Date: 2017-06-19
From: Carry Pond lean to

To: Safford Notch camp ground
Miles today: 13.0
Weather: broken clouds

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am not a morning person.So for me to not just be awake but hiking at 6am takes something special -- a town day, the prospect of food I haven't cooked myself or, as in today's case, an incoming thunderstorm. Despite the less-than-reliable reputation of weather forecasting in this state so far, the consistent forecast for this storm gave us some confidence that this one might actually transpire.And after the literally chilling effect of the last storm, the idea of hitting this one on the highest peak since Katahdin made us all keen to get to the next lean to, at the start of the ascent of Bigelow, before it arrived around lunchtime. But after four sweaty hours of hiking, we arrived at the lean to with no obvious sign that a storm was due to hit.A group of section hikers were present and they were a friendly and talkative bunch who were clearly enjoying themselves. One of their practices was to take turns reading aloud from a copy of The Lord Of The Rings.I opted to head on to the next site, Safford Notch campground, which was five miles further. It was uphill, but how difficult could it be? The answer was, predictably, difficult. But as I scaled a series of sloping slabs of bedrock similar to the ones that we'd found so treacherously slippery in the aftermath of the last storm, I was more than happy to find them bone dry and correspondingly grippy.After the usual series of false summits, the real summit of Little Bigelow Mountain arrived -- along with a view of how much steeper and higher the real peak was. By then thunder had started rumbling around the valley and dark clouds were building up to the south, so the higher peak could wait until sometime after the storm. The trail then decided to become tortuously slow, to the point where I wondered if I'd get to the campground, sited in the saddle between the peaks, before the storm hit. When the sign for the side trail finally arrived, I followed it through a boulder field -- including through a cave that had me assessing its potential as a weatherproof storm bastion -- and was inestimably happy to reach the actual campground.One other hiker was present and exchanged the briefest of introductions before I snaffled a raised wooden tent platform and set up my tent on top. Just as I'd shifted my stuff inside, the first few drops of rain began to fall. I zipped myself inside the tent, massacred the few bugs who'd managed to sneak inside and felt far happier than this simple serendipitous success should have warranted. The storm ended up being, as someone once described, as "a political storm -- promising a lot but delivering very little". After expecting a biblical downpour, the much-feared storm barely wet the tent fly before petering out entirely.I felt slightly cheated, but then I was happily ensconced in my tent at the wholly civilised hour of 2pm so I also didn't really care. The rest of the day was pleasantly indolent -- an on-trail nero during which I finally caught up with this journal but otherwise achieved nothing other than relaxing.Soon after dinner, the rain returned and settled in for several hours but never at the intensity of the infamous storm of a few days earlier. Would tonight's rain continue through tomorrow? I had enough food to take a full day off so an on-trail zero could become a reality.AT fact of the day:The other hiker at the campground when I arrived relayed that his mother and uncle had been struck by lightning but his father had been struck three times. With a thunderstorm imminent, this was not cheerful news. And his trail name? Lightning Rod.