It's well after midnight, at some nameless parking area near the Appalachian Trail in southern Massachusetts. I'm sleeping soundly in the back of the Subaru Motel, where there's always a room available, and the rates are unbeatable. I hear a car trundling into the lot. Headlights go dim; the motor shuts off. Familiar voices: Leonard and Andrew have arrived, and I roll over and go back to sleep.
As always, I'm the first to wake up. On the first weekend in May, it's overcast and unseasonably cold for shorts and a sweatshirt. I tap on the window of Leonard's station wagon.
We've met for our annual undertaking, where we hike a segment of the Appalachian Trail that's a little longer than is practical for a day trip. It started simply enough. Seven or eight years ago, Andrew came up with a trip suggestion: Hike the AT from the Delaware Water Gap to High Point, carrying the minimum gear necessary to stay out overnight. In one weekend, we walked about half the distance of the AT in New Jersey, covering 44 miles. My old hiking boots failed and I walked most of the weekend developing half a dozen blisters on each foot, on a wicked hot June weekend. Two of the people on that trip decided that one day was enough, and hitchhiked from Culvers Gap to the Delaware on Sunday to get the car and meet the remaining fools. We were pretty sore when it was over, staggering into a fast food dive on Sunday night, chowing down everything in sight, and we started talking about the next segment of the Appalachian Trail.
I lap up the magazine articles about others people's high altitude adventures, and I read all the gear porn catalogues mailed to my door. And while I've done my share of hiking, it's been awhile since I've been out on anything that would go halfway to qualifying as an epic. With a regular job in burgeoning suburbia, a mortgage, and some of the other obligations that most people acquire as they grow older, a 3-week trip to Alaska or British Columbia doesn't look possible anytime soon. Such as they are, my outings are tamer and a little closer to home.
That's where the Appalachian Trail expedition comes in. It's become a project: each year we hike the next northbound segment of the trail. The cast of characters varies each year, and the mainstays have been Andrew and me, although I missed two years. While the first two years were weekend trips, in subsequent years we've chosen a chunk of trail, around 27 to 30 miles, and walked it in a day. We end up hiking the last hour or so in the dark, and I hate hiking in the dark. When we ask people if they're interested, some of them just say no, and others say, "That's a stupid distance to hike in one day. What are you trying to prove?"
This year the route starts in Salisbury CT, with a planned finish a little north and east of Great Barrington MA. It's just about 30 miles, which is around the distance we've covered in other segments of this project. After a quick breakfast we stuff our dunnage into the Subaru Motel, and head south to Salisbury for the start of the trip. There are no imposing mountains in this part of New England; nothing that will take your breath away like the Presidential Range or the Cascades in Washington. But it has its own beauty, with broad green fields and valleys separated by low hills referred to locally as mountains.
We drive from Massachusetts into Connecticut, leaving Leonard's car at the northern terminus. After a short road walk, we tramp through a field into the woods and cross Connecticut Route 41 before the end of the first mile, heading uphill to a ridge. The cool of early morning gives way to warmer, more appropriate temperatures, as the clouds burn off to a bright day. We follow the ridge until the short, steep climb up Lions Head. After admiring the view from the summit, we drop down into relatively flat woodland where the undulating trail is easy to follow. By mid morning, we summit Bear Mountain, and then drop into Sages Ravine, re-entering Massachusetts. The ravine is peaceful and dark from mature, over arching hemlock trees as we walk beside a fast moving brook.
From the brook, we begin of a long, steady climb up Mt. Race. We stop for lunch a little after noon, and while we have a good view, it turns out we're nowhere near the summit. I figure we've come eleven miles, and we're making good time. But Mt Race has other ideas about making time. It's not high, and it's not steep; but it goes uphill steadily for 3 miles. We come out of the woods into an almost sub-alpine microclimate, with shrubs, moss, and lots of open rock. Much of the final ascent is along a sheer cliff affording excellent views. I can look 15+ miles south and see Rand's View, a meadow on the north side of Prospect Mountain back in Connecticut. We were on Rand's View at 7 PM on Saturday evening a year ago. Thirty miles to the north, Mt Greylock looms over the valley.
We drop 300 feet and then work our way over Mt Everett. These mountains are not imposing by any stretch, and we haven't been lollygagging. But we've frittered away a lot of time on them, and I now realize we'll get out of the woods later than I'd anticipated. This year, we've had no disagreements about pacing. I generally prefer to push the pace, and Andrew prefers to relax a little: "Go slow, no stop, success." Leonard doesn't express a preference, but he can move. Last year he set the pace as we walked the last 90 minutes in the dark, wending through the woods below Prospect Mountain and down Barrack Matiff. So much so, that we could barely see his headlamp in the gloom ahead of us. So maybe I'm getting a little more tolerant, or maybe I'm just getting old and slow. I prefer to think tolerant, but who knows. We stop for another break.
The precipitous descent from Jug End takes awhile, and after crossing Jug End Road we stop by a stone wall in the woods for a few minutes. Andrew is gassed, I've never seen him like this. I went to Mt Rainier with him and Leonard. He's climbed Denali and South American volcanoes. He's always been the one to suggest that obscure side trail or extra few miles to put an exclamation point on a weekend trip. Now he suggests that we stop short at Route 7 and hitchhike the remaining miles to the car.
It's around 5 P.M.; 12 miles remain between us and the parking lot where Leonard's vehicle is; the Route 7 road crossing is around 5 miles away. As much as I dislike hiking by headlight, I also hate stopping short of my goal, almost to the point of unreasonableness. If we can pick up the pace along the relatively flat 5 miles to Route 7, we may be able to get to the top of East Mountain, the final climb of the day, before dark. This is what I suggest. We shoulder day packs one more time and head out.
We tramp through a flat, somewhat marshy wood, without much undergrowth. It looks much like the woods in NJ, where there are mature trees and the saplings have been browsed into extinction by deer. I marvel at the leaves beginning to come out on the trees, and we come out of the woods. Here, the trail edges alongside someone's pasture, the trail markers are on posts sunk into the ground. The late afternoon light becomes sort of soft and golden. Wilderness it's not, but one of my favorite things about this project is walking through these fields. Crossing a narrow back road, we descend into the woods again.
After 90 minutes of walking, we come to Route 7. We can see the summit of the final hill, 4 miles away, and it's 6:40. Our pace is slowing and we'd be fortunate to get to the top in 2 hours. From there it would be another 3 miles downhill in the dark. Reluctantly we decide to take the pragmatic route. Andrew volunteers to hitchhike back to Leonard's car, and Leonard and I sit down to pass the time. We take out the map again and start planning the next segment of the trip.