The Mahoosucs Tried To Kill Me

I said all those nice things about the Maine woods last week, and then the Mahoosucs tried to kill me on the way out. I think they’re jealous, because while the Maine woods are amazing, the last eleven miles of the Appalachian Trail southbound in Maine are absolutely dreadful.

The fun started at the summit of Old Speck Mountain, with a harrowing descent down several steep, featureless rock slabs to Speck Pond. It would become clear that “a harrowing descent down steep, featureless rock slabs” is the main theme of this section, and these slabs serve as both a prelude to and variation on that theme, with not only tricky footing but a sense of exposure from their placement on the side of a cliff that appeared to simply drop away below my feet. I don’t think I could actually fall off the mountain here, but it constantly felt like I was about to. 

The Speck Pond campsite offers a gorgeous, nearly new shelter which my dumb ass didn’t sleep in because it was supposed to be clear all night, and I thought “hey, empty tent platform!” A tent is a very nice place to sleep unless it rains. I know this seems counterintuitive but think about it: even if your tent keeps the rain out (and few really do), you will be cozy and snug listening to the rain drum on the fabric above you precisely until the moment you need to do anything else, then you’ll be outside and wet. A shelter has the drawbacks of chilly drafts (sometimes), mice (usually), and snoring hikers (always), but at least you can stand up to get dressed. 

The night we spent at Speck Pond, the “mostly clear” weather forecast turned out to mean a huge thunderstorm and forty five minute tent-flooding downpour. Somehow one end wall of my tent got pushed in by a combination of wind and rain and started dumping all that water inside the “bathtub floor” that’s supposed to keep me dry. If I were making tents, I would probably call it a “boat floor” and then make sure I understood which side the water was meant to be on, but that’s just me. Some hasty mopping converted my tent floor to merely wet and my towel to soaked, which seemed like a fair trade. The initial deluge was followed by hours of steady drizzle that continually splashed off that lovely wooden tent platform and under the eaves of my tent, leaving me and everything else inside evenly damp, like a wrung-out dishcloth.  

Monday dawned… well, that’s not quite right. Monday failed to dawn, the air instead gradually became a uniform steely dark gray, like if a day were also a World War Two battleship. This is August 12th in the inland Maine woods, notoriously the hottest time of year in the hottest year any human being has ever lived through, and I was huddled in the cooking area wearing literally every (uniformly damp) item of clothing I have in my backpack and still shivering while I waited for water to boil for coffee. I sincerely think the temperature was in the forties, but I can’t prove it to you. The air was equal parts air and water, like Maxwell’s demon had gone on smoko and said we should work out how to separate them ourselves. It was hard to tell whether the air was making me wet or vice versa. Possibly both. I ate breakfast with Mica, who had slept in the shelter and “didn’t even notice it had rained.” I stuffed all my gear and several extra pounds of Old Speck Mountain’s finest drizzle into my pack and we set off.

The first thing we did heading south out of Speck Pond was climb Mahoosuc Arm, which is a mountain, despite the name. This climb is nothing much, because we were already basically at the summit elevation of Mahoosuc Arm, so I will reluctantly say: this part was fine. There is a viewpoint marked on our trail app near the summit of Mahoosuc Arm, and we stopped to admire the view. It was a uniform steely dark gray, like if a view were also a World War Two battleship, very close up. The air was so opaque it somehow felt worse to look at it than to stare at our feet. 

Which is a good thing because what followed the summit of Mahoosuc Arm was a descent down Mahoosuc Arm that the Far Out app describes as “one of the steepest on the Appalachian Trail, with the trail dropping 1500 feet from Mahoosuc Arm to the edge of the notch in just one mile.” That’s an average slope of about 28 percent, which if that doesn’t mean anything to you, picture the steepest street you’ve ever seen. Got it in your head? Pretty steep right? It’s way steeper than that. 

And the average slope here is made up of short stretches of merely steep descent punctuated by long stretches of high-angle bedrock, green with algae, running with water, and edged with a dubious assortment of loose rocks, roots, and mud. Every step is a split second calculation of weight, balance, counterbalance, friction, and gravity. Every step is a choice: go to the left? Go to the right? Is this slab too steep to inch straight down, or can I wedge my poles into some minute crevice in the rock ahead and send it? Will that mud on the edge help or just grease my shoes right down this next thirty feet of sheer rock face? 

An entire mile of this. Conservatively, at least one thousand seven hundred individual decisions. I’m not scared to do this kind of climbing, I’ve done a lot of it on both rock and ice, and I’m out here by choice. But it is mentally exhausting. Physically exhausting too, but the amount of sustained concentration it requires is really what made this mile of descent so draining. 

But guess what? Right after the steepest mile on the entire A.T. comes what is generally called “the hardest mile on the A.T.” That descent somehow wasn’t the hardest mile! There is a harder one, and here it is. This is Mahoosuc Notch, where the trail passes for about a mile along the bottom of a deep, narrow cleft between Mahoosuc Mountain and Fulling Mill Mountain. Over the centuries, every boulder that has fallen from either cliff above has collected here, in this tiny gap. And now, according to the sadist who routed this trail, it is our task to hike through them. 

The trail here allows only very occasional moments of what you could call “walking” or even “climbing” in any normal sense. It’s mostly a boulder scramble, over and under rocks that range in size from “large car” to “small house.” Again this goes on for an entire mile. It took me and Mica an hour and a half to get through it, and believe me, we are absolute beasts at this kind of thing, especially for a cold, wet, and slippery day. Two hours is the standard estimate. We met other hikers who reported that it took them between “four hours” and “what day is it now?” 

Honestly, I can imagine the Notch being fun. On a sunny day, if you hiked up the Notch Trail from Success Pond Road just to do that one mile of scrambling, full of high calorie town food, clothed in dry sportswear, carrying a tiny day pack with some candy and a bottle of water? Sure. It would be a great time. Even as titanically Not In The Mood as I was that day, I will say it wasn’t my least favorite part. But I would still like to meet the person who decided the trail needed to go down Mahoosuc Arm and through the Notch, so I could earnestly and thoughtfully punch them in the face.

You’d think all that would be enough for one day, but we haven’t even made it to lunch yet. After the Notch we climbed Fulling Mill Mountain (steep, slippery) then descended Fulling Mill Mountain (ibid.) Then we stopped at a shelter for lunch, and commiserated with everyone else there, who were all equally Going Through It, whether northbound or southbound. Then we climbed the hundred false summits and sloshed through the endless poorly-bridged alpine bogs of Goose Eye Mountain. Every time we reached an open part of Goose Eye Mountain the cold wet air roused itself into a furious rain and wind. Once I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned to see Mica, halfway up a twenty foot cliff scramble, with his poncho flipped over his head and trapped under one knee. He got untangled and gave up on any pretense of remaining dry or slightly warm, in the interests of safety. In between the many false summits are alpine bogs with mud up to four feet deep, which are traversed by a series of bog bridges that are mostly either broken, sunk invisibly somewhere between one and twelve inches deep in the mud, or absent.

In fact the actual summit of Goose Eye Mountain is at the top of what appears to be a deep mud bog that is somehow simultaneously a steep cliff. The creative trail maintainers of the Appalachian Trail Club invented a bog board that has rungs nailed across it, so it can also function as a ladder. If you think I’m making this up, I don’t blame you. I would also think so. But I know it’s real. I climbed/forded it.

Finally, after descending Goose Eye Mountain (steep, slippery, plus deep mud) and climbing over Mount Carlo which wasn’t even mentioned in our guide, we stumbled down the steep, rocky third of a mile side trail to the Carlo Col shelter, which is just a half mile from the New Hampshire border. We had traveled eight point eight six miles, and it took us just over ten hours. Over fifteen thousand steps, every single one of which had to be precisely judged and executed to avoid potential consequences ranging from drowning in mud to breaking my neck. I have been more exhausted in my life, but not often. 

The next day, Tuesday, also failed to dawn. And in that last half mile to the border, Maine still had a fifty foot boulder scramble perched on a cliffside for us. We laughed at it. “Ha ha!” we said. “You didn’t kill us yesterday and you won’t do it today either. We have hiked two hundred eighty two miles of you, Maine, and that’s enough.” We stood in the mud pit at the border and another hiker took our picture, and then we left Maine.

I’d like to say that as soon as we entered New Hampshire the skies cleared, the air warmed, the birds started singing, and the sun came out. I’d like to say the trail improved noticeably, with actual dirt often found between the roots and rocks. I’d like to say I was able to spread out my still-soaked tent in the sun at lunch and hang up all my soggy clothes to dry. And in fact, all of those things are exactly what happened.