Date: 2017-07-26
From: Potaywadjo Spring Lean-to

To: Rainbow Lake Campsite, ME
Miles today: 22.0
Weather: clear sky

There are many scenic views along the AT. They are part of the reason for hiking the trail. But eventually they begin to follow a pattern: distant green ridges; rows of mountains fading from darker blue to distant pale blue; waterfalls of differing height and width and angle of descent; pretty lakes. Some hikers stop taking photographs of them - I know that I take fewer with every passing week. A sign pointing off the trail saying "Scenic overlook - 0.3 miles" is likely to be overlooked as too much of an investment for probably insufficient return. But here I am today perched on a narrow rock outcrop, a little ways off the trail, on top of a small mountain, and I am looking at a scenic view that in some ways captures it all - it's sunny, and there's a beautiful calm lake below, with wilderness woods all around. But dominating the scene is a ridge of mountains, the highest elevations we've seen since the Whites, and the highest one, at the end of the ridge, 16 miles away as the crow flies, is what has been to me almost a mythical creature - what the Penobscot tribe called 'The Greatest Mountain'. It is Katahdin.Aidan may have turned 20 in April, but in many ways he's still a teenager. Getting him ambulatory in the morning is a lengthy process. He will ask for extra snoozing time. He will say he's getting up but you'd need to be Sherlock Holmes to find evidence of it, if it were true. This morning was no exception. Everybody else had left the shelter before we did. This does my competitive juices just no good at all. 7:54? What kind of time is that, with a target of 22 miles to meet?First of all, I have to head out of the shelter the way we came in, rejoin the trail, and circle around the shelter until I pick up the blue-blazed trail leading to the trail from our tent-site, to avoid missing that small piece of the trail between the entrance to and the exit from the shelter and invalidating the purity of my AT experience. (Of course, we won't talk about Charlie's Bunion down south, when I went off-trail for a view and returned to the trail further north than where I'd left it.) Today's hike led us past many ponds, lakes, rivers and waterfalls. We saw lots of other hikers, both NOBOs and SOBOs. We kept running into Coins, an Essex man who is returning to England, after section-hiking from Harpers Ferry, to become a lawyer. Poor chap. I felt like warning him, but he is set on being doomed. We also met Zebra several times. She's a young lady from Poland who travels at a seemingly tranquil pace, stopping to take swims and long lunches, yet annoyingly is always overtaking us when we stop for the most trifling reason, like blowing our noses. She started on March 29, so she has really chewed up the miles from Georgia.Aidan continued to suffer from knee problems on descents. He even resorted to my old trick of going down backwards. Luckily there were not too many downhill stretches. We had to climb up Nesuntabunt Mountain, which peaks at just over 1,500 feet. We had dismissed it when we studied it on the map, but climbing the rocky gorges to the top got my heart rate elevated and it was not at all a 'nothing' climb. It was from near its peak that we saw Katahdin, still 36.3 AT miles away.Going down, Aidan was in such pain that I took his backpack on top of mine for ten minutes. When he objected, I said that it gave me boasting rights on my trail journal. "But that makes me look weak", he protested. I didn't object too strenuously when he said the trail had leveled out and I could relinquish his backpack. At that point, we had 8.8 miles left of our 22. Ordinarily that would have taken us 4.4 hours. But the trail was mostly flat, although with tree roots obstructing the way for most of it. Aidan went into hyperdrive, and at every waypoint where I could measure our progress, we were topping 3 mph. Just try doing that for almost 9 miles with a heavy backpack on a hot, humid day. He said it made him miss his cross country running days. I said it made me miss riding in cars, or being moved anywhere by drivers of buses or taxis or trains, or by pilots of aircraft.We whanged into the campsite ahead of schedule, shattered. It is right by a lake, with a spring providing cold, clear water. We both guzzled bottles of it, unfiltered. I guzzled tons of food. The mosquitoes guzzled on us. We hid in our tent and listened to their predatory high-pitched buzzing. Thank goodness for bug spray, leggings and headnets. Tomorrow we journey to the base of Katahdin; on Friday, we climb to the peak. The long march north is almost over. Tipperary