Date: 2003-08-13
From: Franconia Notch

To: Garfield Ridge Campsite
Miles today: 10.2
Weather: light rain

It was the worst of days, it was the best of days...As usual, the raging hiker appetite woke me. Chief and I broke our fast at Peg's Diner, where I had the Hearty Man's Breakfast - three eggs, coffee, pancakes, corned beef hash, wheat toast and bacon. Urp! I ate it all.As I left the table, I found a familiar face: Storywalker, a sectioner who I met last April hiking around Erwin with my buddy Ruth (Green Cove Gypsy). We'd met at Clyde Smith cabin, I think. The hiking world is a small one. Chief and I shuttled up the mountain with our lodging host, a darling, frail old man. But he breathed in a ragged and alarming manner. I was a little uneasy, and eyed the brake pedal in case he slumped over the wheel. Thankfully for all, such action was not required. Five minutes from the Trailhead, the rain started splatting on the windshield. I glanced back at Chief, sitting behind me. His face was dark as the sky. I sighed. We are so tired of rain. When we pull into the Trailhead parking lot, the rain is bucketing down. The old man grins at me and hands me the trunk key. "No sense in ME getting wet out there," he says. We dig out our rain gear in the drenching wet, and also pack covers, though they don't really keep the pack that dry. For true protection, I rely on the stout trash compactor bag inside my pack.We start at 1400 feet. Our highest point of the day will be over 5200 feet, Mt. Lafayette. That's a lot of climbing. And likely, for all that slick-rock, knee-wrenching work, we will see the same grey cloudbank that everyone else has.After an hour and a half of climbing, the rain tapers off. Relief. We've been walking in a running river the whole way up. Our moods are black. Chief is just plain furious, at the rain, at NH, at the mud. We come upon a white canvas tent on a wooden platform: the AMC caretaker. Unexpectedly, Chief calls out: "Is that Tin Man?A handsome young man emerges and returns the hail. Turns out he thru-hiked with Chief some last year. He warns us not to go onto the bare, exposed Franconia Ridge if there is a thunderstorm in the offing. Uhhh, it is thundering now...We rested and talked, then bade goodbye and promised to meet again at the Gathering this fall.We labored upward another hour or more, then stopped for lunch at a rock. We wonder what to do. It is still thundering. If we wait too long, we lose our window of opportunity. Stay or go? If we stay, what do we do? Stand in the rain in the trees?I've brought a sandwich from town, and Chief has turned me on to a children's candy, Skittles. It's not a bad lunch.As we are munching, Chief suddenly punches my arm. "Lookit there!" he exclaims. I look up. Blue sky, peeping though. We whoop and cheer on the cloud burn, but it shortly mists over. But we saw it - blue sky. We know it's up there.Fifteen rocky minutes after lunch, we break out of treeline, and see - sun. Sunshine! THE SUN!! SUUUUUN!!!There is blue sky busting out everywhere! We whoop. YES!!! It has been exactly THREE (count em, three) weeks since we last saw the sunshine. That's a long time to live in the damp and the slick. I've taken so many pictures of mushrooms and fungus that Chief teases me, saying I will have to put out the coffee table book "Spores Of The AT." No wonder we are cheering.I stop and apply sunscreen, which Chief believes to be optimistic but sure enough, the sun holds. The ridge above treeline is... what? "Vista" or "view" just doesn't convey the uplifting enthusiasm that comes from seeing the land spread out below you.We are giddy, goofy, punching each other's arm, jabbering enthusiastically, pointing "Look! Look!" like little kids. We can see stuff! Isn't it amazing how a little sun and view will perk you up? On top of the world, we are. Suddenly, thru-hiking looks like the best thing in the universe to be doing.The trail on Franconia Ridge is rocky and travels along a flattened knife-edge ridge. Slow-growing, rusty-topped rushes, sedges and blueberry bushes line the path, which is often delineated with stone. The blueberries are so thick on the small, tough bushes that they gleam dusky blue at you as you walk. We eat our share.The clouds tease us, obscuring the Trail, only to blow off and take our breath away at the view ahead. My god! The rocks! The sun gleams hotly on the boulders, encrusted as they are with a lime-green lichen. And there's Haystack Mountain, breaking through the whipping clouds. The perfect photo! Yet before I can get my camera unzipped and out, the clouds have blown back over it - only grey blah can be seen.It is The Dance of The Seven Veils, Franconia style.At one rocky outcrop, I stand into the northwest wind and let it pink my cheeks into a glow. Curious... clouds are blowing UP the mountain flanks AT me. The cloud ceiling below is crashing into the mountain then curling up the sides and rolling over me. Amazing.We summit our point of no return, Haystack, then Mt. Lincoln (5089 feet) then majestic Mt. Lafayette. The Greenleaf Hut gleams in the sun about a mile below the ridge. I am shooting pictures like crazy. I may have to buy another CF card for the first time on the trip.We summit our last peak and start down the backside of the ridge. It's SO much easier descending DRY rock, and we make better time. We can look across, down the saddle up the ridge to our next mountain peak walk - the stone knob atop Mt. Garfield, the tip just barely above treeline. It is so cool to be able to SEE where were are going, three miles away. I snap about a zillion pictures as I approach. A shutterbug starved for sun.We labor up the stiff climb. My step-up muscles are quivering. I believe I will finally start to be as "cut" as I was last year after the Long Trail. That hasn't happened out here on the AT yet, despite crossing the 1800 mile mark this morning. Last year, I left the Long Trail with a core strength such as I had never experienced in my life. It felt as if I'd had a internal girdle. I believe the Whites will do the same for me this year.We watch Mt. Garfield's stony knob grow closer and closer, until it is only three miles away as we descend Mt. Lafayette. Perspective is a marvelous thing.As we are descending, we meet a young adventurer out alone with full pack, about age 12, happy, confident, carefree. We comment on the boy's ease in the treacherous ridge. Fifteen minutes later, we met his brother and father, huffing up the ascent. We tell the father with admiration that his son is at the Skookumchuck Trail intersection; I mispronounce the name."SKOO-come-chuck!" he snaps crossly, correcting me. Thereafter, "Skookumchuck!" becomes our all purpose expletive and word of general exclamation, as in "Oh Skookumchuck, I've forgotten my whole roll of toilet paper at the last privy stop!" or just plain, unembellished "Skookumchuck!" It says it all.Another hour and a half, we come out of the Mt. Garfield krummholz and up to the tip of this singleton top. There is an old square tank or cistern at the very apex, empty. The remains of a firetower, long since torn down. We sit down on the south side, out of the wind and in the low, westerly sun, our backs to the tank, and enjoy the broad sweep of the Pemigewasset Wilderness below us. Birds of prey swoop well below our vista. We can look back on the Franconia Ridge, and ahead to our next day's climbing. We are walking in a bit of a "U" shape it seems to me. For maybe 20 minutes we sit, quiet, and look out. A junco alights, then a dragonfly buzzes by this high perch. It is by far the best part of an already fantastic day.Which is as it should be - a sunwashed end to the day.Dinner time closing in, we negotiate the wet rocks in the woods down to Garfield Ridge camp site. Before long, in come Freemont, Caddis, and Stoker.The icing was the big yellow moon, near-to-full but waning, rising like a beacon over the balsams. Everyone had fallen asleep, or was at least silent. The big moon lit the surrounding grounds, tossing shadows around. This was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, and I watched the sky for falling stars until I fell asleep.The perfect ending... the worst of days, the best of days.