Date: 2011-08-11
From: Carlo Col Campsite 

To: Stealth spot near the summit of Old Speck Mountain
Miles today: 10.6

(In which I manage to hike through the Mahoosuc Notch without dying)When I wake up I'm still in Maine, and when we start down the trail it is still wet and steep. A few of the worst sections have wooden ladders and metal hand rungs, but these are rare and often stop before the difficult patch is over. "It's like, helpful, helpful, helpful, ok now die," Doc Boom narrates as the handholds end halfway through a particularly treacherous section. We try to be as careful as we can but Trashcan slips and falls coming down a wet steep rock face. His fall is cushioned by his pack, and he fortunately escapes with only a scrape, but we are all reminded that no amount of caution can go very far to mitigate the risk of traveling over such slick terrain.Before we hit the Mahoosuc Notch we meet two brothers headed southbound, Clay and Tyler of The Brothers Three. Clay has scrapes along both of his arms, and when I ask about them he explains that he just got them when one of his handholds slipped as he was climbing through the notch. For his part Tyler has deep, wide scrapes covering one leg and thigh, and has a bandaged, bleeding finger. The finger, he explains, was a casualty of the steep one mile Mahoosuc Arm just north of the notch. The scrapes are from slipping on a steep bald rock just like the one I slipped on yesterday. Like me, Tyler had no way to self arrest his fall, shooting straight down the smooth wet rock. Tyler was unluckier than I was, sliding 20 feet and then falling of a small ledge. "It really shook me up for the next hour," he says, which based on my own experience I take to be an understatement.The day is sunny, but when we get to the notch itself we see that many of its rocks, like the ones above, are still wet from the night's rain. The notch involves little in the way of overall elevation change, but is instead a one mile scramble through a jumble of giant boulders, many of which are twenty or thirty feet on a side. Beneath some of the boulders I can see ice, still unmelted from winter, and I can feel the cold chill of the air. Almost immediately I encounter a gap between two wet, slanted boulders that I cannot easily cross. Being shorter than Doc Boom and Trashcan I have to search longer for other toeholds, and am eventually forced to raise my risk tolerance in order to make progress.Trashcan, in the lead, forges ahead, but Doc stays around and makes sure that I get through the tricky sections and offers advice on which areas to try and which to avoid. Unlike most of the AT, where there is a single narrow path, the trail here offers numerous different alternatives up, over, around and under the maze of boulders. When we come to a split we each investigate one path and report back on the estimated difficulty before deciding which way to go. The paths under the boulders typically require taking off one's pack and pushing it ahead while crawling over wet, muddy rocks, and since neither of us has yet had to take off our pack while hiking, we avoid those routes, preferring the ups and overs.Several times midway through rock climbs I find myself without any reachable hand or footholds, and when there aren't any other viable routes for me to take, Doc braces himself and creates a handhold or foothold for me with his hand. Going over one of the trickiest sections that would otherwise require a long and narrow mud crawl, Doc climbs ahead and holds onto a tree and I place one foot on his extended foot and grip his extended hand in mine so that I can pull myself up.The mile takes us an hour and forty minutes, one of my slowest miles ever, but we finish without either of us having fallen and without any injuries to self or gear, which seems like a success. The notch is followed by the steep climb up the Mahoosuc Arm, which consists mostly of the long, wet rock faces of the sort that Tyler and I slipped on. The rocks are often alongside trees, however, and while hiking alongside the trail is considered bad form since it contributes to trail erosion, here I do it whenever possible to avoid the slick rocks.Trashcan is waiting at the top of the hill, having completed the notch in less than an hour. We head over to the next shelter for a break, but since it has a fee and none of us have yet paid to set up a tent or sleep in a three-walled shelter, we don't consider staying. At the shelter I meet Guinea Pig, a section hiker who fell and sliced her ankle in the notch and then passed out for what she thinks was half an hour before coming to, creating a makeshift bandage and hobbling to the shelter. The caretaker dressed her wound and she seems to be doing well, but her story makes me glad that I didn't go through the notch alone.For those who enjoy the challenge of the AT, the Mahoosuc Notch and other difficult sections of the trail in Maine provide a novel and exciting way to push one's limits in ways other than simply by hiking long and fast. But for those like myself who have different motivations, sections like the notch provide unwelcome difficulty and nontrivial risk of injury. If the entire Appalachian Trail were like what I've seen of Maine so far, I confess that I would have little interest in hiking it, preferring a less stressful lifestyle in which I do not have to fear for my life or limb with every footstep and hand placement. But having come this far, it seems inconceivable to stop now for anything less than a debilitating injury. I only hope that the terrain becomes a little more forgiving so that the risk of such an injury becomes a bit more remote.We hike up another steep climb from the shelter to a stealth spot near an open and uncovered observation tower. I had hoped for another fire tower with a roof, but one look at the bare platform is enough to convince me to set up my tent. Even though we hiked less than 11 miles, those 11 miles required a full day of hiking without much in the way of breaks. My arms and shoulders are sore from so much climbing, and I am mentally exhausted from watching every foothold and trying not to slip. There are 270 miles left to go, and with miles like these I'm glad that I have plenty of time to finish them as slowly as I want.