The Hard Way Up and the Harder Way Down
Jonathan It was a chilly August afternoon at camp in the summer of 2011. Our group was made up of six campers, including me, and two counselors on a five-‐day camping trip to Maine. The goal of this trip out of camp was to hike up Mt. Katahdin. Mt. Katahdin is the tallest mountain in Maine and it is also one of the hardest hikes in the Northeast United States. One odd part about this hike is that the trail up is not necessarily the hard part. Mt. Katahdin is famous for a section of trail called the Knifes Edge. The Knifes Edge is famous for one reason; how dangerous it is. It is a 1-‐mile section of trail that leads to the top of Mt. Katahdin. It is dangerous because the trail is only around 6 feet wide most of the time, and has 2000-‐foot cliffs on either side. With this in mind, you can imagine how scary it was for us to even step foot on this section of trail. “Come on guys, you got this. I’ve done this 10 times and I’m okay,” said Will who was one of the counselors and also a very experienced hiker. “Yah, you’ll be fine,” added Colin who had also done this section of trail multiple times. Even with this encouragement, my friends and I were still very scared, but we all knew that we had to keep moving or we might not make it off the mountain until the late afternoon. This was not an extra risk we wanted to take on such a hard hike, so we gathered ourselves and moved out. The first couple steps were the hardest. My friends and I were crawling along slowly behind Will, who was fearlessly walking along like it was a sidewalk in Brookline. I tried hard not to look over the edge but its sheer cliffs were so intriguing that I couldn’t resist. As soon as I looked over the side, I regretted it. My stomach lurched, and I pulled my head back trying to relax. After regaining myself, I kept moving. As we moved along slowly, I started to get more comfortable, as did some of my friends. I pace started to increase and I was walking along now at a normal speed. Now that I was somewhat comfortable, I could take in the amazing beauty of Northern Maine. We see for a hundred miles over the breathtaking uninhabited landscape. Before we knew, we had made across the Knifes Edge and we were at the summit. We all gathered around the summit marker and put one finger on the marker simultaneously. Touching the summit marker all at the same time was a camp tradition that I had learned on my first hike at camp. After settling down for a lunch of turkey and ham sandwiches, we were back on our way. You would think that the way down would be the easy part, but it turned out to be even harder then the way up. Usually the way down is the easy part that you looked forward to. But, we were already at the top and this was the way down, so we got on our way.
At this time, we were coming down the steepest trail I had ever been on, after summiting one of the tallest mountains I had ever hiked. The camp counselors were trying to increase our pace as we went down. “Lets keep moving, it looks like we got some bad weather coming over the mountain soon and we don’t wanna get stuck on this mountain side,” said Will, who was our camp counselor and also an experienced hiker. My blood started pumping a little bit faster now as we were trying to move down the dangerous slope at a fast pace. We could all see the large cloud formation with what appeared to be heavy rain falling out of it. None of us wanted to get stuck in that, so we were motivated to get the bottom as quick as possible. Although we wanted to get the bottom as fast as possible, we could not move too fast because of the type of trail we were descending upon. The trail that we decided to take was known as a rockslide trail. A rockslide trail is formed by rocks that have fallen down the mountainside through weathering and erosion. This rockslide trail consisted of very little dirt and mostly large, and sometimes unstable, rock formations. Another thing that made this trail particular hard was that some rocks would crumble when you stepped on them and there was sand covering a lot of the rocks. This sand caused many of us in the group to cut up and bruise our legs along the way, making the remainder of the hike even more strenuous. “Ahh!” I yelled sharply, as I slipped off a sandy rock and my leg landed on a sharp rock. There was bright red blood trickling down to my ankles originating on my shin where I had cut myself. It stung because the sharp rock had left grains of sand embedded in the wound. It hurt pretty badly but I knew that I needed to continue. I heart was pumping fast and my chest was tight because we had been hiking for 6 hours, so the pain was somewhat suppressed. Even though my leg was hurting, we had to continue on a little further until we could clean the cut. We stopped at the next flat area and I cleaned my cut with some alcohol patches. Then, I put on a Band-‐Aid and we were on our way. Once we got to the bottom we were starting our flat walk back to the van. “Wait where’s Johnny?” asked Will “I’m right here,” I responded thinking he was talking about me. “No, the other Johnny,” He replied talking about another camper named Johnny who was two years older then me. “He was here a second ago; I remember him being right behind us,” added my friend Henry. We looked for Johnny who we ended up finding at the rangers station about 45 minutes later. It was a very long day and we were eager to get back to our campsite. This was an amazing experience for me even with all the mishaps that the trip brought. Even though everything didn’t go as planned, I learned that sometimes taking the hard way is taking the right way.