Wellesley in the World - Trail Bloopers, Vol. 1 (NJ to Salisbury, CT) by Allison Broadwater ‘09 and AJ
When we started the trail, we didn’t know much about backpacking. You could make a pretty convincing argument that we still don’t know much about backpacking. We still make mistakes, but we at least try to learn something from every time we endanger life, limb, and foodbag, while trying to not make the same mistakes over and over (I say, try). With this in mind, we’ve compiled a short collection of some of our more memorable screw ups for your enjoyment.
Bear(bag) Necessities
Hanging a bear bag is necessary in the woods. Anything that smells like food or, really, anything with a strong scent at all needs to be hung in a tree while you sleep or you’ll, at best, wake up to find mouse bites on your bags or, at worst, a bear in your tent. But you can’t just sling your bag-o-all-your-food over any old tree branch. There are guidelines to follow! The bag should be hung at least 10′ off the ground and 6′ from the trunk of the tree. In principle this seems easy: sling a rope over a limb, attach to bag, pull loose end of rope, and voila. But in execution, I’ve had… problems.
A lot of shelters along the AT have installed pre-hung “bear cables” that make the entire process much easier. Our fourth night on the trail, though, we finally had to hang our own and I got the chance to put to rest any lingering fears Allison may have had about my backpacking prowess. I took our utility cord, bags of food and such, and a hefty rock to a tree deep in the woods. With one end of rope tied to it, I heaved the rock gloriously over the branch. The rope immediately comes off and falls to my feet while the rock flies over the branch and off into the night. That’s fine. I grabbed a stick, tied a double knot and repeated. As I threw, the stick broke in half and the rope fell to my feet. Looking around to make sure nobody saw, I see Allison over at our tent sitting and watching the show- howling with laughter. I certainly convinced her of my prowess. I eventually just held one end of the rope and threw the bulk of wadded up rope over the limb.
I did things like that until about North Carolina, where I got the brilliant idea of attaching a heavy carabiner to the end of the rope instead of trying to tie it to a rock or stick. The first time I did this, Allison asks “what happens when it gets hooked to something in the tree?” What a nonsensical question.
Just outside of Bland, VA, Allison was in the tent and I went to hang the bags in the dark. With my headlamp, I finally found a suitable limb, even if it wasn’t very thick. With one great toss, the carabiner sailed over the limb, wrapped around two times, and (by what can only be explained by black magic) the carabiner clipped itself to the limb. Being days from any town and carrying all of your necessary possessions doesn’t afford you the ability to just lose things. But, after battling with the situation for far too long, I settled on reaching up as high as possible and cutting the rope- sacrificing a carabiner.
I got most of the rope back and grabbed the second (and last) carabiner, but now it was definitely nighttime. I settled for another nearby branch (this one thicker than the carabiner). I heaved it over and attached the bags. With my first pull on the free end of the rope, the supporting limb came crashing down. But not to worry, the next limb down caught the rope and was now supporting the weight of the bags. With another pull, that limb came crashing down as well because this is a forest of dead trees.
At this point, it was pitch dark outside, Allison was sure I’d been eaten by something, and everyone else in the camp was woken by my nonsense. I took the bags, looped then over a limb at arms length, and went to bed expecting a dead tree to fall on us. But at least I learned my lesson about carabiners.
It was about a month before we had to hang a bear bag again. But I was a pro by now. I grabbed the utility rope and carabiner. Found a branch that was too thick to hook the carabiner to, and heaved the rope over. It sailed up and over and, to nobody’s surprise, hooked itself to the rope. I now had it perfectly attached to the limb. With two people and four trekking poles, we managed to unhook the carabiner and get everything back and hang the bag correctly. But I’m no dummy, it only takes two screw ups for me to learn a lesson.
So we needed to hang a bag in NJ after a very long day. We got into camp well past sunset and I wanted to get the bag hung as quickly as possible. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but long story short, it hooked to the rope again and I just left it until the morning. By now though, we knew how to get it down. It’s been a couple of states since I got a carabiner stuck, so I feel like I’m on a roll. Hopefully I can remember it now. Yep, I only need to experience very negative outcomes of the same situation three different times to learn a lesson. But, I’m not the only one who showed their true outdoors prowess.
The Bear and the Maiden Fair
New Jersey has the largest concentration of black bears of all of the states on the AT, according to a stranger that we trusted implicitly. True or not, we certainly encountered more bears in that tiny state than anywhere else.
Walking all day has a few incredible effects on the body. Around 1pm, the most noticeable effect is an immediate and powerful hunger. It was about 1pm one day in NJ and we were desperately looking for a place to sit down for lunch. I was walking in front when I heard sticks breaking in the woods beside us and I look over to see, no more than 20′ away, a very large mother bear and 3 cubs. But not to worry! I had, just days before, finished a book on bear attacks and how to behave in just this situation. I stopped walking, put my poles out in front of me. I didn’t try to scare the bear off because, with her cubs beside her, momma bear would not appreciate an aggressive mammal. So I backed up slowly, not looking away but not making eye contact either. I calmly asked Allison to do the same thing, confident that we could get through this if we just followed the rules for bear encounters and let the family walk off into the woods and away from the trail and us.
Just as the momma bear was starting to walk away, I heard crunching behind me. Another bear sneaking up for a surprise attack? No, it was Allison eating butter toffee almonds, and the bears heard/smelled it too. Black bears have a nose more sensitive than a bloodhound, says Wikipedia, and their favorite food is butter toffee almonds mixed with humans, says a fact that I made up. Luckily the bears decided we weren’t worth the hassle and trudged off over the mountain. This is how people get eaten by bears. Dehydration, exhaustion, and constantly operating thousands of calories in deficit makes us do stupid things though.
Wet Hot American Summer or A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall
The AT has a season, just like any outdoor hobby, and it stretches about March – September. The majority of people start in March or early April. We didn’t start until the middle of April and we are moving slower than average. What this means is that we are sometimes the only “thru-hikers” on a given section of trail on a particular day. This gives us the opportunity to show off our hiking knowledge and feel good about our accomplishment when people stop and ask us about the trail. Sometimes we get big for our britches, though.
Climbing Roan Mountain in TN (a 6000’+ peak), we had beautiful weather but we knew we had to get up and over the mountain before a storm hit later that day. Almost to the summit, we came to a beautiful overlook. We could see for miles. The valley in front of us really wasn’t a valley, but more of a bowl, with two gaps in the sides. We must have gotten there at just the right time because we watched as fog and low grey clouds spilled in through the gaps to fill in the valley. It was incredible to see a storm building from this point of view.
We stood there longer and watched black clouds fill in next and we could see lightning flashing in the clouds. The other, lower mountain tops around us were engulfed by the storm, as it flooded through the opposing gaps. Just then, a couple of women out with a dog came past and said hello. They clearly didn’t realize what beautiful vista we were looking at, because they were so quickly walking (almost running) past. We said, “look at this!” excited that we could share our appreciation of nature with these day-hikers. Living in the woods all day, we know a good mountaintop vista when we see one. Nobody knows how to take in the beauty of nature like a thru-hiker.
They came and watched the building storm for about ten seconds before saying, “Yeah that’s beautiful. But we have to get to our car before it hits us.” Oh, right. We didn’t realize the fog that had set in around us over the last several minutes. Nor did we feel the light rain or see how close that lightening had gotten.
We took off in chase of the two women, trying to lose just a little elevation so that we would not be inside of the lightening storm when it hit. Just as we caught up to them, the skies opened and the hardest rain we’ve ever experience came down on us. The trail is weird in rain like this. The physical path of the trail is usually the path of least resistance down the hill. So, people as well as rain runoff will follow the AT off of a mountain.
The four of us waded through calf deep water and scrambled over rocks. The two women said that if we could keep up with them, they’d drive us into town to a hotel. We would have kept up with them to the ends of the Earth then. We could’ve been off the mountain and huddled in a shelter if we hadn’t taken 45 minutes to admire a storm that was clearly headed our way. But, we were rewarded for our stupidity with a nice, dry hotel room and delivery pizza.
There is No Spoon
There is a bit of friendly hiker competition at shelters sometimes. Who is the smelliest, who walked the farthest, who goes the longest between resupplies. Even if you don’t get sucked in, it’s hard not to feel a little judgement in these groups sometimes.
Allison was off at a wedding back in PA. I had left a lot of my gear with her: tent, food bowls, extra water filter. I was going for lightweight. What I mistakenly left with her, however, was the titanium spoon I had planned on using. I realized this my first evening, when I tried to make a rice meal. With a lot of genius brain-power, I managed to fold an empty packet of tuna into a rough spoon shape. Nobody was at this shelter at dinner time though, so I didn’t care.
Even at this point in the trail, Allison and I eat pop tarts for breakfast and sometimes have ramen for dinner. This is uncommon for thru-hikers, though, because most other hikers are burnt out on both. The following morning, I pulled out my crumbled pop tarts from my food bag and started picking through the crumbs. The two other guys eating at the same time started to put their breakfasts together, all while sizing each other up to decide who can be crowned King Thru-Hiker. Hiker 1 pulls out a bowl (like, a real kitchen bowl you’d use at home), a box of cereal, and reconstituted powdered milk. He digs in to his breakfast. Hiker 2, not to be outdone, pulled out a bag of bagels (not crushed, not smushed, but full and fluffy bagels) and a tub of cream cheese. We are, like, a hundred miles from a town. How long had he had cream cheese in his pack?! Hiker 2 was the clear victor and I (and my pop tarts) was the clear loser.
That evening, I was in the next shelter with the same people and I started to get dinner ready. Digging through my bag, I got out two packs of ramen, just as hiker 1 was putting the finishing touches on his dessert: blackberry milkshake (freeze dried ice cream, powdered milk, water, and blackberries he picked on his hike). Folding up my make-shift spoon , hiker 2 asked if I was going spoonless to save weight. What I responded with was inspired by three things: intense exhaustion combined with dehydration, the fact that we used to have plastic spoons until they broke, and probably a subconscious desire not to lose tonight’s thru-hiker competition. So, I said that my spoon broke. I immediately knew that it wasn’t what I meant to say, but I thought that would be the end of the discussion so no need to correct myself. Hiker 1 then asks what kind of spoon. I knew that this was my opportunity to correct myself and say “Sorry friends, I misspoke, I actually just forgot my spoon with my girlfriend.” But instead, I said “Titanium,” because of the three fore-mentioned reasons. Hikers 1 and 2 were stunned, “How did you break a titanium spoon?!” they demanded. Now I was in too deep and decided to just stop trying to explain anything and let them think that I snapped my titanium spoon (it’s stronger than steel!) while eating the world’s thickest peanut butter or something. I hope to never run into them again, especially now that I have my spoon back, or they might demand I show off my circus sideshow brute strength and snap our spoons in half.
(Dis)honorable Mentions
We’ve done so many other things over the last four months to jeopardize our hike but that post would fill a library.
We used a slow, laborious hand pump for 300 miles to filter our water. It was only after we sent it back home in favor of a Sawyer Squeeze that we realized the intake tubing had a hole in it and the pumping was taking about 5x longer than it should’ve because we were never getting good suction.
Allison is terrified of snakes. It is her weakness (use this information how you will). We see a snake almost every day, but we had managed to stay clear of any poisonous snakes until late in TN. The water source for the Mountaineer shelter had a nice waterfall. We sat and enjoyed the scene for about ten minutes before going back to the shelter refreshed both mentally and hydrationally. Not two minutes later somebody returns from the water and says, wide eyed, “you didn’t get water at the falls I hope, because there’s a water moccasin lying on the bank!” How did we miss that.
Well, that’s all we have so far. I’m sure we will have enough bloopers for several more volumes to come.
Other updates:
We are in Connecticut, about to cross into Massachusetts. We are at AT mile 1500 exactly. We’ve walked 2,720,000 steps in 121 days and burned 500,000 – 700,000 calories (on top of base metabolism). We are projected to reach Katahdin around the first week of October, then we will swing down to VA for a couple weeks to finish up the section we missed.
See everyone in the Fall!
AJ
Reposted, with permission, from Allison Broadwater’s blog. For context, be sure to read the origin story of this trip.
Mount Riga State Park has a pretty awesome trick up it’s sleeve. In fact, it may even be the park with the highest ratio of most visited to least interesting. That’s because to climb the highest point entirely within Connecticut, Bear Mountain, you’ve got to start in the State Park.
Far away in the north western corner of the state it sits, unmaintained and rather dull, knowing that people will pace through it regardless. Before we began our state park mission, we’d already done Bear Mountain, and so we were feeling a little bit of State Park fatigue by the time we pulled up to Mount Riga. We’d already jump started the car twice that day, and it felt like winter was drawing in at that very second, and so we gave it the most cursory of visits this time.
As with the rest of the valley, Mount Riga was highly involved in the iron ore industry, and you’ll find evidence in charcoal burning pits if you look carefully. It’s also a top hunting spot in the autumn, with plenty of dear and the occasional bear visiting the area. It’s also apparently home to a bunch of mysterious feral characters called “Raggies” who may or may not descend from Latvian Iron Forge workers in the late 1800s. But you know when you’re looking at Damned Connecticut to find something vaguely interesting about a State Park, that you are suffering severe State Park fatigue and it may be best to stop writing.
Mount Riga is basically a piece of land the State purchased to ensure public access to Bear Mountain, and it does that very nicely. But as the top of the hill is well outside the park, you don’t get a summit shot.
