Opinion

The teenage woods

I’ve lived in Maine for 23 years, and Mica was born and grew up here. Both of us have done the majority of our backpacking here, so the notoriously difficult trail in Maine is mostly just how we expect trails to be. We have heard tell of distant lands such as “Vermont” and “Virginia,” where the trails are supposedly paved with dirt and you can walk upon them with the upright stride of a modern hominid. Whatever is to come, I have a hard time imagining the trail anywhere else being much harder than this.

Over the past 31 days, as we’ve slipped on slimy roots, tripped on shifting rubble, slid down frictionless rock slabs and occasionally refreshed our tired feet with an accidental slosh through calf-deep mud, Mica and I have devised a little mnemonic that captures our best advice about hiking in Maine. It goes like this:

Avoid the roots and skip the rocks

To keep your a-- above your socks.

But alas, my hiking bud,

If you do that, you’ll drown in mud.

For all that making our way through it can be a trial, I love the Maine woods, and I think it deserves more appreciation and understanding than some of its most prominent literary chroniclers have offered so far. In his entertaining, but to thru-hikers controversial, tale of an abridged Appalachian Trail hike, “A Walk in the Woods,” Bill Bryson writes that the woods of Maine “brought to mind the woods in the Wizard of Oz, where the trees have ugly faces and malign intent and every step seems a gamble. This was a woods for looming bears, dangling snakes, wolves with laser-red eyes, strange noises, sudden terrors — a place of ‘standing night,’ as Thoreau neatly and nervously put it.”

Bryson is not entirely wrong, but his writing on the Maine woods is superficial — more cartoon than portrait. Maine probably harbors fewer dangerous animals than any other Appalachian Trail state. And it’s telling that for literary backup he calls on Thoreau, a suburban Massachusetts mama’s boy who tried to climb Mt. Katahdin once and had a whole nervous breakdown about it.

Neither Thoreau nor Bryson ever spent enough time in Maine to understand it. The Maine woods may do a credible impression of primeval wilderness, but it’s not. Bryson himself pointed out in his book that the last ice age scraped these northern mountains clean of life, and even clean of soil, as the slabby bedrock mountaintops of Western Maine attest. And more recently, nearly every acre of forest in Maine has been logged within the past 200 years. Hiking the Barren-Chairback Range in 1996 at age 44, it’s unlikely Bryson saw a single tree that was much older than him.

By forest standards, the one in Maine is a teenager, and like a teenager it can be strikingly beautiful, but also moody and indifferently cruel. What makes the Maine woods so difficult to hike is that every inch of it is aggressively alive, in the absolute piss and vinegar of its youth. Every tree root is a grasping claw desperately trying to hold together some glacier-worn rubble pile of a mountain to make it a home, in a place where the season for growth is just a few short weeks between the ice of spring and the ice of fall.

The trail in Maine is continually invaded by life, crowded by saplings, clutched by tree roots that seek the rushing water that erodes its rocks and washes the thin crumbling soil away from one place to collect and accumulate in another. Nothing is fixed, everything is in flux. I’m not particularly mystical, but I think the Maine forest has an energy to it that emanates from this vigorous explosion of life. It can be overwhelming to experience, but I’ve also never felt more nourished by the outdoors than I have in these woods.

Despite its infamous difficulty, I’ve also heard Maine described by numerous experienced thru-hikers as their favorite state on the trail. The Mainer in me accepts this as natural, even obvious. How could it be otherwise?

Of course, no sooner did I write all these nice things about the Maine woods than the Mahoosucs tried to kill me on the way out. Because, although the Maine woods are amazing, the last 11 miles of the Appalachian Trail southbound in Maine are absolutely dreadful.

The fun started at the summit of Old Speck Mountain, with a harrowing descent down several steep, featureless rock slabs to Speck Pond. It would become clear that “a harrowing descent down steep, featureless rock slabs” is the main theme of this section. I don’t think I could actually fall off the mountain here, but it constantly felt like I was about to.

The Speck Pond campsite offers a gorgeous, nearly new shelter which my dumb self didn’t sleep in because it was supposed to be clear all night, and I thought “Hey, I’ll sleep on the empty tent platform!” A tent is a very nice place to sleep unless it rains. Even if your tent keeps the rain out (and few really do), you will be cozy and snug listening to the rain drum on the fabric above you precisely until the moment you need to do anything else; then you’ll be outside and wet. A shelter has the drawbacks of chilly drafts (sometimes), mice (usually) and snoring hikers (always), but at least you can stand up to get dressed.

The night we spent at Speck Pond, the “mostly clear” weather forecast turned out to be a huge thunderstorm and 45-minute tent-flooding downpour. Somehow, one wall of my tent got pushed in by a combination of wind and rain and started dumping water inside the “bathtub floor” that’s supposed to keep me dry. If I were making tents, I would probably call it a “boat floor” and then make sure the water understood which side it was meant to be on, but that’s just me. Some hasty mopping converted my tent floor to merely wet and my towel to soaked, which seemed like a fair trade. The initial deluge was followed by hours of steady drizzle that splashed under the eaves of my tent, leaving me and everything else inside evenly damp, like a wrung-out dishcloth.

Monday dawned — well, that’s not quite right. Monday failed to dawn, and the air instead gradually became a uniform steely dark gray, like if a day were also a World War II battleship. This is mid-August in the inland Maine woods, notoriously the hottest time of year in the hottest year any human being has ever lived through, and I was huddled in the cooking area wearing literally every (uniformly damp) item of clothing I had in my backpack and still shivering while I waited for water to boil for coffee. I sincerely think the temperature was in the 40s but I can’t prove it to you. It was hard to tell whether the air was making me wet or vice versa. Possibly both. I ate breakfast with Mica, who had slept in the shelter and “didn’t even notice it had rained.”

The first thing we did heading south was climb Mahoosuc Arm, which is a mountain despite the name. We were already basically at the summit elevation, so I will reluctantly say: this part was fine. There is a viewpoint marked on our trail app near the summit, and we stopped to admire the view. It was a uniform steely dark gray, like if a view were also a World War II battleship. The air was so opaque it somehow felt worse to look at it than to stare at our feet.

Which is a good thing because what followed was a descent down Mahoosuc Arm that the FarOut app describes as “one of the steepest on the Appalachian Trail, with the trail dropping 1500 feet from Mahoosuc Arm to the edge of the notch in just one mile.” That’s an average slope of about 28 percent. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, picture the steepest street you’ve ever seen. Got it in your head? It’s way steeper than that.

The average slope here is made up of short stretches of merely steep descent punctuated by long stretches of high-angle bedrock that are green with algae, running with water and edged with a dubious assortment of loose rocks, roots and mud. Every step is a split-second calculation of weight, balance, counterbalance, friction and gravity. Every step is a choice: Go to the left? Go to the right? Is this slab too steep to inch straight down, or can I wedge my poles into some minute crevice in the rock ahead? Will that mud on the edge help or just grease my shoes right down this next 30 feet of sheer rock face?

An entire mile of this. Conservatively, at least 1,700 individual decisions. I’m not scared to do this kind of climbing; I’ve done a lot of it on both rock and ice. But it is mentally exhausting. It’s physically exhausting, too, but the amount of sustained concentration it requires is really what made this mile of descent so draining.

But guess what? Right after the steepest mile on the entire Appalachian Trail comes what is generally called “the hardest mile on the A.T.” That descent somehow wasn’t the hardest mile! There is a harder one, and here it is. This is Mahoosuc Notch, where the trail passes for about a mile along the bottom of a deep, narrow cleft between Mahoosuc Mountain and Fulling Mill Mountain. Over the centuries, every boulder that has fallen from either cliff above has collected here in this tiny gap. And now, according to the sadist who routed this trail, it is our task to hike through them.

The trail here allows only very occasional moments of what you could call “walking” or even “climbing” in any normal sense. It’s mostly a boulder scramble over and under rocks that range in size from “large car” to “small house.” Again, this goes on for an entire mile. It took me and Mica an hour and a half to get through it, and that marks us as absolute beasts at this kind of thing, especially for a cold, wet and slippery day. Two hours is the standard estimate.

Honestly, I can imagine the Notch being fun. On a sunny day, if you hiked up the Notch Trail from Success Pond Road just to do that one mile of scrambling full of high-calorie town food, clothed in dry sportswear, carrying a tiny day pack with some candy and a bottle of water? Sure. Even as titanically Not In The Mood as I was that day, I will say it wasn’t my least favorite part. But I would still like to meet the person who decided the trail needed to go down Mahoosuc Arm and through the Notch, so I could earnestly and thoughtfully punch them in the face.

We hadn’t even made it to lunch yet. After the Notch we climbed Fulling Mill Mountain (steep, slippery) then descended Fulling Mill Mountain (ibid.) Then we stopped at a shelter for lunch and commiserated with everyone else there, who were all equally Going Through It, whether northbound or southbound. Then we climbed the hundred false summits and sloshed through the endless poorly bridged alpine bogs of Goose Eye Mountain. Every time we reached an open part of Goose Eye Mountain the cold wet air roused itself into a furious rain and wind. Once, I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned to see Mica halfway up a 20-foot cliff scramble, with his poncho flipped over his head and trapped under one knee. He got untangled and gave up on any pretense of remaining dry or slightly warm, in the interests of safety.

The actual summit of Goose Eye Mountain is at the top of what appears to be a deep mud bog that is somehow simultaneously a steep cliff. The creative trail maintainers of the Appalachian Trail Club invented a bog board that has rungs nailed across it, so it can also function as a ladder. If you think I’m making this up, I don’t blame you. I would also think so. But I know it’s real. I climbed/forded it.

Finally, after descending Goose Eye Mountain and climbing over Mount Carlo, which wasn’t even mentioned in our guide, we stumbled down the steep, rocky third-of-a-mile side trail to the Carlo Col shelter, which is just a half-mile from the New Hampshire border. We had traveled 8.86 miles, and it took us just over 10 hours and more than 15,000 steps, every single one of which had to be precisely judged and executed to avoid potential consequences ranging from drowning in mud to breaking my neck. I have been more exhausted in my life, but not often.

The next day, Tuesday, also failed to dawn. And in that last half-mile to the border, Maine still had a 50-foot boulder scramble perched on a cliffside for us. Finally, we stood in the mud pit at the border and another hiker took our picture, and then we left Maine.

I’d like to say that as soon as we entered New Hampshire the skies cleared, the air warmed, the birds started singing and the sun came out. I’d like to say the trail improved noticeably, with actual dirt often found between the roots and rocks. I’d like to say I was able to spread out my still-soaked tent in the sun at lunch and hang up all my soggy clothes to dry.

And in fact, all of those things are exactly what happened.