Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (33 page)

Very little virgin forest remains in the eastern United States. It was surprising when people kept telling me this in such densely forested places as the Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah National Park, and Green Mountain National Forest. But consider this arresting statistic:
The USFS (U.S. Forest Service) has eight times as many miles of roads as the entire interstate highway system!
But that statistic will soon be outdated because there are aggressive plans on the drawing board to build many, many more. After watching truck after truck motoring up and down dirt roads groaning from the weight of strapped down wood, it became clear the principal purpose of the USFS roads we frequently crossed is to haul lumber out of the woods.

Of course, some stoutly maintain that timber cutting serves a larger end. These modern foresters see trees competing with each other for the necessary water, sunlight, soil nourishment, and growing space. The death of one can be the blessing of another. Systematic cutting, forest managers assert, allows the remaining trees to grow stronger.

That sounds like a viable position. But too often this management is not done prudently, and whole areas are cleared out. What’s more, the U.S. Forest Service is notorious for leasing out large tracts for timber cutting to favored customers at below market rates. These sweetheart deals have resulted in more trees being cut down than growing.
And I recently was startled to read that more greenhouse, heat-trapping gasses are emitted by cutting down trees than are emitted by every single car, truck, and airplane in the world.
Walking through the wondrous, fine whispering forests it’s easy to understand why environmentalists get so up-in-arms over cutting down trees.

The environmental movement, which was so ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, is now outmatched politically by commercial interests. In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan loved to say, “Sometimes I don’t think these people (environmentalists) will be happy until the White House is turned into a bird’s nest.” I absolutely loved Reagan, but like most people at the time, he didn’t give two cents about the environment. Neither did I. We pursued money and material success in almost monolithic fashion. The environment was an issue for hard-core activists, counter-cultureniks, and the like. But as I so often observed on the AT, the environment has become the issue for the generation in their twenties, and they will have to be reckoned with. My bet is they will turn the tables in the next ten or twenty years.

Southbounders had been streaming by for the last couple weeks at this point. Some chose to start at Katahdin because they graduated from school in May or June, and thought hiking south would lengthen their hiking season. Others were from the North and just thought it was logical to begin there.

But a lot of us northbounders were put out by southbounders. “They think because they’ve already done the Mahoosucs in Maine and the Whites in New Hampshire, they know everything,” complained one northbounder.

Another said, “I get the impression they think they’ve outsmarted us tactically.”

“They’ll find out how smart they are,” one wit mused, “when they arrive in the most remote regions in the South during the middle of hunting season late this fall.”

For my part it, certainly was easy to detect them as they approached. They not only had the swagger and sense of purpose of thru-hikers, they had the smell. They walked down the center of the trail as if everyone else was supposed to clear out of the way. When they stopped they acted as if they were doing you a favor talking to you. At shelters their body language bespoke, “Approach me at the risk of reproach.” In fact, the more I saw of them the more I thought they reminded me of, well,
us
.

On my second-to-last day in Vermont I was following the trail through a dung-filled cow pasture, when I approached two female hikers having lunch on the edge of the pasture.

Both were in their early twenties. One was short and pigeon-toed, but cute as a button. The other was fair-haired and fair–featured, with a graceful, appealing look. “Hi, I’m Cackles and this is Box-of-Fun,” the shorter one said. “We’re the Joy Machine.”

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

N
ew 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.