Date: 2010-10-04
From: Katahdin Stream Campground

To: Katahdin
Miles today: 5.8
Weather: broken clouds

Today is the day! Woke up with a start¢it was too light outside. Groan¢we all overslept. It was 6:15. My daughter, Erica, will be here at 6:30 to climb Katahdin with us. She had dropped me off at Springer at the start of this trek. I love the symmetry of her making the trip up here for the end. Before getting up I wished a happy birthday to my mom who passed away two years ago. If she had been alive while I was hiking, I'm sure she would have been worried and fretted through my entire trip. I'd like to think, however, that today she would have been proud of me, too.It was a cold morning in the lower 30's but we all unzipped and got moving quickly. As pokey getting up as I tend to be, I was on fire this morning. I think I set a new record quickly making breakfast and coffee and packing everything except what I was going to put in the daypack. Then walked up to the parking lot just as Erica pulled in. Joyful reunion. She was amazed at her new skinny mom. I've lost 76 pounds since she dropped me off at Springer seven months ago, going from a size 18 to a size 4. She stayed in Millinocket last night and had gotten up at 4:30 to make it here in time, stopping to buy a few 12" sub sandwiches for our lunches.Wild Poodle and I dropped off our backpacks at the ranger station, loaded borrowed daypacks with what we needed for the day, took some group pictures with Peru and Radar, and signed in at the trailhead register at 7:30. We gave Erica a trail name: "Legs" (she's tall and all legs) and teased her a bit about her five layers of mostly borrowed clothes. She didn't want to take any chances with her thin Miami blood and was wise to leave the thong bikini and sandals at home.Within a half mile, all of us were shedding layers as the sun and our hiking warmed things up. What a glorious day! Cool and crisp with clear skies and only the whisper of a breeze. We walked on pleasant trail moving gently uphill for awhile, replenished our water and took a snack break. Days hiking the trail tend to run into each other; one day being pretty much the same as the next with perhaps different scenery and weather but the mind numbing tedium of putting one foot in front of the other never changed. Today, though, we were on the final footsteps of the 5 million it takes to walk from Georgia to Maine. Today, the sights and sounds of the Trail seem to be as raw and beautiful as it gets.The elevation starts to sharpen as we make our way to treeline. We get up-close glimpses of other mountains through the trees which gave us a visual marker of how high we were climbing. Our trail-hardened legs hadn't figured it out yet. Still below treeline we started hitting some challenging rock walls. As we climbed up past the last trees, we saw an endless field of rocks leading up to the sky. We saw the tiny figures of Peru and Radar about a half mile ahead (and above us) which really gave perspective to how massive this climb was going to be.We stopped for lunch a little over halfway up. As we continued, our angle of ascent became steeper and steeper until it became a true hand-over-hand climb, as close to technical as you can get without ropes. I kept glancing back to see how Legs was doing. She's in excellent physical condition but, like the rest of us, was starting to feel the burn of this climb.One last push and we made it to the top of the false summit called the Gateway and onto the Tableland, a very rocky, relatively flat stretch about 1.5 miles from the true summit. Wild Poodle was quite a bit ahead of us as I was hanging back to stay with Legs who was no longer hiking with that Miami swagger and now had a distinctive hiker hobble. We danced on rocks for several hundred feet around Thoreau Spring as the trail in this area was waterlogged from all the recent rain.My heart started to thud as I spotted the Katahdin sign and with a quarter mile to go, I told Legs I'd meet her on top. The trail went up a little more with nicely placed steps and I bombed up them, very excited and all of a sudden very emotional. Peru and Radar were there and Poodle sang the theme from Rocky as I took my last few steps, touched the sign, rested my head against it and wept a few tears of joy. Yes!! Legs came up a few minutes later and with high spirits, the picture taking began.Radar videotaped my approach to the sign and using his long telephoto lens, also has a few clips of us climbing down from the Gateway. What a sweetheart to take the videos and post them for us. They can be viewed at the tail end of his website at:http://tjbaker.smugmug.com/gallery/14054589_sYDxB#1071484563_V5zdMWe spent about an hour at the summit. It was a heady moment. Then we started back down this most awesome of mountains. Peru and Radar were way ahead of us and Wild Poodle kept on pulling away, too. Legs and I lost about a half hour of time getting caught in a loop of old blazes right at treeline before we realized where the new reroute went. Surprisingly, going down wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The steep portion coming down from the Gateway was the only time I had a sense that I could actually fall off this mountain but with a little care and some butt sliding, we made our way down.The sun set and Legs and I headlamped the last mile or so to the campground. As we were walking through the woods in the dark, I remembered how afraid of the forest at night I was back in Georgia. Surely every predator in the area was getting ready to pounce on me. And now I was just blithely walking along, totally unconcerned. The comfort level and self-confidence I've gained on this trek is priceless. Then I realized that this was all new to my daughter. Like me, she's a city girl but now is in the wilds of Maine, had climbed her first mountain ever and I wondered if she was nervous hiking in the dark. She said she wasn't but wondered how I could find and stay on the trail in the dark. I guess that after 2,000 miles, it was just instinctive for me to follow the trail tread and blazes. They were as clear as could be to me but to her unpracticed eyes, I was working a miracle finding our way back.We signed out at the trailhead register at 6:30 pm. It had taken us 11 hours. We met up with Peru, Radar, Wild Poodle and two friends of Wild Poodle's, Holly and Paul, who drove up from Florida to celebrate our successful summit with us. They had wonderful cold fizzy drinks and a cake that said, "Congratulations! Are your feet tired yet?" Between the six of us, it was demolished pretty quickly.We picked up our backpacks at the ranger station, loaded into our vehicles and headed to Millinocket. We all had dinner together: big, rare prime rib and a nice tall whiskey drink for me. Lots of laughter and celebration, and then it was time to say goodbye. Kisses, hugs and a tear or two and then Legs and I went to our B&B and the others to their hostel.We had a picture-perfect day for summiting Katahdin. But not all days out here have been ideal. How do you sum up what a thru-hike is like? Interspersed through this journal are what I called "Trail Truths"; lessons that the trail taught me. These were things that crystallized from the simplicity of hiking every day. The epiphany moment, though, was when I realized that all these things were "Life Truths" too; they applied to everything. By stripping away the complexities and clutter of everyday life in the real world, it allows one to see the basic truths of life as a whole. They're life lessons that I want to carry back with me to the real world. The Trail has taught me to stay in the present, to just be; to give up the compulsion to control; to simply savor every moment. As you can see from this rather philosophical line of thought, you spend a lot of time in your own head out on the trail.When you're climbing a mountain in the dark, in the fog, with freezing rain stinging your face and your knees screaming in protest but you're having the time of your life, you'll know for sure then that you're a long distance hiker. Even with all the negatives, you will get breathtaking mountain vistas, awesome sunrises and sunsets, sections of forest that are so beautiful they don't look real, and feel fully, truly alive. Everything out here is contrast and balance. 2,000+ miles is a daunting number and the difficulty of the trail is not to be underestimated; however it has been one of the most personally satisfying things I've ever done.