Death March

Labor Day Weekend in Vermont did not cooperate, weather-wise, with my plans to do 60 miles worth of hiking. Rainy, misty, icky weather.

But I did my best. Starting this morning at 7:00, I headed north on Vermont's "Long Trail" from Appalachian Gap, aiming to follow the Trail along the ridgeline of the Green Mountains over the top of Camel's Hump (the oddly shaped mountain that appears on the Vermont quarter) and all the way down to Route 2 in the Winooski River Valley.

What I hadn't counted on was how God-forsakenly rugged the trail over that stretch really was. UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and rarely any level stretch lasting more than a tenth of a mile. You know how a walking pace of 3.5 to 4.0 miles per hour is reasonable to fast for most people who aren't actually speedwalking? I was managing around 1.3.

This should give you an idea why (assuming you know what the contour lines on topo maps mean):



Or maybe this will tell the story more directly:

A typical section of trail:



An atypical section of trail:



Fortunately for my sanity, I had lots of signposts telling me how far I had to go and periodically encountered shelters maintained by the Green Mountain Club, where I could get in out of the drizzle for a few minutes and also use the composting privies located nearby.



I fell down a lot.

No matter how carefully I worked my way down slippery rocks on trails, there were times that there simply weren't any branches to grab onto and down I'd go. One time I fell and somehow twisted as I fell so that I landed face down, WHUMP, and was so frustrated that I just grabbed a nearby pine branch in my teeth and chewed angrily on it like a dog worrying a sock puppet.

Yes, I made growling noises.

I eventually realized, upon reaching Montclair Glen Shelter in Wind Gap that there was simply no way that I was going to be able to make it up and over Camel's Hump and down to route 2 in the steady drizzle in anything less than eight more hours, and I was already pretty tired. Unfortunately, there was just about ZERO cell phone reception and I wasn't able to get through to Carole to say "COME GET ME."

I resorted to texting her, trying repeatedly to get messages through asking her to come pick me up at a certain parking area off Camel's Hump Road in Huntington, a spot we'd been to twice earlier this summer. While I kept texting her, I headed down the trail toward said parking area, hoping against hope that I'd get there and find her waiting.

Unfortunately, Carole's not much for maps or for remembering picky details like which trail we'd taken up a mountain, so she headed for the other side of Camel's Hump.

I kept walking. There came a brief period where I had reasonable cell signal for a moment and got a bunch of her queued-up messages and went "WHAT?" at the news that she was actually heading away from me. A barrage of text messages went back and forth and I finally got her turned around and headed to Huntington, Vermont and the right trailhead.

Before she could get there, I actually made it all the way down the trail and down three more miles of road to the main north-south route through Huntington and was waiting at a particular stop sign when she finally pulled up. I was exhausted.



And we still had to go back to Appalachian Gap to pick up the other car before we could go home.

Fortunately, this morning I felt fine. My feet were in fine shape and my legs were a bit tired, but not sore or stiff or aching, so I guess I must be tougher than I was a month or two ago.

So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.