#218 Imp Campground to Carter Notch Hut - Day 138: ATMM 1886.7 to ATMM 1897.5
We pull ourselves upward and onward, rock after rock, using roots, tree branches, cracks in the rocks, and even one other – whatever it takes to carry ourselves up and over the next boulder.........
8-25-2015
We wake the next morning to thick clouds that have decided to nestle themselves on our mountain. Visibility is extremely low. We can sense the oncoming rain.
We cook our breakfasts beneath the old tarp and nearly get all our gear into our packs before the rains set in, but not quite.
I head into the shelter to put my boots on. Inside, I meet a young guy named Nathan, who’d recently graduated high school and is hiking from Maine to Georgia. Since he had such a late start in the year, he’s hiking from north to south to avoid the autumn snows on the north end of the trail.
Problem Child comes over to talk with us, it turns out that she is familiar with his hometown and know some of the same people he does.
On the trail, climbing becomes very difficult. We struggle up vehicle-sized rocks, which are slippery due to the rain, making them even more difficult and dangerous to maneuver.
We use our hands as much as our feet most of the time as we pull ourselves upward and onward, rock after rock, using roots, tree branches, cracks in the rocks, and even one other – whatever it takes to carry ourselves up and over the next boulder, as we inch our way along.
On top we find a hundred yards of flat summit, where we rest and grab a snack, before going down, down, down the other side in like manner.
Then we’d go up, up, up again.
On top of Wildcat Mountain Peak A, RoadKill and I sit on a wet rock looking over the map.
I look up to see a thru-hiker coming across the top of the mountain. His eyes hit mine, and we share a moment of confusion that comes when recognizing someone, but not immediately knowing why.
“NotYet, right?” asks a rain-soaked hiker who’d just climbed up.
I respond “John? You’re still on the trail!”
I’m surprised he remembered my trail name. (Not Yet was my trail name at the time, picked up five years earlier in The Hundred Mile Wilderness. I was renamed Sprawl inside a shelter in 2017 in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee)
I’d met him on the trail in Georgia back in April, when I was on the trail for a week with Mosey, Jeff, and Problem Child. He and I were hiking near one another just south of Blood Mountain when, in the course of about a minute, the sun disappeared, the temperature dropped dramatically, and hail pummeled us. Mother Nature gave us just enough warning to drop our packs, hover over them, while holding our rain jackets over ourselves to block the beating we would have taken if we hadn’t read the signs.
I was on the trail a few more days. He’d had been hiking north ever since.
And now, four months later, Problem Child and I are standing on the same trail, nearly two thousand miles north, with a guy we met earlier in the year.
We talked for a while then parted ways.
I begin thinking the months between then and now - other trips with friends and with family I had taken since April, all the work I had done in my business, all the days spent at home.
All the while, John, now known on the A.T. as “Juice,” had been plugging away on the trail; knocking out mile after miles, state after state, with the hope of reaching Mount Katahdin in Maine.
He’s about three hundred miles away from his goal of completing the twenty-two-hundred-mile-long trail.
