Rusty Foster, a writer in Maine, recently began a planned six-month hike of the Appalachian Trail from his home state south to Georgia with his 19-year-old son, Mica. After a hiatus from the trail due to health problems, the two are now back in the woods. This is the second in a series adapted from the newsletter he writes from the wilderness, Today on Trail. You can read the first episode here.
Mistakes have been made: to begin with. There is no doubt about that. This must be clearly understood, otherwise nothing meaningful can come of the story I am about to tell.
I shouldn’t even be here to tell you what happened. I should be deep in the North Woods, fending off marauding elk and living off stale beef and accidentally swallowed black flies. But instead, as I write this on July 7, Mica and I are back home on Peaks Island. It’s not the end, it’s just a brief setback.
The mistakes in question are an instructive combination of mistakes of inexperience and mistakes of overconfidence, so I will name them as we go along.
On June 30th we drove to Baxter State Park and hiked the comically rocky 3.3 miles from Roaring Brook to Chimney Pond. I wanted my family to see Chimney Pond, located halfway up the north side of Mt. Katahdin in a spectacular bowl of cliffs.
I’ve spent a lot of time at Chimney Pond Campground volunteering for search and rescue, and it’s a place that means a lot to me, so I shamelessly jumped at the chance to convince my wife to come see us off. She loves hiking, but she hates hiking. She did it, and now she never has to do it again, a promise I’ve put on paper here for the world to see.
We stayed overnight in the bunkhouse and the next morning Christina and our 11 year old Ash went back down to drive the truck to pick us up. Katahdin Stream Campground. Mica and I are going to climb Katahdin, because our Appalachian Trail starts at the top.
At 5,269 feet, Katahdin is large, but not particularly large, even by Appalachian standards. But it is, out of all proportion to its height, a difficult mountain to climb. We climbed the Saddle Trail from Chimney, which is the easiest way up because you’re already halfway up the mountain and from there it’s only about 1,350 feet of elevation gain in a mile to the plateau, a broad, gently rolling scree field that forms Katahdin’s upper plateau. But the last four-tenths of that mile are straight up a loose sand and gravel landslide, at a continuous 40-degree slope.
Despite this, I’ve seen more than one person climb Katahdin in Crocs. On a sunny summer day, Baxter Peak is packed with climbers of all ages, abilities, and levels of general seriousness, from groups of teenagers who look disconcertingly fresh-faced and disinterested to people who don’t seem to climb many mountains but have set Katahdin as a goal for themselves and are only now beginning to consider climbing the fearsome cliffs they’ve just dragged themselves up.
It is a Katahdin tradition to climb the big summit sign and look triumphant, so Mica and I did. Our photo was taken by a beaming gray-haired gentleman who, along with his wife, was clearly very proud to have reached the top.
After 6.88 miles, which took us almost 7½ hours, we arrived at Katahdin Stream, where I had booked a shelter on the river. It was one of the nicest campsites we’ve ever stayed at, and it made up for the emotional blackmail I had put my wife through to hike to Chimney Pond. Then Christina and Ash drove off the next morning, leaving Mica and me alone with our packs and our feet.
Mistake number one: Have you seen it? I certainly haven’t. The mistake was that I underestimated the energy required to climb Katahdin. This was a mistake of overconfidence on my part, as this was my fourth or fifth time on the summit. I felt wide awake and ready to go, but the fact is that I was already tired, which would become apparent later.
We left Katahdin Stream and almost immediately went the wrong way, following an older AT map up the Baxter tote road to Elbow Pond. The trail is beautiful, as are all the trails in Baxter except the busy ones. The rest of the park is filled with smooth, quiet trails that wind through peaceful pine forests and occasionally pass a strikingly charming backcountry pond where a canoe has been carefully positioned so you can paddle out and search for moose. It’s one of the best places in the world.
Just outside the park boundary after about 10 miles of easy trail is the Abol Bridge store, the last place to stock up on supplies before entering the 100-Mile Wilderness. They did have ice cream cones, but it always seems like they could do with a little more. We enjoyed our ice cream and I drank a gallon of cold Gatorade, then continued for about three miles to Hurd Brook, the first campground heading south. In retrospect, this was the last time I felt good.
We had planned to go to Hurd Brook and take a little break, and then probably move on to the next campsite, about eight miles away. But by the time we got to Hurd Brook, I was completely exhausted. I told Mica we had to stay there, that I didn’t have another eight miles in me. It was hot and humid, and the air under the thick tree cover was very still and about as dry as an unventilated bathroom after a long shower. Every time I bent down to set up my tent, I felt like I was going to faint.
We also realized that we hadn’t really thought about how far it was to our food drop, where we had to pick up five more days of food at a certain intersection in three days. To get there, we had to cover almost 40 miles over the next two days. There was a shelter, a fairly flat 20 miles away, so we decided we would go there the next day and see how far we could get. In the meantime, hungry but also sick, I ate a small package of macaroni and cheese and some hot chocolate for dinner. I would feel better in the morning, I thought.
Mistake number two: If you’re already feeling bad after a 12-mile day, is it a good idea to follow it up with a 20-mile day? No! Of course not! This is the kind of thing only an idiot would do, and I don’t make excuses for myself. And besides, rushing to do a food drop when I can’t even eat what I have? Insanity.
I woke up still feeling sick, but forced myself to eat half a packet of fried rice and some more hot chocolate. Mica and I packed up and headed out of camp toward Wadleigh Stream, 12 miles away.
Despite telling everyone for years how bad the trail is in the 100-Mile Wilderness, I had forgotten just how bad the trail is in the 100-Mile Wilderness. If you get tired of roots, there are always rocks. If you don’t like roots and rocks, don’t worry, there will be deep mud soon. If you want something other than roots, rocks, and deep mud, I hope you enjoy wading through streams, because that’s all we have. There isn’t a foot of flat trail to be found. The howling of mosquitoes searching for even one millimeter of flesh unprotected by DEET was constant, punctuated by a counterpoint of horseflies circling my head. I became a moving ecosystem, with entire generations of black flies meeting, falling in love, mating, raising their young, and dying within three inches of my eyeballs, which were apparently crying the sweetest nectar imaginable, judging by how many of them gave their lives to taste it just once.
It rained for a while in the morning, which was a great relief from the heat, but then the rain stopped and the forest turned into a rice oven again. The rain and mud left my socks hopelessly wet and the skin under the balls of my feet decided to avoid the hot spots and immediately opened blisters without warning. “Stop and treat at the first sign of a hot spot!” they all say. Ha! My first sign was the unmistakable feeling of the thick skin on my soles separating from my toes.
My nausea was also worse now. I could only eat a couple of Triscuits. We stopped for lunch and I ate half an apple. I couldn’t eat and at the same time I was so hungry. The calorie deficit was starting to threaten.
But despite all that, the 100-Mile Wilderness is still so beautiful. It’s insanely full of mossy glades, slopes softly carpeted with hemlock needles, and pristine lakes that look as if no one has ever seen them. I know this is all second-growth logging; none of it is actually wilderness. But it’s impossible not to feel like Legolas is about to step out from behind a giant ash tree and shout in Elvish, “Halt, traveler!”
In the afternoon we stopped at a high lake with an unofficial tent site and considered staying there, but it was only four miles to our destination, where there was a shelter and a toilet. We decided to keep going. We arrived at camp after 12 hours on the trail and Mica cooked his dinner only to discover that he couldn’t eat either. I managed a few sips of hot chocolate before a most ill-advised gulp of Propel sent me running into the bushes to throw up behind a tree. I came back and Mica looked at me and said, “Okay, we’re going home.”
I spent that night in slow satellite text conversation with first the hostel that did our food drop, then a shuttle driver and Christina. We left camp just before 8am on Friday and were on the road by 9:30am. Despite all my struggles, we had made good time—a steady 2mph every day.
We had at least a two-hour wait at the small dirt parking lot at the end of Nahmakanta Stream Road, so I rolled out my foam mat and lay down with my head on my backpack. It was still warm, but there was some shade and a bit of wind. We didn’t see a car pass by for an hour. Mica read me a Kafka story from an e-book I had on my phone, “The Village Schoolmaster” (or “The Giant Mole”), which is really funny. The nature and circumstances of the giant mole itself are never explained. Then I fell asleep for a while. It was nice. In retrospect, lying in the sun for two hours at the parking lot on Nahmakanta Stream Road was one of the nicest moments of the entire trip so far.
The shuttle came right on time. I had some Saltines when we got home, and Saturday I had some ramen, and then slowly more food. I rested. I treated my blisters. We thought about what was next.
With food and rest I feel much better, which I think reduces the chance that there is something drastically wrong with me. I am going to see my doctor this week, but I think what happened was a vicious cycle of heat, dehydration and possibly a touch of food poisoning, all made worse by simply pushing too hard and too fast.
Mistake number three: Doing exactly what literally every source of advice about hiking the AT south begins with, by strongly warning you against it. They weren’t talking about me, but still, reader, they were talking about me.
Mica and I are taking this opportunity to swap some items we didn’t find suitable. And I’m developing a trail menu that I think I’ll find more appealing than freeze-dried meals. The plan is to head north again at the end of the week.
This time we looked at the map together and made an 8 day plan to get to Monson, hiking no more than 8-10 miles per day. I think we now see the difference between miles we can technically do and miles we can sustainably enjoy. We both have a better sense of how much we still have to learn. And we plan to hike less per day and swim in lakes and read in the sun more.
