After the first 28 miles of a 46-mile run across the Appalachian Trial in New Hampshire this summer, I was nearly dead. Aidan and I were both drenched with sweat, red in the face from the 90-degree heat and 99 percent humidity, and sprawled on the ground in an effort to let our legs stop rattling from the bone-jarring tromping over rocks and roots and dirt.
We’d run from Hanover to Wentworth that July morning, crossing over several 3,000-foot-tall mountains for a total elevation gain of 7,000 feet. And we were still about 20 miles short of our destination of Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, on the other side of the 4,800-foot-peak of Mount Moosilauke. Dark clouds loomed overhead. Aidan is entering his senior year of high school, and I think he was sorely regretting having agreed to my arguably insane plan of running nearly one-third of New Hampshire’s Appalachian Trail in one day.
Aidan’s dad poured cold water over us. Jenna and Orbit looked on apprehensively. Then thunder erupted. We took shelter inside the van as grape-sized raindrops pelted the windshield. “You’re not really going to keep running?” Jenna asked us. Aidan said he was done–one trail marathon was enough that day. It was nearly 3 p.m., we’d been running since 6 a.m., and we’d gotten little sleep the night before. But I couldn’t let go of the idea of running this 46-mile span of the AT in one day–going from one mountain hut to the next, powered by no more than my own legs, felt like an extreme adventure that was elegantly simple.
The rain let up briefly.
“I’m going for it,” I said, opening the van door. “See you at Moosilauke!”
“What do we do if you don’t show up?” Jenna asked.
“If I’m not there by 9 p.m., tell the lodge staff. They should know what to do.”
I jogged up the road and ducked left into the woods on the Appalachian Trail. Within seconds, the sky reopened and a Biblical downpour drenched my body and shoes. But it was already too late to turn back. With no cell phone, and with no cell phone service in any case, I was committed to journeying another 20 miles by foot before nightfall to my destination haven of Moosilauke Ravine Lodge.
This run along the AT had begun at the off-grid Baum Cabin, a tick-and-mosquito-infested shack owned and operated by the Dartmouth Outing Club. Aidan, Uncle Steve, Jenna, Orbit, and I had all arrived the previous evening at dusk after a pleasant afternoon drive from Connecticut, with a stop at the swimming hole Buttermilk Falls in Ludlow, Vermont.
Directions to the cabin said to walk over trails from the Baum Conservation Area for seven minutes. These “trails” turned out to be thigh-high grass lined with ticks that eagerly latched onto our 12 legs. We later found no fewer than 30 ticks on Orbit. It’s a wonder he didn’t pass out from the loss of blood.
Adding to the misery, it was over 90 degrees inside the cabin (according to the thermometer), the main windows refused to open, the “porch” was rotten and falling in, and the outhouse was padlocked. I had expected a lot more from Dartmouth. We searched for at least 15 minutes for the outhouse key. We settled for pooping in the field, despite the risk of ticks.
Because it was Jenna’s birthday weekend, Uncle Steve had baked a pound cake (his mother’s recipe) and snuck it into the cabin. After a dinner of macaroni with cheese and peas (as well as sugar snap string beans from Uncle Steve’s garden), we lit up candles and surprised Jenna with a happy birthday song. It was a briefly merry moment during an otherwise grim overnight at Baum Cabin.
Nobody slept. The mosquitos soon forced us to take cover inside our sleeping bags, but then it was so hot that I started sweating inside my bag and had to lay atop it, swatting at the mosquitos and picking ticks off my body. We tossed and turned atop the crinkly mattresses all through the night. It was miserable. Reminded me of an island shack where I once slept in Laos.
Aidan and I were already exhausted when we set off at 6 a.m. from Baum Cabin. We told Uncle Steve that we’d meet him in 26 miles in Wentworth, where the AT crossed Rt. 25A. I said we’d be there between noon and 1 p.m. We wouldn’t arrive until after 2 p.m.
First, we had to find our way to the Appalachian Trail, which required navigating about four miles of sparsely marked trails through the Baum Conservation Area. It’s really a wonder that we found our way.
I carried a two-liter hydropack while Aidan had a one-liter pack. He quickly drained his reservoir and I refilled it from mine, which became a recurring theme through the morning. We’d refill our hydropacks, he’d quickly drain his, and then I’d refill his from mine.
Our first rest came at 9 a.m., after running about 11 miles, near the base of the Dartmouth Skiway. We had been averaging about 4 mph. From here, our pace slowed to 2 mph while going up 3,000 feet to the top of Smarts Mountain. After about 21 miles, we took a 15-minute rest at 12:30 p.m. at South Jacob’s Brook. From there it was a final six-mile slog to the crossing of Route 25A in Wentworth.
“Hey!” Uncle Steve yelled when he saw me emerge from the woods. His eyes were wide with alarm. “Where’s Aidan?!” His mind seemed to have jumped to scenarios of Aidan stranded in the woods, incapacitated by injury or migraine.
“He’s right behind me,” I said quickly.
Aidan and I both devoured peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches. After about a 30-minute break, I set off alone on the AT toward Moosilauke in a downpour.
The next 10 miles went by smoothly in about 2.5 hours — I was averaging about 4 mph. But the following five miles to the summit of Moosilauke nearly broke me. The 3,800-foot-climb to the summit seemed endless. I stopped repeatedly, leaning over my legs or resting against a tree, my body begging to lay down. It was the most physically drained I’d felt since two years earlier, when I ran the 55-mile-long Connecticut section of the Appalachian Trail.
I whooped aloud when I reached the summit of Moosilauke at 8 p.m. No other person was in sight. A steady wind pushed thick fog over the ridge. A steady drizzle chilled me. I carried no extra clothing or directional maps. Fortunately, the final three-mile trail down to the Ravine Lodge was well-marked.
At about 9:30 p.m. I saw the lights of the lodge through the trees. I trudged up to the main building, an incredible log structure that was rebuilt in 2017 at a cost of $17 million (which included money for a maintenance “endowment fund”). It was the extreme opposite of what we’d encountered at Baum Cabin. It also made me wonder, why couldn’t Dartmouth have tossed a few bucks downhill to fix up Baum? (We were later told by Dartmouth Outing Club leadership that Baum Cabin is considered the most “rustic” (i.e. grim) of all the DOC-operated cabins and that the club has avoided investing in the property, seemingly on the principle of “don’t throw good money after bad.”)
“You must be Stephen,” said a man standing outside the lodge. He was a rabbi from Pennsylvania who had heard about me while eating dinner at the lodge with Jenna, Aidan, and Uncle Steve. As he pointed me in the direction of my cabin, the others came walking toward us.
“You made it!” Uncle Steve said.
“Barely,” I said. They’d saved me a plate of leftovers from dinner, which we ate back inside the luxury lodge’s dining hall.
The next morning we were up early to get to a volunteer trail work event on the Crawford Path in Crawford Notch–said to be America’s oldest continuously maintained hiking trail–on the west flank of Mount Washington. While we three worked the trail, Jenna and Orbit went on a hike up Mt. Pierce and to the Mitzpuh Spring Hut.
We washed off the dirt in the nearby Ammonoosuc River:
And in the Ammonoosuc River in Jefferson, NH @whitemts pic.twitter.com/4RJ6L7lKQo
— Stephenigma (@StephenKurczy) July 8, 2019
