AWOL on the Appalachian Trail (31 page)

As I approach, I see that the peak is open and rocky, much like the Baldpates. Wind has blown away the fog. I eagerly rush to the top of the mountain because the guidebook says that Katahdin can be seen from the summit of Saddleback. I can see fog settled in pockets in the valleys, but it does not prevent me from seeing distant peaks. Dozens of mountains are visible. The Horn, the next mountain over which the AT passes, is only a mile away, and I can see trees and a rocky top. The more distant mountains lose detail and take on a bluish tint. The mountains furthest on the horizon are gray and blend with the color of the vanishing sky. I don't know where to look for Katahdin; it could be on either side of the Horn, depending on the bend of the trail. What would distinguish it from other peaks? Faraway mountains look uniform, like waves on the ocean. For a moment, I fool myself into thinking that Katahdin is one distinctive peak on the horizon, but I have no means to confirm my guess.

Katahdin is still more than two hundred trail miles away, which may make it about one hundred miles by line of sight. Nevertheless, I repeat my search from the summit of the Horn. I cannot even relocate the distant mountain that I thought looked most distinctive from Saddleback. The descent from the Horn is steep and time-consuming for me to traverse. The ascents of my day have been much less bothersome than the descents. Walking uphill is more strenuous, but it is a positive, constructive sort of strain. I imagine it strengthens my muscles and improves my aerobic capacity. It's hard to put a positive spin on the strain of walking downhill. My knees are jarred and my toes are crammed into the front of my shoes. It is mentally stressful because if I was to take a fall, I would slide, flip, or tumble before coming to a stop.

Saddleback Junior is the third significant mountain of the day. After I toil up and over this mountain, I am happy to transition to a stretch of fairly low and level land. There are streams to cross. These streams usually must be forded, but the recent dry weather has made it possible for me to pick my way across by jumping rock to rock.

I come to what looks like an overgrown logging road, and I scan the area briefly before locating the trail that continues on the far side of the road. The trail soon becomes challenging, wiggling through dense woods and then leading up a steep slope. There is a stream cascading down to my right and woods on my left; this looks like the path I should be on, but it is unusually sandy. My feet slide back in the sand, so I reach forward to grab whatever handholds I can find. I have to throw aside some dead branches. My feet dig trenches in the sand, uncovering a deteriorated log ladder. I wish it had been replaced by another ladder, rather than covered by sand. The work of climbing through this drains my energy. At the top of the dirt-covered path, I see another road-width path, curving at a nice grade up the hill. Trees alongside the "road" are marked with white blazes. For the past half mile, I should have been on that nicely graded road; instead, I was struggling, bushwhacking through an earlier routing of the AT that had been intentionally covered with debris by the builders of the new path.

After I cross the road, I see a stream off the trail to my left. The stream is moving slowly, bending around a flat piece of ground. The gap between the trail and the stream narrows as the trail begins to incline up the mountain. I look over to the stream, also on an incline now, lively and cascading over rocks. It is late in the day, and I begin to feel cold, even with the effort of hiking uphill. I am tired and it is apparent that I will not reach the next shelter today, so I consider looking for a place to tarp. The AT diverges from Perham Stream, into steep terrain with heavy underbrush. The flat that I passed a quarter of a mile ago comes to mind, and I backtrack to set up camp at that location.

The only clearing large enough for a tarp is on the other side of the stream. The stream is too wide to jump, so I make fruitless sorties up and down it looking for a narrowing or an opportunity to rock-hop. Not wanting to waste too much time, I simply step through the stream, wetting my feet. My tarp site is cozy, softened by fallen leaves. The stream trickles past, and the bank beside me is vivid green with moss. Moose tracks and droppings indicate that my site may be on their path to water. If one were to pass through in the night, I wonder if it would trample my tarp, either failing to see it or mistaking it for a bush.

After setting up my tarp, I drag a stone to the area just in front and use it as a seat while I prepare and eat my dinner. I am pleased with having such an ideal solo campsite. I leave the stove running after my meal is prepared and use it to ignite a few pieces of paper trash. Then I supplement the burning paper with twigs and leaves until I have a modest campfire. The sky is darkening and the temperature drops. I feel a chill on my back, but my face, my hands, and my knees are warmed by the fire.

Tarping last night and the coldness of this morning remind me of my first night on the trail, of earthy pleasures of traveling through the woods that I now tend to take for granted. I start the day invigorated. The trail goes up and down at a more even grade, so it doesn't feel like the day is much work, even with a good amount of elevation gain and loss.

I run out of water. Streams have been abundant in Maine, so I had not been paying close attention to my water supply. I pass a group of day hikers on the way up Crocker Mountain and ask about water in this section of trail. They are locals, who know the area well. They say I will pass no more streams before reaching the town of Stratton seven miles away, and they quickly add that they will give me some of their water. Each of them pours a cupful from his bottle into mine, and one of them gives me a handful of apple slices.

I reach the trailhead at State Road 27 at the same time as yet another day hiker. He offers me a ride into the app idg, tiny town of Stratton. My last workplace had more employees than Stratton has residents. There is a post office, a diner, a small grocery store, and a couple of motels. I stay in a motel that has six rooms. The White Wolf Inn next door has no vacancies because it is "overwhelmed" by about a dozen hikers.

Most of the hikers are in the rustic White Wolf Restaurant. Ken and Marcia are having pie to celebrate Marcia's birthday. There are more than a handful of thru-hikers, and section hiker 81 is here. 81 started hiking north from Springer Mountain twenty-two years ago, in 1981. Hence the trail name. He uses whatever vacation time he can manage, usually two weeks or less each summer, to piece together a hike of the entire Appalachian Trail. He will stop at Monson, Maine, this year and finish the trail in 2004.

Ever since the two-week period of rain that plagued me through Vermont, I have had good luck with the weather. It has rained, but I have been dodging it. I took a zero in Gorham on a wet day. It rained just after I snuck into the town of Andover. It rains hard overnight in Stratton. It is still raining in the morning. That is okay; I need to wait for the post office to open so I can retrieve my mail drop, and I need to write another newspaper article. I have breakfast at the diner and supplement my supplies at the grocer. I sit in White Wolf Restaurant to write, and by the time I am finished I am ready for lunch.

I return to the trail, planning to hike five miles out to the first shelter. It is a good chunk of trail to tackle in a short day since there is a nineteen-hundred-foot climb. Skies are overcast, and the trail is still damp from the morning rain. I am the first to arrive at Horns Pond Shelters at 5:30 p.m. Nearly as soon as I take my pack off, I feel the temperature drop. It will be a cold night. There are two spacious shelters. Each can hold about nine hikers, but only three more hikers arrive after I do: Ken, Marcia, and Crash Test Dummy. We all use the same shelter, thinking it will be best to share our warmth. Crash Test Dummy is hiking south. He started in Quebec and is hiking a route known as the Eastern Continental Trail that encompasses the AT and a handful of other trails. The southern terminus of the ECT is in Key West.
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I take time in the morning to plan out the rest of my hike. I should make it to the base of Katahdin easily by September 1
6, hiking less than twenty miles every day. It is comforting to have a relatively easy schedule ahead of me.

North from Horns Pond Shelters, I begin the ascent of Bigelow Mountain. The sky is wonderfully clear, allowing me to see my surroundings in such detail that I feel as though my vision has improved. The trail bends to the left and curls snakelike up the steep mountain. Through an opening in the dense but stunted spruce, I have a view back down to the saddle where I started the morning. Scanning carefully, I find the green roofs of the twin shelters and Horns Pond. It looks as if it is further below me than behind; my progress has been more upward than northward.

I continue uphill until the trees end and all that is before me is the rocky pinnacle. The sun is directly behind the peak, like it is impaled on the apex. The steepness of the final fifty yards is accentuated by the beams radiating down from up high. The rocky scene looks like an overexposed black and white photograph. Atop the mountain, color is restored. Alpine vegetation has already been singed by the cold and is deep reddish brown and orange. Ahead, I can see the second summit of this same mountain, which is called Avery Peak. The saddle between the peaks is dense with igh. Treens. Below, to the west, Flagstaff Lake is expansive and brilliant blue.

Avery Peak. Flagstaff Lake is to the left.

The trail descends all the way to Flagstaff Lake and passes briefly along its beachy shoreline. Down below timberline, the deciduous trees have started dropping red and yellow leaves. I cross Long Falls Dam Road, briefly stopping to sit on the pavement where "2000 mi." is painted in footlong white letters. The trail skirts West Carry Pond, and there is a shelter near the shore where I stop for the night. Ken, Marcia, and section hiker 81 also stay in the shelter.

I hike out from West Carry Pond Shelter with 81. The trail is very easy. I plan to reach the town of Caratunk today. It is fourteen miles away, just beyond the Kennebec River. My guidebook lists no elevation higher than the elevation of the shelter, so it looks to be an easy day. The trail meanders a little, crosses a few streams, and follows the shoreline of East Carry Pond. 81 and I catch up with Ken and Marcia, and we all stop for lunch at Pierce Pond Lean-to. Pierce Pond Stream flows out from Pierce Pond for three miles before emptying into the Kennebec River. The AT parallels the course of the stream.

The Kennebec is about seventy yards wide, for the moment slow moving. A bed of rocks, only slightly submerged, extends from the woods thirty feet into the river. There is a delta of rock where Pierce Pond Stream merges into the river. Sparkling clear water from the stream bubbles over the rocks. The river is the widest crossed by the AT without a bridge. Despite its width, the river looks shallow and tame enough to ford, but I have heard a number of warnings against fording. There is a dam upriver that releases on no set schedule, so the river could rise unpredictably. Two couples in canoes whisk by. Their canoes are in the deepest part of the river, closer to the far shore, and the speed of their canoes shows that the river is more powerful than it looks. In 1985 a hiker drowned trying to ford the river. Since then, a ferry service has been provided.

Ken, Marcia, and the Kennebec ferryman.

We wait about an hour before the ferry, a man with a canoe, arrives. He can take two hikers at a time, and Ken and Marcia go first. Suddenly, the current of the river strengthens, evident by deep ripples midstream. I take my camera and walk out as far as I can on the bed of rocks to get their picture as the canoe pulls away. The tide rises rapidly, moving three inches up the rock I am standing on and nearing my feet. By the time I return twenty feet to my pack, which I thought was on the shore, water has caught up to me and soaks the bottom of my pack.

Across the river, the trail crosses U.S. 201, a road parallel to the river. I turn right on 201 and travel a short way to Main Street of Caratunk, Maine. These are two of the four paved roads in Caratunk, a town with a population of about one hundred. I will stay the night at the Caratunk House, a large home with a hiker hostel built into the loft of a barn. Paul, the owner, is out front grilling hamburgers on the carpetlike lawn. The hostel is extremely comfortable, but my stay is brief. In the morning, I head north again after a hearty breakfast of eggs, French toast, coffee, juice, bananas, cantaloupe, and blueberry muffins.