Date: 2014-08-03
From: South Arm Road, Andover, Maine mile 246.8

To: South Arm Road, Andover, Maine mile 246.8 
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

My Dad used to occasionally mention Wrong way Corrigan, the pilot who gained national repute in 1938 for filing a flight plan to fly from New York to California and ended up in Ireland. I now have some empathy for the fellow. He made the trip in a patched together plane that the federal aviation authority did not consider safe and would not certify for ocean flight. The media hyped his story and New York gave him a ticker tape parade when he got home that drew a bigger crowd that Charles Lindberg's parade. I was scheduled for the Andover Hostel shuttle driver to take me back to South Arm Road and slackpack south for 10 miles to East B Hill Road where the shuttle would pick me up and bring me back to town. Although that was the schedule and what I had written down, I had filed in my head that I would be let out at East B Hill Road and walk north 10 miles to South Arm Road. I followed my false assumption and started hiking north retracing my steps climbing three long hard miles back to the top of Old Blue Mountain before I realized my mistake. I have read a good bit about confirmation bias in Skeptical Inquirer and literature on political beliefs, but my stupid mistake today gave me a personal experience of its power. Confirmation bias is the term for the tendency we all have to twist the facts we observe to match our beliefs and if we cannot twist the facts enough to make a match to ignore them. The tendency applies to religious beliefs, political beliefs, pseudo science beliefs, conspiracy theories, racial prejudices, and anything else we humans convince ourselves we know. I believed that I was getting out of the car at East B Hill Road and hiking north to South Arm Road. Therefore when I came to the rebar steps up a rock face that looked familiar, I commented to myself how unusual it was that the layout of steps on this trail so resembled the steps I had climbed down the day before. About one quarter of the way up the hill I came to a lookout over the road we had taken into the trailhead and the stream beside it. The vista so resembled the lookout I had stopped at coming down the mountain the day before that for a moment I questioned whether I could be retracing my steps. I took out my camera and pulled up the picture I had taken of the vista yesterday and compared the picture on the camera with the actual vista until I convinced myself that there were some slight differences in the two. As I hiked on I made plans to post the prior day's picture of the vista over South Arm Road next to the picture I had just taken of what I thought was the vista over East B Hill Road in my trail journal pointing out how remarkably similar the two views were. Later I came to a large thin slab of granite along the trailside that made a unique drum like sound when the metal tip of my hiking pole hit it. Again I remarked to myself how unusual it was that two rocks on two separate trails made such a similar unique sound. It was only when I reached the summit and read the sign announcing that I had just climbed back to the top of Old Blue Mountain that I suddenly realized the mistake I had made and the mental gymnastics I had taken myself through to make the clues that should have made me aware of my error earlier match my false belief. I am irritated about stupidly wasting a day and re-hiking six hard miles, but I now have a much more vivid understanding of the power of confirmation bias and perhaps I have learned to be a bit more humble about what I think I know. The hike was pretty. My new boots felt comfortable and worked well. Practice improved my skill on the steep, slippery descent down Old Blue Mountain. Instead of the four falls I had the first time I climbed down it, I only fell once. I had a delightful supper with Tom "High Loon", a 50+ retied attorney from Columbus, Ohio who is finishing his northbound hike. I have a book on my to-read shelf, "Praying for Sheetrock". He has a relative who plays a role in the rural southern community's shakedown of outsiders. In that context he really liked my stories about Judge Anthony Eddings of Beaufort County.