Date: 2017-06-20
From: Safford Notch camp ground

To: Stratton
Miles today: 10.0
Weather: overcast clouds

After a night of steady rain, the lack of raindrops hitting the tent fly when I first woke up around 5.30am suggested I wasn't going to have my vaunted on-trail zero, for which I'd been carrying an extra day of food.But given that I'd been here doing nothing since just after lunch the previous day, I wasn't too disappointed at the prospect of moving on. As anyone who knows me will have predicted, that didn't translate into action and I spent the next couple of hours "assessing the weather" (code for "snoozing and occasionally waking up to listen for raindrops") to be safe. When I woke up to find the sun casting shadows of the surrounding trees onto my tent at the far more civilised hour of 8am, I took it as a sign that the rain had indeed passed so I began packing up.But at pretty much exactly the moment when I'd moved all the various contents of my pack onto the wooden tent shelter, a steady rain began. Seriously? I pondered my options: throw all my stuff back into the tent and recommence my, er, "weather assessing" role? Or assume this was just a passing shower and move on. With town -- and all its benefits -- just 10 miles away, I chose the latter and that seemed rewarded when the rain petered out.After making my way back on a nearly level trail through the mud, boulders, caves and moose poop for the 0.3 miles back to the junction with the AT, I found that onward travel involved mud, boulders, caves, no moose poop but also absolutely and definitively no level trail either. The ridge leading up towards Avery Peak, the highest point of Mt Bigelow, was even steeper than it had looked on my approach to Safford Notch the day before -- and it had looked pretty steep then. But, like a lot of trails in New Zealand, the route ahead was tough but not cruel because it seemed to only be as tough as it needed to be to get where it was going and no more. Unlike some kiwi trails, steep sections were interspersed with short easier stretches that seemed intentionally designed to give the quads a short rest. Just to add to the mix, the rain returned and was became heavy enough to justify stopping to put on my WalMart poncho. It proved to be a tough day for clothes choices, and whatever choice you made, the weather would then immediately reverse. After donning my poncho and sweating my way up the grunty series of rock steps, the rain eased off but seemed to be just a minute away from starting once more so I kept the poncho on for much longer than warranted before finally stowing it.I was particularly grateful to be doing this ascent on rested legs rather than at end of the previous day, but even so it took two hours to cover the mile of trail from the notch to the summit, which might be a new record for slowness for me.Most of the mountains on the AT in Maine feature signs on their summits, giving the name and elevation. So after breaking out of the tree line and seeing the silhouette of a sign emerge through the scudding clouds ahead, I thought I'd finally reached the top. It turned out to be a MATC sign asking hikers to preserve the delicate alpine flora by staying to the trail. My impression that I could hear the echoes of previous hikers' profanities at the discovery, I was later to discover when comparing notes with the other sobos in town later that day, proved to be correct.With immaculate timing, the clouds then cleared and revealed a truly spectacular view -- as befits the summit ridge of the highest mountain since Katahdin. After several more similar signs, the actual summit came into view. At more than 4000ft, the wind was pretty cold so this time I donned my rain jacket in the leeward side of the old fire lookout tower right on the summit. The view justified the exertion of getting up here, as it almost always does. Supposedly Katahdin could be seen from here -- the first possible sighting for nobos, showing the end of their journey was finally something more tangible than an abstract theory -- but I wasn't sure if it was hidden by the clouds to the north east or if I was simply failing to identify it from among the serried array of peaks that could be seen. No longer having it on the horizon, taunting us by how slow the travel has been in Maine, was an equally important moment for this sobo.Any hopes that the descent might be easier than the ascent were quickly quashed as the trail towards Bigelow col traversed a boulder field left treacherously slippery by the rain. At the col itself, the sun came out and I took a short break on the porch of the former fire warden's cabin. A series of improved campsites showed this would have been a great place to stop, although I was happy not to be here during yesterday's brief thunderstorm.The next few hours featured a ridgewalk across the western peak of Bigelow and then over to the Horn, from which it dropped down to Horn Pond, site of another immaculately kept campsite and two lean tos, one built back in the early days of the AT but now only used for day hikers and another more modern version designed for thru-hikers.The trail had been remarkably busy, with a series of predictably skinny, bearded and fast-paced nobos passing through. The only sobo I passed with Poppa, a Virginia native who I'd first met on my first day of the 100 mile wilderness and who stood out for having two enormous cedar hiking poles. Passing him was hardly a unique experience because he was the epitome of the tortoise vs hare parable. Through longer days at a slower pace, as befits his 60-year-old physique, he'd been keeping pace with the main group of sobos. He'd already done 350 miles on the AT much further south, which helped explain why he had his trail legs while the rest of us are still gaining our own. It was good to have the chance to chat to him for a little longer than usual and he proved to be an interesting guy. He'd been married with a young child when he enlisted in the Army out of financial necessity. After doing the full 20 years, he went on to a second career as a bomb tech with the FBI and similar government roles. He was a little hesitant when I confided I'd been a journalist, but seemed a little more at ease when I explained that I was (a) retired, and (b) an example of one of the trustworthy hacks.From Horn Pond, the trail plunged down into the valley via a brutally efficient trail. The final three miles from an established campground on Cranberry Creek was almost flat and took just over an hour, flattering my otherwise snail-like pace of taking eight hours to do just 10 miles of trail. The first seven miles that day told a truer version of the story, with an average speed of just one mile an hour -- the same as I'd averaged through the snow of the Sierra back in 2006. From the road, I hitched into Stratton and found lots of familiar faces at the motel and a few others, such as Dragon, who I'd only seen as register entries. In true style, Poppa rocked up an hour or two later, slow but triumphant.Life is good.AT fact of the day: The increasing number of nobos we've been meeting have generally been dismissive of the difficulties of the sections they'd just done and we're about to encounter, suggesting that the main difficulties are well behind them and we're just a bunch of wusses. That's changed since the Bigelows, with most of them expressing both fear and concern about the section we're about to do from Stratton to Rangeley. It's only 32 miles but they've convinced me to change my plan from two days to two and a half. Gulp!