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September 20 – Hiking Heartbeat: The Story of One Eventful Day
9/20
This was an extremely eventful day. Our plan was to go 12ish miles to a shelter. It was supposed to be an easy day, with low (for us) elevation gain. Easy miles, etc.
So the day starts with rain. It rains all morning; it was supposed to rain till about 6 a.m., but every time I hear raindrops, I just go back to sleep. I don’t have signal, and I’m just pretty tired, so there is nothing for me to do but sleep till about 9 a.m. Then I get a bit of signal and text Flamethrower; she’s too far away for me to call out to her. She has signal and shares some of her sweet, sweet Wi-Fi with me. I catch up with the internet and the weather. According to the radar, it’s not raining nearby. I decide that we must just be stuck in a cloud, and it’s peeing on us. It’s not a steady rain, so being just a dripping cloud makes sense in this valley. Eventually, we start packing and eat, etc. We’re out of camp by about 11. This is a very late start for us, but it’s an easy day, so we should still make it, assuming nothing goes wrong. (Narrator: a lot goes wrong.)
We pass Crash and Boomboom, hanging out with two other hikers at a stealth site; they already hiked a few miles today. We say ‘hi’ but continue on. Next, we find ourselves about 2.5 miles and over 800 feet of gain into our day. This is where we come across a bad scene. A section hiker, George, took a tumble off the trail. The trail was raised about 8 feet in that area because it was descending before wrapping around and was just a bit high. You could see his footprints in the soft ‘shoulder’ of the trail just before the fall.
A second man, Bert, is there trying to help his friend, the injured hiker. We’re told the hiker has a broken leg, and when he fell, he landed on his face. He’s lying on his back now, looking pale, clammy, and very out of it. He’s awake but not moving or very responsive. We’re told the friend turned him over to check to see if he was breathing. He also covered the guy’s ‘broken’ leg with a sleeping bag. Bert is on the phone with EMS. Soon, he’s off the phone and checking on his friend. He moves the sleeping bag to cover the guy’s whole body. At two points, the injured man croaks out his friend’s name, and at one point, he asks for help moving his injured leg. The man’s movements are jerky and spastic. We can’t help. We offer everything we have, but the guy has what he needs. After a while, seeing that we can’t help, we tell Bert we are going to hike on, and when we come across rescuers, we will direct the rescuers to him.
We hike up another 100 or so vertical feet and summit the ridge. While up there, we scout for some possible pickup sites for the helicopter, but there isn’t much—just rocky outcroppings. We take some hiking pictures and go slow. Within an hour, the helicopter has arrived and is circling the mountain. Unfortunately, the injured man is in dense brush and can’t be seen. We get to an outcropping and hope to see the helicopter deploy rescuers, but we don’t see that. Instead, it circles a bunch before flying down towards a road. I want to signal it, but how do you communicate that the injured man is 1.5 miles away?
Thankfully, with the sound of whistles in the distance, we think rescuers are nearby. We hike down to meet them. I meet a younger guy with a high visibility vest and a radio coming up and relay the relevant info about the injured hiker: basically, that he’s right off the trail 1.5 miles away on the other side of the ridge, with a possible head/neck injury. The only clearings are the rocks. He’s not in a ravine because you can easily walk right up to the injured guy, but he fell off the trail. It’s just a weird part of the trail where the trail was high and coming down to wrap around. Super bad luck/timing for a fall. At least the injured man is close to the trail and tree near the top. We tell the rescuer that he can’t miss them. So he continues on, and so do we.
Another 2+ miles later, we are passed by another hiker we know—a guy we met in Bethel. He reports that the injured guy has regained some mental composure and was able to do math problems, etc. This is great news because he was completely out of it when we left, and I was worried that he had a serious brain injury (he still can, but improvement is a great sign). We refill our water near the shelter and hike down to the road. I’m hoping for trail magic. I’m sorely disappointed when we come to a sparse dirt road, not a busier road like I was expecting.
To save time, we opt for a 3.1-mile road walk instead of a likely rooty and rocky 2.6-mile trail hike. Road walking is faster, and today if we catch a hitch, we’ll take it. Most cars speed by us, not even pretending they might stop.
Then, when we’re about a mile from the trailhead, Fae and Matt pick us up. They know of a different trailhead that’s a bit closer, and they take us down some crazy back roads with all kinds of bumps and rough terrain. They stop by a sign that says 1.2 miles connector to AT. I try to look, but there really isn’t evidence of a real trail here. If anything, it’s an overgrown mess. So the new plan is that they are actually going to the lake the shelter is on. They have a cabin right there. The only problem is there isn’t a trail, so we might have to bushwhack about .3 miles. We’re okay with that. They take us through some intense back roads that thankfully their pickup has no trouble handling. The community has no power supply but does have phone service, although you’d have to find a way to power your modem. They say some people have generators, but otherwise, there are no utilities out here. These cabins also have outhouses. That’s how primitive we’re talking. We are surprised by the number of houses; it’s a cute area for sure. We wonder how much a cabin up here will cost, but there is no way to get signal to find out.
Then they drop us off. We thank them and head into the woods. It’s a bit tough, but I’m following the footprints of the moose that came before me, and if a moose can get through here, you’d think two people could. Right? Yeah, after about 20 minutes of fighting, we both have soaked, muddy shoes from walking in a bog up to the middle of my calves, and it’s getting deeper. The woods are getting impassable, and we’re just done. I turn back, and Flamethrower follows. I want to walk in the lake around the lakeshore. It’ll be arduous, but we’ll get there. Well, that doesn’t sound like a good idea to Flamethrower, so we retreat to the road. Where we are now all alone. With no signal. Miles from the trailhead.
Thankfully, I have maps and GPS on my phone, and I know right where we are. I do some math and figure out that if we road walk 5 miles, we can get back to a trailhead. I choose a trailhead a bit ahead of where we are now. And we get to walking.
It’s a mile of walking before we are out of the community. My shoes squelch and drip water the whole way. I can see the water bubbling up through the tears that the rocky Whites put into my shoes in NH. I thank my lucky stars that I sent new shoes to Monson, and I only have about 40-50 miles of hiking before I can trash these torn-up gross things.
Once out of the community, the roads get worse. We’re now on a back road that consists of two tire wells and overgrown trees that might allow a small car to pass through. We have days of food and plenty of water. Even if this turns out to be a misadventure, we should be able to get back before we get into too much trouble. This is especially true because we can walk 20+ mile days if we had to.
Anyway, after a mile of following this road, another community road lets out onto it. And it looks a bit better traveled. Not much, but slightly more passable and less overgrown. My heart sinks when I see that the road we intended to connect with is barricaded off. I see on the map that there is a stream that runs by it, and I suspect it washed out. We talk about hiking up there anyway, but we don’t look past the dirt barrier. Instead, we follow the road the long way around. I’m heartened when the more traveled road turns in the same direction we are heading. All this time, Flamethrower is trusting me to not get us lost and not asking too many questions. I try to keep her up to date with the plan and what I’m thinking. She seems okay with it.
We turn with the road again. From the amount of wear on the road, I can tell most cars go the other way, but some cars go in the direction we want to head in. So we follow the road that way. We pass a bridge over that stream and stop for water. We both fill up completely. It’s getting dark, and we don’t want to run out. When we finally get to the intersection with the blocked road we wanted to travel, I can see that the tire tracks mostly move in the direction we want to head in. But it’s almost dark, and we’re about 1.6 miles from the trail. I tell Flamethrower I want to call it a night and camp right here, past the barricade on the road. Nobody is around; we’ve seen no cars, and I’m not guessing they are going to drive up now. But also, I don’t want an awkward midnight encounter with anybody, because we have no signal and nobody is around for miles.
It turns out the road slopes pretty badly beyond the barricade, and it’s just logs anyway, but they are pretty far off the path that locals would drive. I’m worried about some midnight drunk flying around up there. But the moose population is high enough to hopefully keep people off the roads at night. We’ve been seeing moose prints and droppings all over the place and all over the road. I kept hoping to see one, but no luck tonight.
Anyway, we set up our tents right in front of the barricade. It’s nice and flat on the gravel—so much better than last night’s actual campsite. We both have dinner. I cook from my tent while Flamethrower cooks while sitting on the logs.
It’s a dark night until the moon joins us, then it’s fairly bright. We hope for Northern Lights, but there aren’t any tonight; normally, we can’t see this much sky from deep in the woods. I take some time and look at the Milky Way and at the constellation Cassiopeia, which is sitting brightly overhead.
I slept a lot last night, and as a result, I’m not tired. Flamethrower, on the other hand, falls right to sleep, later recounting that she slept with no fear or concern about being ax murdered in the night. I eventually resorted to headphones and audiobooks. I fall asleep listening to a book I know well.
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Comments 1
Wow, that does sound like quite an ordeal! Sorry you had to go through and sorry about the hiker. But, thanks for taking the time to tell us all about it! Hang in there!