Date: 2022-08-07
From: ME 27

To: East Flagstaff Road
Miles today: 16.7
Weather: few clouds

We slackpacked the Bigelows today. The Bigelows are the last of the 4000 foot peaks (until Katahdin) that started with Killington in Vermont.The shuttle from our camping spot in the woods to the northern trailhead took almost an hour. In recent years the Native American tribe took back control of a road between Stratton and East Flagstaff. Depending on who¢s telling the story, the road has been closed for different reasons. Whatever the cause, it changes the shuttle from a 20 minute ride into a 55 minute one! The price goes up accordingly!Shawn was our shuttle driver. He was a local who moved away and then came back to the area several years ago. I was recounting my haircut story to Leg on the ride to the trailhead. ¢I thought I¢d ask the lady at the General Store if there was a place in town I could get my hair cut.¢¢See that green door across the street? Go see if she¢s there. She doesn¢t usually do walk-ins, though.¢¢So I walked in and she sat me down and shaved my head. Fifteen minutes tops.¢, I said to Leg.¢Adrianne cut your hair!?¢ Shawn asked. ¢I¢ve know her for 20 years  I¢ve called a half dozen times and left messages. She¢s never called back. She¢s never cut my hair!¢¢I guess you should just walk in!¢, I suggested. Because of the long distance, we didn¢t get started hiking until 9:15. That¢s a late start for a 16 mile day. Water was scarce (Maine is in a drought) and the climb to Little Bigelow started when we stepped into the woods. It wasn¢t ¢steep¢ by our definition but it was a 2 mile climb.Avery Peak (4049) was a bit less than halfway into our day. It¢s peak is above tree line and has clear views to the horizon on all points of the compass. Flagstaff Lake was below us to the north. Route 27 and Carabassett Valley stretched out to the south hemmed in by the Crocker Peaks and Sugarloaf Mountain beyond. Moxie Bald, 55 trail miles north, stood proud. The mountains to the far north retreated into the haze. I spent several minutes trying to discern Katahdin in vain. Most of the hike between Mount Bigelow and the descent after The Horns was a high ridge walk through evergreen forest. Ferns and Mayflower grew among the thick moss on the ground while the canopy above filtered the sunlight through leaf and needle. The spruce and fir here, with the occasional paper birch, create a forest of fractals; trunks to limbs to branches, then twigs and needles. The sound gets combed out of the wind as it moves over the ridge. The forest here seems old, slow moving, yet ever-changing. It is a quiet forest and, despite my best efforts to tread through silently, I could not match the forest¢s stillness. I felt clumsy, felt like an imposter.¢¢¢¢¢¢¢¢-Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over ¢Burnt Lands,¢ burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man¢s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,¢to be the dwelling of man, we say,so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,¢not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,¢no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie therethe home this of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites - to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping from time to time to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star¢s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,¢that my body might,¢but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!¢Think of our life in nature daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,¢rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?Excerpt from: "The Maine Woods" by Henry David Thoreau.¢¢¢¢¢¢¢¢¢¢¢We found our campsite from last night close to 7:30 as the day¢s light was failing. Leg, who had been hiking around us all day, called to let me know he was about 15 minutes to the road. We waited on him before getting back on the shuttle and heading H.O.ME. We arrived at the hostel about 8:00. Three DiGiorno¢s Pizzas were for dinner. We yogied some chocolate and cheesecake for dessert. Showers. And glorious, dark, mattressey, silky bed.