Girls Gone (to the) Wild

When the deluge finally began to slacken, we threw the tent together in record time, not knowing if the reprieve would last long. Jennifer dried the floor off with a damp T-shirt, and we slid into our sleeping bags and chatted until nightfall, trying not to think of how sticky and slightly miserable we were.

The people we met

The next day was brighter and promised better. All of our things had gotten at least a little wet, and we hung some of them on the outsides of our packs in a vain attempt to dry them. We went 11 miles, filtering water early in the day at a good spring, where we met weekenders Hank and Kevin, the latter of whom was carrying a 50-pound pack to train for climbing Mt. Rainier. To pass the time as we hiked, we belted out show tunes, then discovered that our reputation had preceded us when we met McD from Chicago, who had been told by some folks who passed us earlier that some girls ahead were “singing to scare off the bears.” (We decided they didn’t know quality when they heard it.) All of which just goes to show that you’re never entirely alone on the trail.

When we did meet people, we almost always exchanged a few words and conversation centered on things common to us all: campsites, water sources, distances and destinations. Some of them, like McD, gave us their trail names — monikers that allow familiarity and easy identification on the AT while preserving privacy. Such names can be self-styled or given for almost any reason: I was nearly dubbed “Northfake” because the brand-name backpack I had bought in Thailand (for the equivalent of merely $18, fortunately) turned out, of course, to be phony.

We also met our only through-hikers on the second day, an older couple planning to complete the trail in two-week sections — this was their second section. We were later told that northbound through-hikers had long since passed during March and April, and southbounders, who start in about June to avoid the worst of the Maine bugs, wouldn’t be arriving until September at the earliest.

Bear-bagging it

As twilight drew closer, we crossed a road and wound our way high onto a ridge, into the clouds that had never lifted off. The shelter was more than a mile downhill from the trail, so instead we found a round grassy campsite with its own balcony of rock, where we felt that we were drifting in a world of white, an invisible sea of sound created by the wind rushing through the trees around us. We sat on the rock and stretched, then had dinner and packed all of our food, even the sealed items, into our bear bag. I clambered up a tree to hang it, thinking as I did so that surely a black bear could do as I had just done, but if it did, at least it would be eating our food and not us.

This campsite was closer to the trail than our last one had been, and I found myself more nervous as night fell. We had hung the bear bag a good distance away, but I still had visions of something following our scent to the campsite and imagined approaching footsteps. At one point I had to go out into the dark, and the lights of some town glittering far out in the valley only made me feel more cut off from the rest of humanity. But we fell asleep and woke up to a perfect foggy morning.

We are the champions

The final day, with only a 6.5-mile hike, should have been easy, but it was actually the most difficult. First of all, Courtney felt too nauseated to eat, which we eventually discovered was due to her just (unwisely) having started birth control. The supreme irony of our all-girls’ trip: In the end, our greatest adversary was not men nor beasts but the female body. Her illness forced our pace to a crawl, although Courtney pushed herself to the limits of her energy.

Secondly, we had drunk the last of our water that morning, and the spring we had counted on was dry. Jennifer and I made an epic trek over a mountain to the next tiny spring, and then she took water back for Courtney. The pool, no bigger than a cup, had been emptied when we filled the water bottle, and as I sat alone waiting for the spring to refill it, I heard a rustle in the grass. I tensed myself, determined that if it were a snake it wouldn’t get a drop of my water. Then, peering closer, I saw a soft, slick salamander the color of wet earth. Courtney’s fiancée once told me that he would feel safe drinking from any pool salamanders lived in. We watched each other for a moment, and then it slipped under the overhanging bank.