Date: 2021-07-08
From: Grafton Notch (mile 267.2)

To: Full Goose Shelter (mile 276.9)
Miles today: 10.3
Weather: overcast clouds

Ruthie at Bethel Village Motel runs an extremely clean and pleasant place. The rug was like a massage for my feet. Why motels are putting in tile floor more and more I don't understand. Ruthie, I later learned, is a native of the Bethel area who lost her husband almost forty years ago. She inherited and had to learn the business from scratch, while raising their three-year-old. On the ground floor she runs a boutique store as well. Kevin drove Bait and I back to Grafton Notch. Joseph opted to double zero to wait out the rain. Kevin moved up here from Boston decades ago but says he will always be treated like an outsider by the locals. Although Bethel has since seen many more Massachusetts folks migrate in. Bethel has apparently long been a site for diversity trainings run by an outside advocacy group and a radical bubble has developed around it. In any case Kevin worked in concrete most of his life, introducing new mixes and techniques to the area. That and his rough accent bely his wide reading. In our short conversation he alluded to Plato's allegory of the cave and summarized William Faulkner's Reevers. A hiker coming in to Grafton Notch said Beach Day, Prepack, and Alias had started up a few minutes earlier, having been dropped off by the West Bethel Motel. I climbed the Eyebrow Trail alternate to connect to the AT further up since I've already done the AT stretch. The two are the same length, but the Eyebrow is extremely steep for part of it and provides some views across the notch to Baldpate. Once back on the AT the climbing continued. Almost 3000 feet vertical by the time I reached the firetower on Old Speck. The last 4000 footer in Maine! Now I've collected them all, most of them 2 or 3 times. Time to finish up the New Hampshire 48.Speck has the only extant firetower on the AT in Maine. There are no stairs. Just a vertical ladder. It's a metaphor for the Maine AT: why build switchbacks when you can climb straight up? But the sketchy ladder climb was worth it. 360 degree views of mountains in all directions. The weather so far has been cooperative. No rain, just overcast. The Carter range was on the horizon to the southeast. Only the Presidential range beyond was in the clouds Rough descent down to Speck Pond. I searched for a discrete place to skinnydip but ended up jumping in right off the trail where it crossed a beaver dam. Fortunately it was a quiet ten minutes. Beach Day and the others meanwhile went to the Speck campsite and talked to the caretaker, who told them the beavers tended to harass anyone swimming in the pond. So I guess I lucked out. Anyway, the swim streak is up to 23 days straight.The climb down Mahoosuc Arm was miserable. Steeply slanted bedrock and rocks everywhere. I still had my trekking poles out when I was trying to maneuver between some boulders and lost my grip, sliding down until my knee banged into a pointed rock. Man that hurt! Lost a little blood on that one, as well as my temper. Put the poles away after that.It's not a simple matter to compare the difficulty of northbound and southbound hikes of this section, or any other. My memory of northbound hiking is colored by the weather, which was cool and dry and ideal for hiking, and the fact that I'd already walked 1900 miles and was in peak hiking condition. But after trying to adjust for this I feel southbound is the harder direction here. Old Speck is a very steep climb with more altitude gain than almost anything in the north outside Katahdin itself. Mahoosuc Arm is not as much vertical change, but is even steeper, and more challenging to descend. Then there's Mahoosuc Notch, the toughest mile on the AT. Near the beginning I met a NOBO who'd just come through, casually checking her phone, who assured me "It's not bad." I checked the time - 11:55 - secured my phone to a strap, and plunged into the rocks. But not long after, when trying to take a picture, I found the phone was restarting for some unknown reason. It inexplicably reset the date and time back to April 27th. That threw my mental game off, and I had to refocus on the task at hand.The threatened rain thankfully held off as I scrambled and contorted from boulder to boulder, trying to keep 2 or 3 points of contact at all times. I did not want any accidents here. My first time through several years ago I had leapt from rock to rock, taking the high route. But with damp rocks in places, the traction wearing off my shoes, and my recent brushes with injury, I took a less aggressive approach and slowly wound my way. Using hands and feet I stepped, pulled, pushed, balanced, rotated, leaned, embraced, and squeezed around, over, through, and under the rocks. White blazes were only suggestively placed. It was choose your own adventure. Two or three times I squeezed and crawled on my belly through narrow gaps under boulders the size of cars, managing to keep my pack on. Once I nearly face-planted on the rocks when my right foot wedged between two roots. I caught myself with my hands as I fell headlong, my face hovering inches above the rocks.An older dayhiker couple was returning through the notch to their car, doing the entire thing a second time today. Several NOBOs passed by, though each time we had to dance a bit to get around one another. Near the south end of the notch I heard many voices. The first thing I thought was, is this trail magic? I guess I was pretty hungry by now. But it turned out to be an Outward Bound group of 13 young people resting all over the boulders. One girl told me it was only the third day she'd ever hiked, and she seemed very freaked out about tackling this stretch. But the leaders, two girls, were very upbeat and chatty and seemed to have the situation well in hand. I remember the stretch south of the notch as being easy, but this is not the case. Not even close. Fulling Mountain lies in the 1.5 miles to the Full Goose shelter. And it felt every bit as steep as Old Speck. I even tripped on the bog bridges on the flat summit. I was exhausted.I arrived at Full Goose shelter to find Bait and a couple of older NOBO ladies. Not sure if I would continue, I stopped to eat and rest. Bait was definitely done for the day. As Beach Day, Prepack, and Alias filtered in it became a given we were staying put. It was only 2:30 and the rain had held off this long. But we didn't want to hike another 5 miles to a potentially full shelter.Bait started a fire and we cooked up the hot dogs he'd carried in. One of the woman told us of a NOBO girl who'd fallen fifteen feet that day, miraculously with only a bruised ego, and was tenting nearby. We sent her a hot dog to cheer her up. Northbounders poured into the area over the next two hours. We ended up with 12 in the shelter, after some uncomfortable moments. It's a big shelter and people should be prepared to make room, but there were also plenty of tenting spots and it's bad form to squeeze into a shelter if you arrive late. In at least one case a NOBO named Rocket Man said he had no tent. Sorry, that gets you zero sympathy out here. Sucks to be you if you don't bother carrying necessary equipment. Expecting shelter space because of your poor choices is as bad as refusing to make room for someone. I ate way too much of my food. I can't go to town tomorrow because rain will almost certainly blow in, it's 20 miles away, and both hostels are full anyway. So I'll have to stretch it until Saturday.