A thousand ice birds pecking at my face with their ice beaks

Or what it's like to climb the tallest mountain in Maine

Thank you for being a subscriber.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to others and becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes peel back modern parenting life for a look inside, and sometimes be, well, whatever this is. If you support my work, I would appreciate it.

---

Second in a series about scaling state’s highest peaks. This originally appeared in Charlotte Magazine.

The wind howled like nothing I had ever heard before. I was trying to sleep in my tent at the base of Mount Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine, but the freight-training wind made that impossible.

The only reason my tent had not blown away was because I was inside it. The trees shouted so loud and vicious that when the alarm on my phone rang at 6 a.m.—set that early so I could climb the 3,900-foot ascent to the 5,267-foot summit of the mountain and get back down before dark—I hit snooze because the air temperature on this October morning was in the 30s and that blistering wind would make that ever so much worse. I like hiking, but I like not freezing to death better.

I never fell back asleep, but I stayed in my tent for half an hour, waiting for the roars to relax into purrs. When they didn’t, I figured it was now or never. I crawled out of my tent, and my eyes followed the noise up. A canopy of bright yellow leaves obscured the bluing sky. I expected to see trees bent in exhaustion from trying to stand against the wind. Not only were they not bent, they were barely moving.

What sounded like fury signified nothing.

The climb up Mount Katahdin is so nasty that Baxter State Park (which contains Katahdin) insists all hikers sign out at the ranger station when they start. I said good morning to the park ranger as I marked my departure time on the sheet for the Abol Trail, one of myriad routes to the summit. The ranger told me the boulders above the tree line would be covered with ice and that the winds at the top were gusting at 60 to 70 miles per hour.

On the wind, at least, I didn’t believe him. I had learned in the three previous days of camping and hiking on Maine’s most famous mountain that everything everybody said was a worst-possible case scenario. It’s like all they ever heard was the wind in my tent, and they never looked up to see. I started to wonder whether Baxter rangers are all failed life coaches: “If it gets hard, quit.”

---

G.K. Chesterton described becoming a Christian as like arriving in London and “discovering” it. That’s as good of a description as I’ve ever heard for why I love hiking. I follow trails, so I know I’m not discovering a thing, but I still sometimes feel like the first person who was ever there—the first person to see that tree or hear that bird or trip over that rock.

When I was a boy in Michigan, I loved to explore the campgrounds where we spent our vacations. I was Lewis and Clark in Nikes and a Detroit Tigers hat. I remember bounding across one trail that led me out of the campground and into what I thought was untrod territory. That sense of going somewhere new ended when I encountered an abandoned school bus, inside of which was a hobo’s kitchen. But thankfully, no hobo. (No offense to hobos.)

Another time, when I was maybe 5, a group of us came upon a clearing in the forest to find the wooden frame of a teepee. It was wondrous—five or six giant logs leaning on each other to form a round triangle. I thought it must have been hundreds of years old. I was furious when an older boy pushed one of the logs away, and the whole thing toppled. All these years later, I assume that wasn’t the frame of a real teepee but was instead an exhibit of the state park we were in. But I thought it was real at the time, and even though I was only 5, I knew better than to deprive the next boy of that joyous discovery.

--

I hoped that discoveries at least that memorable awaited me on Katahdin. The summit of Mount Katahdin is the northern terminus of the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail, and it is widely considered the most difficult and dangerous mountain on the AT. That sounds poetic and majestic when you read about it in guidebooks. But when you’re standing at the bottom of Katahdin, the cold already nipping your face, it looks like it sucks.

And then you start hiking and it’s even worse.

The Abol Trail goes up, up, up, relentlessly, up. There are no switchbacks, no stretches of easy, and the only way to catch your breath is to stop. And it’s not just the incline that makes the hike difficult. Long portions of the Abol Trail follow a jagged, pointy rock bed.

I thought of the hobo’s school bus and the teepee after I reached the top of Mount Katahdin. It’s a false summit—the top is not the same thing as the end of the trail. The summit is another mile plus across a dome-like top. It is lonely and barren up there. I looked around and, for a moment, saw no evidence that anybody had ever been there before. Not only that, but I saw no evidence of why anybody would want to be there.

For as far as I could see in any direction—which was not very far, given the clouds swirling around me—there was not a normal step to be had. It looked like God’s Storage Room for Leftover Boulders. I wonder if He’s in heaven thinking, Beloved, you’ve seen the beach right? It’s smooth and soft and easy to walk on. Children frolic there, and nobody ever has to be rescued from a walk on the beach! What on My green earth are you doing up here?

On paper, the last mile looks easy. In reality, given the cold, wind, rocks and clouds, it might have been the hardest mile I’ve ever hiked. I carefully placed each foot onto the next rock. I wondered how many other pairs of boots had been right there, how many other hiking poles had jabbed right here, how many other people had scarfed a granola bar in this exact spot. I also wondered how much colder my hands could get before they got frostbite.

My reverie ended when I came upon a roped off section of the trail to protect a portion of the mountain that appears to have suffered from overuse. Something about that rope woke me up to the world around me. It was like disappearing into a great book, turning the page, and finding someone else’s hand-writing in the margin.

I thought back to the ranger’s dire predictions about the wind. I don’t know if the gusts up there were actually 60 to 70 miles per hour, but if they weren’t, I never want to stand in winds that are.

My fingers were so cold I pulled them back into the center of my gloves and made a fist. The wind felt like a thousand ice birds pecking at my face with their ice beaks. For an hour or more, I thought, if it gets any worse, I’m going to turn around. It got worse, but I kept going, in large part because I had joined another hiker and wasn’t going to quit now that I was with somebody.

When we finally reached the summit, there were a half dozen or so people there already. Normally I would have stayed to soak in the 360-degree panoramic view … when that view was there. Clouds engulfed and abandoned the mountain several times while I was up there. When the view was clear, I wondered which of those screaming-with-yellow trees 3,900 feet below had obscured the morning sky when I crawled out of my tent.

But I couldn’t linger up there. I needed to get off the summit while I could still feel my fingers.

The hike off of the domed top was no easier than the hike onto it. Twice I slipped on icy rocks … and by slipped I mean big, dramatic, embarrassing falls that sent my feet into the air, my arms flailing wildly and my hiking poles flying across Katahdin’s bleak landscape. If I discovered nothing else in eight hours on Katahdin, it was that being bitterly cold, ferociously exhausted and falling comically on my rear end is as much fun as I can have in a day.

Notes From Dad excerpt

I contributed an essay to a powerful anthology called “Notes from Dad,” and the book is going to be released May 16. Contributors include 14 F3 men; a handful of them are readers of this newsletter. My piece is about passing on a spirit of adventure to my kids … and living to regret it. At the launch, I will offer “Notes from Dad” for the special rate of $1.99. Watch for the link then.

The brainchild of my great good friend Jason “Cherry Limeade” Meinershagen, who is famous (or should be!) for doing burpees in the bucket of a firetruck, “Notes from Dad” is full of inspiring essays on fatherhood. Some are about great father figures. Some are about overcoming the lack of great father figures, as in the case of the following excerpt drawn from Willie Blue’s essay in the book.

I was trying to think of fond memories of my father; I couldn’t think of anything. I can remember when I first started to hate him. It was on my 13th birthday. He showed no interest, didn’t even remember it was my birthday. I tried to rationalize by saying that he had too many children to remember everybody. He did more for my older brother than he ever did for me. I think he liked him more. After I left home,he became closer to my youngest brother. My youngest brother used to pick him up from work. My brother was telling me that he would introduce him to his friends and coworkers.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized the one thing that still sticks in my mind is that he tried to kill me once. I think it was when I was around 6 years old, and he put a rope around my neck and dragged me across the floor.

---

Coming next week

Next week I’ll publish the third in a series about hiking the tallest peaks in three states. This time, it will be Tennessee’s Clingman’s Dome. Excerpt:

I listened to the water, as I had been doing for the last few hours of the hike. I had come to think of that low rumble as applause. It got louder the closer my buddy Andy and I got to it. The cheering reached a crescendo as we hit the middle in the five previous river crossings, faded as we departed, and resumed again as we approached each subsequent crossing.

Now the river cheered me on. Getting to the other side without getting wet would go a long way in determining how the rest of this hike went. We still had two days, 20 miles and several thousand feet of elevation change, to say nothing of two nights of sleeping in the backwoods. I needed to be dry for all of that.

I took a deep breath, stood up, tried to step to the next rock and instead landed knee deep into quickly moving water, with first my right foot and then my left. 

The water’s applause turned into a gasp. 

Or maybe that was me. 

The water was COLD. 

My feet, legs and mshewifwdazrs—woops, apparently, my notebook—were soaked. I muttered a few choice words and looked to the far bank, where Andy tried not to laugh, with me or at me, though we’ve been friends long enough that I would have been fine with either.