Sore feet and mountain sunrise

What's your favorite plan for a fun, relaxing four day weekend? Thanks to awesome MITOCer (MIT Outing Club) Sally, I ended up with the rather terrifying plan to do a one-day Pemigewasset traverse. On paper, this looks like:

•   53 km of trail, with
•   6 km of vertical (half up, half down)
•   9 summits
•   a lot of rocks to step on

So I spent a lot of time in the gym for the preceding few weeks, and ate a lot of fattening things, and prepared myself to be completely destroyed. It didn't help to realize that Backpacker Magazine lists this as the second-hardest day hike in America.

Of course, it feels pretty awesome now that I'm sitting at home at MIT eating a late-afternoon breakfast and putting my feet up, with a solid hike and five new 4000-footers under my belt: the conclusion of the this story is yes, we made it.

Having driven up north the night before, at 4am we headed out of the Lincoln Woods trailhead towards our first summit of the day: Mt. Flume. Hardly a word was spoken, and I can't imagine any of us was much awake those first two hours. Around us fell mist and clouds, thicker and thicker as we pushed upwards, until my headlamp blazed to illuminate a few feet of water droplets ahead of me. Partly afraid of losing the trail, but mostly in the hopes of sparing us fatigue by the end, I kept our pace just slow enough to keep my breathing even. We would manage to sustain this sleepy 3mph for about the first third of the trip.

Stars! calls out Sally. Suddenly, time is moving, space is opening up above us, and the ceiling is lifted from our little tunnel of mist and endless footsteps. We're getting higher, so when we turn off our headlamps for a few moments to watch the light peek at us through leaves and clouds we might just glimpse the shadows of mountain ranges lifting around us. After that, things go quickly. We climb on, up rocks and a few sets of manicured wooden stairs, passing better and better viewpoints as the mist gets thinner, the sky paler, and the surrounding mountains more visible through the trees. 'This is the start of my first full, clear mountain sunrise', I think, and it's electrifying.

The competition for the most glorious sight of my life is wonderful and fierce, but this hour - from the first glimpse of stars to the stunning climax of Mt. Flume - surpassed all expectations. I thought I'd seen my fair share of sunsets, and passed meditative morning hours in the valleys watching the sun strike ridge after ridge in the distance, but now I see why it's the sunrise for which mountaineers and photographers submit themselves to summit camps and alpine starts. The air is still clear, and we see that the clouds did not dissipate: we surpassed them. The sky is orange; the last stars still linger; and below us is a rolling white cloud sea. Nothing is visible above but the mountains, with mist running down their slopes into the ocean. We were on Flume for a few chilly, thrilling moments before descending towards Liberty.

If I were to do this again, I would have started earlier and made it truly above treeline in order to draw out the sunrise, but nonetheless the weather stayed beautifully clear, the trail near deserted, and the valleys below us mesmerizingly cloud-covered until we ascended Mt. Lafayette. This was our fourth summit (after Flume, followed by Liberty and Lincoln which we passed quickly) and the highest, and rather full of tourists.

Stopping on the summit of Mt. Flume - Photos thanks to Tyler

If we weren't tired, we were by this point at least conscious of the miles behind us. We made slower time on the three mile descent from Liberty (another great reason not to do the loop the other direction!), and then on the bumpy, rocky route to Mt. Garfield, filling up on water at Garfield Pond. Still, it was quite fun to finally hit the peak and announce it as our fifth summit! After Garfield was a quick jaunt to Galehead Hut, our halfway point where thanks to the AMC we had a long and caffeinated break before what we gratefully realized would be our final steep ascent of the day up to South Twin. 

In my experience, hiking is an essentially solitary activity. This doesn't reflect negatively on other people; meeting someone in the mountains creates and instant bond of friendliness, and the hiking community has an incredible way of attracting like-minded and wholehearted people. However, serious hiking ultimately requires you to immerse your mind and body in the mountains around you. It invites both physical challenge (like Pemi loops...) and deep introspection. Sometimes this is because the wild beauty around you will sweep your heart up with the wind, and sometimes because it's the only way to draw out enough of your reserves to make it home.

So, Sally and Tyler introduced infuriating guessing games on the way across the Bonds to try to forget about our footsteps for a few miles. We dreamed together about hot chocolate, baths and bed. Sally and I went out of our way to tag West Bond (summit 7!), leaving our packs and taking the extra mile at a jog, which felt fabulously energetic. We wound our way to Bondcliff across rocky slopes dotted with tiny alpine trees and bright berries, until amidst evening clouds that obscured what might have been a stunning view of the wilderness, our group stretched thin. Alone with the moss and the stones I felt the mist swirl intimately around me. Tired, blistered; how could I feel less than love for these mountains? I gave them quite completely my body, and they left me thrilled enough to run and happy enough to hunt wildflowers with my eyes. 

There is little to say about the last ten miles after sunset, except that they felt far longer than I can convey in brief words. The descent tired my knees and ankles painfully at every step until the final flat had the chance to tire my feet and bones. Tyler went ahead of us old ladies so he'd have a chance to nap in the car before driving, and the rest of us made the last five miles by singing children's songs and Simon and Garfunkel and anything our minds were straight enough to remember the words to. Nonetheless, we made it. We were back at the car just in time for the clouds to leave us again with a sky full of stars.

There Might Be Bears

Well, this is embarrassing. I’m hiding behind a broken concrete wall, letting my rather muddy dog take an afternoon nap while I take the chance to strip down to my sports bra, spread my clothes out to dry in the sun, and curl up barefoot on my backpack eating squished bread and tuna. It’s a peaceful chance to sunbathe – at least until a rather rugged man pulls up his pickup truck in the grass, not ten feet from me, and tries to turn it around. Oops. Should I grab for my clothes? Yell an apology?

Nope. Just another hobo, he thinks, and drives off without a second glance.

 ***

It was a few weeks ago that I first had the brilliant idea of leaving behind my end-of-semester stress and taking some time by myself to think. I’ll take myself backpacking, I thought, I love hiking, it’s a perfect excuse not to do any work or check my email. I’ll do 100km or so for a little challenge. West Virginia isn’t thatmountainous, right?

What I ended up doing was a fragment of something called the Allegheny Trail - accompanied, by the way, by my dog Fei, who has almost forgiven me for taking him on a never-ending-walk. It stretches some 330 miles through the Appalachians, and is the brainchild of a group of hikers who decided that if West Virginia didn’t have any long-distance trails, they would make one – an awesome attitude. However, the trail is new and little-known enough that my time went something like this:

West Virginia is wild...

wasting...

wonderful.

Paved Roads: walk along two-foot wide verge while locals drive by at 55mph. Be impressed by how quickly dog learns to get off the road and sit still when he sees a car coming. Be unimpressed when dog learns to dive under the guard-rail and away into the bushes when he sees a truck.

Jeep Trails:  in some places I could go miles without seeing a house or person, and they were easy walking with lots of little streams and butterflies.

Can you see the tail of our
explorer of shrubbery?

Footpaths: these were entirely un-maintained. I came to dread them. I fended off spiders with a stick and every few paces in the name of public service to throw aside trees and branches that had fallen into the path (Dog collected small sticks and had great respect for my tree-tossing prowess). Still, at many points we had a great time as jungle-explorers and bug-hunters extraordinaires.

The most spectacular path appeared on the morning of the last day, and looked like this:

Picture an obstacle course, where you have to climb over things and army-crawl under things and push through things while balancing on narrow branches. The re-picture it with a forty-pound pack on your back, and no ideawhether it goes on for four more yards or four more miles.

When I finally made it through onto semi-populated roads, a guy in a little Honda stopped me.

‘Did you just come up Twelvemile Run?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘did I ever.’

‘Do you think I could get my car through there?’

I told him it might not be the best of ideas. 

Naptime.

***

The final big adventure was camping. I’ve camped in the wild before, but always with a tent and some company. I brought some rope and a hammock and tarp, an intention to just pick some good-looking trees in places no one would bother me, and a lot of warnings about… bears.

Bears aren’t so bad, right? They eat lots of things that aren’t people. They don’t even like people. You just have to hang up your food in a tree, far enough away that a hungry bear can try to get it without having to go through you. Then, having hung your food, you stumble back to your hammock by flashlight, right towards a set of glowing eyes in the dark. Boy, did I wish I’d discovered this about my dog beforehand.

Afterwards, you can wrap up in your sleeping bag and slowly doze off, glad that your dog has good night-senses if anything comes. You can keep trying to slowly doze off while he cocks his ears in one direction and growls. And keeps growling, and growling towards this one patch of trees; not a bark, as he gives to anything he thinks he can scare, but a continuous menacing growl at the dark. I can see nothing. He keeps growling. I make mental plans about which way to retreat in case of bears. Dog keeps growling. I wish I could just sleep so that whatever is out there can eat me and get it over with. Dog keeps growling, until finally it starts to rain and everything becomes still. 

Home Sweet Hammock

The nights were beautiful, too. There’s something special about camping in a hammock on a clear night, where you can open your eyes in the night and look straight up at the stars. The last night, we stumbled on a spot that looked like a caravan campsite; a lovely riverside clearing a mile from anywhere. It was still early when we got there, so I spent a while setting up my lean-to in case of rain, then sat and watched the sunset over the tree-tops. At dark, the clearing filled with fireflies. 

The moment, after three long days, was perfect.

That last day, I loved the coolness of the rain and the drops on my head. Then I hated the endless rain. I hid from it under a tarp by the roadside full of the smell of wet dog. I rested from it sitting on mud of its making. Then I found, finally, a patch of sunlight winking through the leaves, and came out into open farmland, with a view over waving grass to the rain falling on valley after valley as the Virginia hills stretch blue into the distance.

- What did I find here, I asked myself, that I was looking for?

- I found how to keep going; that it doesn’t matter whether it’s rainy and your feet hurt.

- You learned a little bit more about sore feet? That took you four days of bruises, filth and getting mistaken for a hobo? After spending all semester wishing for the time to properly learn statistical physics?

- Yes. Physics is less important than feet.