Date: 2009-10-10
From: Carl A. Newhall Lean-To

To: Crawford Pond
Miles today: 16.6

Today turned out to be the craziest day of the wilderness, as we nearly missed our food drop, Big Camera had a slight case of hypothermia, and Jungli fractured her radius in three places. It turned out to be a big mile day, mostly because, as a group, we recognized that we had to get our food drop and then get the hell out of the wilderness. It had rained again at night and continued to rain in the morning, presenting a misty grey environment with very limited visability. After some very steep steps up the mountain, I passed the Sidney Tappan Campsite, presumably where Chef and Jungli had camped the night before. Then, we hit the huge peaks of West Peak, Hay Mountain, and the big one ¢ White Cap Mountain. Everyone who tells you that the 100-mile wilderness is flat is dead wrong. The terrain was especially difficulty given the heavy rainfall and crazy river fords, but I would imagine that it would be challenging without these as well. The plan was to make it down to West Branch Ponds Road for our food drop. As I was making my way down, I unexpectedly saw Chef climbing up the mountain.  Chef, what the hell are you doing?  He explained that he tried to reach Shaw s the night before, but the line was cut out due to the poor signal caused by the weather. But, during this short time on the phone, Chef had set a time to arrive at the road in the morning and the one owner of Shaw s assured them that the guy would be there to drop off the goods. So, Chef was climbing back up the mountain to see if he could get a signal to call again to Shaw s. After all, each one of us had completely run out of food due to the low mileage days and very difficult conditions, and we were anxiously looking forward to a replenishment.   Upon arriving down at the road, I saw Buttchinz and Jungli taking care of Big Camera, who was nearly hypothermic. He was shivering from head to toe and the girls were trying to keep him warm and start a fire. I assisted with the fire, gathering a seemingly endless quantity of birch bark, which happens to be the best kindling in the wilderness. The rain was still coming down quite, but not as hard as before, but the problem was that everything was completely soaked! But, we remained persistent and within 30 minutes, we managed to get a fire going. The guy with the food dropped showed up maybe an hour or so after I had arrived (the others were waiting much longer) and we were incredibly happy to have food again. The guy was at the road before the scheduled drop and then thought that he mixed up which road to drive on, so he went all the way to the other road and then back again. It was a bit of a mix-up, but to be expected given the isolated environment we were in. While waiting there by the fire, we also met a student from Dartmouth who was out hiking with the Dartmouth Outing Club, doing a relay of the trail all the way down to Connecticut. As a team, the DOC wanted to complete a large section of the trail. I handed off the postcards to the Dartmouth studet and he followed through at delivering them to the post office. Big ups to whoever you were! Chef came down the mountain a little bit upset about having to hike up the mountain again (and rightly so) and Beechucker followed soonafter. We reasserted that it would be best to pull some bigger miles now and get to Baxter State Park as soon as possible. Chef was the most assertive and said,  Well guys, from here on out, it will be a race to Katahdin . Chucks stayed behind at the East Branch Lean-To, where we all pushed on, having to ford another river, the East Branch Pleasant River. The water level was still very high, but I managed to rock jump the entire thing without getting my feet too wet. We continued and then made it to Crawford Pond by nightfall. I had hiked ahead of Jungli and was directly behind the BC s, who eventually found Chef just ahead and we all managed to camp together at the pond. I left a note for Jungli letting her know that we were just some 300 meters ahead. It had become very late and we were all worried about Jungli. She should have arrived at the camp at the latest an hour after we had arrived. Then, I started to think that she just decided to camp somewhere in the woods. But, why would she do that? She knew the urgency to push on. Anyway, some 1.5-2 hours after I had arrived, we saw a light turn the mountainous bend. We started shouting to her but she didn t respond. When she walked into camp, I told her that we were worried about her, at which she broke into tears. It was then that we saw the wood in her arm that she had used to splint her wrist and arm. When she was able to calm down, she explained that she was just hiking casually on one of the mountains, but she slipped and as she was falling, her hand was still stuck in the loop of her trekking pole and she fell awkwardly on her wrist. I have had some experience with broken bones in my life, so I inspected it and asked her if she heard a pop. She replied  yes . After inspecting the arm and seeing the swelling and knowing that she had heard a pop, I suspected that it was fractured. We all consoled her and helped cook her meal, change her clothing and get her to rest up in the tent. Chef and I stayed up late by the fire to cook our steaks. We sat there without saying too many words, just listening to the crackling of the fire. He looked up and said,  So, what do you think? Broken?  I replied  yes, I think so , but that we would know more in the morning. At that point, I told Chef that I would stay behind and get Jungli to help and that the others should continue to push on towards Katahdin. I would be giving up the hike to help a good friend and a member of the Vortex group.   We continued to sit there by the fire, chomping down on our marvelous steaks, which were grilled to perfection on small wooden twigs. We ll see what the  morrow will bring...