itself. One book describes it as a “true alp, with peaks and crags on which lightning plays, its sides brown with scars and deep with gorges.” For 3.5 miles, hikers are exposed to the harshest terrain and weather. One minute we would be in sheets of rain, next in a super-cooled cloud, and then standing in sunshine, admiring the unique, spectacular views of the far-reaching mountains and valleys below.

  The Greenleaf Hut lies twelve hundred feet below Franconia Ridge, down a side trail, and has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives of unsuspecting hikers who have desperately had to bail out. Refuge back below treeline appeared tantalizingly close, but it took much longer than it appeared it should take. Every step was a laborious task, especially on the downhills.

  Finally, our descent brought us to the famous krummholz, below treeline. There on a rocky slope that was the most unlikely of lounging places were several exhausted hikers taking a break. Stranger, who had the smoothest walking stride I had ever witnessed, said “That was by far the toughest hiking I’ve ever done.”

  We then went up and down rock chutes and finally arrived at the sign pointing to the Garfield Ridge Shelter. In the Whites even the side trails to the shelter were steep, rocky, and tough. My feet were screaming.

  We were soon to come up on the Presidential Range—named after early presidents—the nation’s greatest n
etwork of footpaths. This range is traversed not only by the AT, but by sixty other trails. By car and by foot, White Mountain National Forest gets approximately seven million visitors per year. That’s more than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined.

  There are those who decry this onslaught of humanity, but not me. In a nation with an obesity rate of 20 percent, full of workaholics, and a virtual obsession with money and celebrity, it seems all the more desirable for as many people as possible to share in the breathtaking beauty and challenges that White Mountain National Forest provides. And believe me they come away more impressed (and better off financially!) than from a vacation at Disney World.

  The great irony is that in this age of computers, cell phones, and hyper-connectedness, the outdoor lifestyle is growing in appeal. A recent authoritative study of the American Sociological Review found that the average American has only two close friends, down from four in 1985. And the number of people with no close confidants soared from 10 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2004. People are more closely connected than ever, but apparently it isn’t very authentic. On the other hand, when you are out in the middle of nowhere busting your butt with people it quickly builds trust and authentic friendship.

  Late in the evening boisterous school songs rang out in the cold night air from the campsite behind the shelter. The Yale Outdoor Club was camped out there. I was extremely impressed to learn that the vast majority of incoming freshmen at universities in New England participated in outdoor orientation trips. The Yalies were planning to head southbound the next day, over what we had just covered. The group leader sauntered over to debrief us on the terrain. “Do you want something that will make you sleep well or do you want the truth?” I asked.