🧵1/6
September 2, 1983: The trail descended past a water source called Hairy Root Spring (I know — sounds yummy, doesn’t it?) to the shores of Wachipauka Pond, the mountain tarn I had just seen from above. The AT crossed a marshy area and climbed over a wooded hill before dropping down to state road 25, another small two-lane highway,

#backpacking #hiking #outdoors #landscapephotography #NewHampshire #nature #forest #mountains #adventure #trails #AppalachianTrail

2/6
just past the outskirts of a little New Hampshire village known as Glencliff. I arrived at the trailhead at 7:30, 15 minutes early, thanks to all my nonstop walking. Darkness was falling and the evening was becoming rather chilly. I put on my chamois shirt and sat down to await my ride. I had brought with me no long pants, and my legs rapidly became chilled as the body heat generated by hiking subsided.

3/6
It was a beautiful night — unbelievably clear. The sky gradually donned the velvety-black mantle which city and suburban dwellers so seldom encounter. Constellations began to appear, and the Milky Way spanned the firmament in a blaze of glory. I lay on my back alongside the blacktop, oblivious to the fact that I was freezing my butt off.

4/6
The entire universe flipped over, and I was staring down into a huge black abyss. The few stars with which I was familiar from southern Connecticut skies blazed like beacons here. My eyes would shift to the empty black beside them, and gradually lesser lights would emerge, eventually flaring with frozen fire approaching the intensity of their more spectacular cousins. My eyes would shift to another “empty” portion and more lights would eventually swim up from the depths.

5/6
I wished my friend Mark from Shenandoah could have been there tonight. I fell deeper and faster through the vast universe as my forgotten body slowly froze beside a little-used mountain road on a tiny pinprick of light far above. Infinity.

It was a magnificent sight, one which I was able to savor for a good long time. My mother took a wrong turn on the way to pick me up and came out somewhere in Vermont. By the time she got straightened out and managed to reach the trailhead, it was 9:00.