Date: 2017-06-16
From: Bald Mountain Stream

To: Bald Mountain Brook lean to
Miles today: 8.0
Weather: light rain

Forgive me trail gods, for I have blue blazed.The AT, as most people know, involves a gazillion white blazes on trees, rocks, street lights and even a canoe to mark the way from Maine to Georgia. Other trails are marked in blue, and following them -- rather than The One True Way -- is known as blue blazing. Many people look down on such actions.(There's an entire lexicon based on this theme. Yellow blazing, named for the yellow paint marking US roads, means to skip bits of trail by taking a road, whether by driving or hitch hiking. Pink blazing means.... Well, let's just say it reflects the way men vastly outnumber women on the AT, the effect that disparity has on some of the former when it comes to pursuing the latter, and also helps explain why the imbalance exists in the first place and both exacerbates and perpetuates it.)In my defence, it was bone-ass cold, with driving rain and howling winds, and when the AT -- of course -- went directly over the top of Moxie Bald Mountain, I opted for the far more sheltered and barely 0.4 shorter bypass trail, which quickly intersected once more with The One True Way.To be entirely honest this isn't my first blue blaze, since I've sometimes gone to a lean to via a short side trail for sobos and then rejoined the AT via the separate side trail used by those going in the other direction.The AT definitely attracts some trainspotter-style obsessiveness in some of its adherents, to whom what I'd done is nothing short of heresy. My own AT philosophy, as in most of my approaches to life, is simply to have fun out here and to have a continuous line of footsteps between the Canadian border and Springer Mountain, the trail's southern terminus in Georgia.Today was certainly a day when the "having fun" brief was a tough one to fulfill. Sometime around 5am, I'd heard the first drops of rain on my tent as a cold steady drizzle set in. I waited in the hope that it might blow through but by the time I packed up around 11am, the downpour continued unabated.This ensured it was a very fast and efficient four miles to the next lean to, Bald Mountain Pond, where I found all the others in attendance. Unaware of my inclination for craven prevarication, they all thought I was way ahead. By that point, I was already pretty wet, despite my modified WalMart poncho, and was only warm because I'd been motoring along as fast as I could go.They offered to make room for me in the lean to, where they were passing the time playing cards and telling stories, and it was an appealing offer since it seemed like they'd have a fun afternoon. But I'd also done just four miles that day and was already in wet-weather mode. After weighing up "comfort vs progress", I headed on, knowing that the Bald Mountain Brook lean to was just four more miles and the mountain in between here and there was not as high as the one that followed.I was glad that my fitness levels are getting back to more like how they were in New Zealand rather than in the UAE because I was able to head up Moxie Bald Mountain at a fast enough pace to stay warm. The terrain -- ribs of ancient rock still showing the scars of where ice sheets covered this area millennia ago, now coated in lichen forests -- was beautiful, although I'd need to be in different weather to fully appreciate it.Instead the weather was of a kind that encouraged me to take the bypass trail. Two miles after that, I reached Bald Mountain Brook lean to and found it entirely empty. Once I stopped, the exertion that had been keeping hypothermia at bay also stopped and within a few minutes I was shivering so I set up my stove to make potato soup and got in my sleeping bag.An hour later, it was a surprise when everyone else began to rock in, bearing markedly similar tales of horrendous conditions on the mountain. Pan and Tink were followed by Boss and Sweets and then Rapunzel and Wrongway, arrived, having improbably been motivated into leaving the warmth and comfort of the shelter by Jake, a 23-year-old former Marine who'd done 22 miles that day.It was particularly good to see them because while lying shivering in my sleeping bag earlier, I'd been taunted by imagined scenes of them having a raucous rain day party at the previous shelter. Life is good.AT fact of the day: On the PCT and CDT, I could have simply stayed put during instances of rainy weather and, with the benefit of hindsight and ignoring the problem of running out of food, in each case it would have added only a week or at most two to how long it took to complete the trail. Something tells me the AT is a whole different beast.