Day 19: 7 July, 21.1 miles today, 238.5 miles total, Story Spring Shelter, Green Mountain National Forest
Days without rain: 4
It took me a while to figure out why the hostel owner in Manchester Center sounded so familiar, but during the ride out to the trail in the morning it hit me: he sounded exactly like Casey Kasem. The smooth, top-40 quality of his voice seemed rather at odds with his demeanor, which was like an uncle who seemed perennially on the verge of saying something problematic, but without ever crossing the line. He was a nice fellow, though, who delighted in the minutia of trail culture, while still being able to take a shower every morning.
One of the other hikers riding back to the trail was a charmingly grizzled North Carolinian who insisted that the state of Vermont had no humidity. I had shed enough sweat back home to understand the point He was making about our native climate, but he really did seem to think the air this far north was actually dry. He was an AT NOBO, so after wishing each other a good hike, we set about our separate ways. Ten minutes later my shirt was soaked through. No humidity, indeed.
The terrain lolligagged easily over small rises and falls, gently undulating all morning long until I parked myself beside an orange-brown stream for lunch. The color—and the bitter, tree-bark taste it leaves even in filtered water—comes from leaves and branches and logs submerged for long enough to have created this tannic tea. As I was finishing my meal, a quick young AT NOBO crossed the bridge and shed his pack on the other side, deciding after some consideration that flowing brown water would be better than whatever he could draw from the pond up ahead. We chatted as he filtered a liter and I packed up my food bag. I never volunteer details about my thru-hiking experience, but I’ll always answer a direct question. When he found out I was a triple-crown hiker, he shouted across the stream, “Dude! You’re my hero!” I’m always uncomfortable with this pedestal, which is why I don’t bring it up. “Look,” I told him, falling back on an old line, which nevertheless still rang true, “if I can do it, anyone can.”
My afternoon’s work began with a climb up the last of the Long Trail’s highest and best-known peaks, Stratton Mountain. Like its siblings in the south of the state, it was a long, gentle climb which nonetheless left me dripping in perspiration barely after starting upwards. Stratton’s peak is rounded and forested, though there is an old fire tower at the summit which offers expansive views on a clear day. It’s an exciting spot heading north on the Appalachian Trail—that tower offers hikers their first glimpses of the White Mountains. For an LT SOBO on an overcast afternoon, it just seemed like a lot of extra work. Besides, there was rain in the forecast, and I was determined to make as much progress south as I could before it finally fell.
Day 20: 8 July, 19.0 miles today, 257.5 miles total, City Stream/VT Rte 9, Green Mountain National Forest
Days without rain: 5
Despite the forecast, there was no rain overnight, nor in the morning as I worked my way out of my tent like some particularly grubby and awkward moth emerging from its chrysalis. Though usually fine once I was actually upright, middle age (and a hobby as hard on the joints as thru-hiking) had turned leaving my tent each morning into a process that required a bit of planning. The least graceful but most efficient method involved sort of backing my way on my hands and knees. At least any of the younger people I might be camped around were invariably still asleep while this was going on, so I rarely had to worry about embarrassing myself in front of humans who could still, like, stand up.
There was no rain, but a dense fog had rolled into the valley and hung like cotton drapes between the trees in thick white sheets. The forest had shrunk to a narrow 50’ bubble beyond which nothing could be said to truly exist. Every so often a burst of wind would whip through the canopy above, and the accumulated mist would fall to the floor in a sudden spatter. So, not rain, but also not not rain.
I had started seeing a steady stream of northbound AT hikers once again. Most of these encounters were cordial enough, but every so often I’d meet the sort of arrogant asshole who gives the thru-hiking community the reputation it has in some corners as a crowd of ill-mannered, self-involved douchebags. These people are almost always young, and it’s clear from their look, their clothes, their gear, and the way they carry themselves that they’re several months deep into their first long-distance trail. Thru-hiking is incredibly difficult, and it can be easy to be tricked into thinking that if you’re doing it that must make you an incredible human being—especially when you haven’t had the opportunity for a second long trail to humble you by upending everything you thought you knew about living and moving through the mountains.
These are the hikers who complain about trail magic—these trail angels won’t take my trash, these cookies aren’t the ones I like, this hitch made me ride with the window down—who take their shoes off in restaurants, and who treat the trail as if it’s theirs alone and anyone else they meet in the wilderness is some sort of poser worthy of nothing but contempt. I met a young woman as I was working my up an overgrown climb, clearly an AT NOBO, clearly out on her first thru-hike, clearly irritated to be forced to share the mountains with anyone not doing the singularly amazing thing she was currently doing. When she saw me she just stood and waited for me to get out the way, despite the fact that trail etiquette is for downhill hikers to yield the trail to those going up, and despite the fact that I had nowhere to move to but a steep, brush-strewn slope, and despite the fact that she was literally standing next to an open, flat patch of ground she was determined not to step onto to let me pass.
I could have pressed the issue—maybe I should have—but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I moved awkwardly into the thicket, and she pushed forward, not speaking to me but condescending to a single grunt as she went by. As I worked my way back onto the trail and resumed the climb, irritated and put out, it occurred to me how funny the whole thing really was. First-time thru-hikers are incredibly prone to hero worship, justified or not; if at any point she’d realized she was being a snotty dick to a real-life triple crowner, she’d likely have shit herself in abject mortification—possibly literally, knowing the highly questionable nature of most hikers’ diets.
That encounter was, unfortunately, the highlight of the day. Though the grade was almost always gentle, the trail had become little more than a river of rocks flowing over the hills. My broken shoes did little to cushion the continuous pounding of stone against foot, and over and again I banged my toes and tripped over deviously camouflaged roots. I slammed my left foot—my good foot—so hard against one hidden menace that I swore I could feel the tendon pop—the same one that had been giving me so much trouble in the right. Nothing about the landscape, the topography, or the weather suggested that the day should have been as hard as it proved to be. It didn’t even seem that hot, but once the fog had burned off I was left sodden and sticky, feeling like I was swimming through warm honey instead of air. There were precious few views as I stumbled through the long, green tunnel, just occasional clearings which generations of beavers had flooded with massive, meticulously built dams. These swamps bred legions of flies, horrendous and amazingly persistent, which circling my head endlessly until I was driven to drop everything until each one had been swatted dead.
The sun was already dropping behind the mountains as I set up camp beside a blissfully roaring river—not quite load enough to drown out the less-blissful roar of the semis streaming down Route 9 just across the water. It didn’t really matter. The moment I was inside my tent, sheltered by its walls from whatever may lie waiting just outside, I fell asleep, hard, deep, and dreamless.
Day 21: 9 July, 14.3 miles today, 271.8 miles total, Massachusetts
Days without rain: 0
The last morning, it rained.
There had been showers throughout the night, though never anything forceful enough that I’d felt the need to close my vestibules. I lay awake for a few minutes, revisiting the old dilemma as to whether or not I should try to wait out the rain from the comfort of my tent. Deciding it would be best to get started, I slid into my rain jacket and shambled into the open air. As I picked a handful of slugs from the tent’s guylines, I became gradually aware of an absence of moisture falling from the sky. It had already stopped raining. I shook the night’s accumulation from my shelter, packed up, and headed across the highway.
The City Stream, I would guess, had carved what would eventually become the roadbed for Route 9 a long, long time ago—the vertiginous slope on either side of the river suggested the steep walls of a canyon more than the gradual build of mountainsides. The trek down had been a balancing act, struggling to keep upright as I hopped from stone to uneven stone as I dropped a thousand feet from the ridge above. Going up is always easier: all it takes is effort, planting each foot atop another stone step and driving the body upward over and over again through the sultry morning air until, suddenly, you’re at the top.
The hiking was little different from the day before, a gently undulating tangle of rocks and roots that lead through a forest thick and alive with the vibrancy of summer. The trail became crowded and overgrown, sometimes disappearing altogether beneath knots of vines and eager, groping bushes. The bugs weren’t constant, but when they came they did so in great, unholy flocks—by the time I began absent-mindedly to brush the mosquitoes from my legs they were already so numerous and ravenously preoccupied that I popped several of their already swollen bodies, and my calves were smeared with blood before I had any idea what was happening. I remembered then that I’d been carrying a bottle of pure deet for 260 miles for some reason or other, and though the cloud of poison in which I enveloped myself probably took a year or two off my life, it was worth it to buy an hour of relief.
As I approached the Massachusetts state line, the trail flattened out, become wide and open, a welcoming path of solid dirt. I remembered this belt from my AT hike, when it had been one long butter-slick mud puddle that had stretched from the border for miles and miles into the state. Now, however, it was dry and smooth, an easy walk in the woods, a victory march to the Long Trail’s southern end.
Five minutes from the border, I came to a seasonal stream, still trickling steadily into a series of clear, deep pools. I made way downstream of the trail, peeled off my wet and salty shirt, and splashed the cool, clean water over my face, my hair, my armpits, my fevered and welted belly. Refreshed and cooled, I sat in the shade for a long while, listening to the percolating water and the chorus of birds calling out across the forest. This, for me, was the true end of the hike—not the unremarkable sign set at the southern terminus of the country’s original thru-hike, nor the four miles I’d still have to cover through the woods before bursting all at once into the middle of the sleepy town of North Adams, MA—but this moment of solitude, of quiet reflection, as I let the trail and all the twisted and difficult miles I’d walked wash over and through me.
Black flies investigated my pack but left me thankfully alone, and I sat and watched the water striders skate and pirouette across the pools in the stream while the wind whispered through the leaves somewhere in the canopy far above me. In a few minutes I’d be done with the Long Trail; in a few hours I’d be out of the wilderness altogether, officially and permanently returned to human society and all of its troubles. But for now, for this smallest of moments, I was here, I was really here, alive in this green and living place and breathing in as much of it as my lungs could hold, a part of this trail, a part of this mountain, this forest, this world, and present, present, present.
As always, love reading about your journey!