Bear!

New Jersey Appalachian Trail, Part Four

This is the fourth installment in a series about section hiking the AT. The previous installment is here, and the fun begins here.

Day Six: Pochuck Mountain Shelter to Wawayanda Shelter (11.5 trail miles)

When we woke in the morning, I offered to share my last swallow of water, but E declined. Did I mention it was 2.3 miles to the next water source?

The day started with a big climb up Pochuck Mountain (which may not have felt so big if we had had water). It was hot and humid and sticky from the word go. After two miles, a pair of hikers heading in the opposite direction confirmed that there was a very small stream coming up soon and a bigger one after that. (To clarify: E confirmed this with the hikers, because I had succumbed to a grim, sullen silence.)

At the first stream, we sat and filtered a liter and drank it in one go, passing the bottle between us. But then we walked to the next stream, a little less than half a mile down the trail, to take a more leisurely break. We leaned our bags against a big log which functioned as a bench. E washed our stove (which we had packed away dirty the night before because we had no water to clean it) and prepared to make coffee. But the stove wasn’t lighting properly. Water had gotten inside the burner, so when we turned on the gas and held a lighter to it, it flamed up around the edges of the pot, burning the plastic insulation.

Right as we were in the middle of some rather tense troubleshooting, another hiker walked up and joined us on the log, which we had almost but not entirely taken over. It was rather awkward. I wasn’t in the mood to banter so we sort of just ignored each other? In our defense, she didn’t offer a friendly overture either. But, eventually, we burned/steamed the water out and were able to light the flame normally.

My mood drastically improved with coffee (two pots, with hot cocoa) and food, and I set about scrubbing the salt from my face. When the other hiker moved on, I rinsed all of my clothing and hung it to dry on the guardrails of the bridge. Then, stripped to my underwear, I sat down in the stream, and contorted myself until almost all of me was submerged. This took several awkward tries—it was not a deep stream.

Before leaving, I strung up my spare socks and underwear to continue drying on the back of my pack. A bit later, walking downhill on a mowed strip of trail through tall, reedy grasses, I saw what I thought was a large black cat playing with a butterfly, which dashed into the greenery when it heard our approach. Then I reconsidered—cat, or bear cub?

Perhaps I had been primed by the stray the day before to think cat, but E briefly caught sight of the animal in the grasses and said it was too tall. In any case, we booked it out of there because visibility was low and where there’s a cub, there’s probably a mom nearby.

We cruised along the next mile of trail, a long boardwalk over a marshy area. Correction: We would have cruised along, if E and I didn’t stop to take photos of nearly every wildflower we passed. The irises were a particular delight. Red-wing blackbirds—one of my favs because it’s so easy to identify—darted in front of us. We stopped to lunch at a suspension bridge over Pochuck Creek, dangling our feet above the water from one of the cement reinforcements on the embankment. We followed the eerie, sinuous path of a snake wriggling its way up river.

After crossing a set of railway tracks and passing through a cow pasture, we popped out near a bustling parking lot. We had seen maybe a dozen families and couples out for a stroll on the boardwalk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, but the trailhead for Stairway to Heaven was nearly as busy as a fairground entrance.

And there was a farm market and bakery down the road. We dropped our bags behind the trailhead kiosk and dashed over to buy cold drinks (Poppi sodas, which I picked out because of the fun flavors, not because of the “gut healthy” claims that the company is now being sued over) and apple cider donuts for dessert later. If I hadn’t already bought cheddar the day before, I would have got the fancy cheese, too.

I hustled back to our bags, paranoid that someone wanted to steal my stinky and well-used—but still expensive!—hiking gear. Theft on the AT is rare, from what I’ve heard, but if it happens it’s almost always close to roads and cars. But nobody wanted our stuff. Maybe the Kula cloth (a fancy pee rag) dangling from my pack kept the thieves away, but more likely people are just...nice. And respectful. And out to enjoy their day, not to ruin mine. Whew.

We drank our sodas then and there so we could dispose of the cans before hiking on, and while we sat in the shade we observed what appeared to be a giant family reunion hike out. At least two, maybe three dozen people, all wearing matching t-shirts. I was glad we didn’t have to pass the group on trail.

Stairway to Heaven is, as it sounds, a long, steep climb up a series of rock stairs. On the approach, we passed one young child who plaintively asked us if he was almost done, and another on the verge of a complete meltdown. It was immensely satisfying to pass dayhikers while carrying a fully loaded pack. I know the New Jersey AT isn’t the most challenging section of the trail, but I was really enjoying feeling strong and capable more often than not.

An aside: Part of this strength may have come from, well, just being stronger. I had been running regularly through the winter and early spring (not so much right now, in this horrible heat). But I also felt that for once I was eating enough food to sustain the effort required to hike 12 – 15 miles a day. Amazing, incredible, who would have thought it?

E was still faster, dashing up ahead and then waiting for me to catch up. He doesn’t hike with poles, and was clutching the paper bag of donuts so they wouldn’t get crushed in our packs. He said he heard a girl complaining to her family that she was so bored she had started counting to 1,000, and then promptly dropped her phone. (This was one of two phone-droppings he witnessed.)

When we finally made it to the vista, we could see down into the valley below—the trailhead, the parking lot, the farm, and the cow pasture, with the narrow boardwalk trail running through. We could only assume one of the mountains on the next ridge was where we camped the night before, although who knows which one!

After the cliffs, the crowds all but disappeared, leaving us almost entirely alone in the (hot, buggy) woods again.

We stopped at a rushing stream that finally, finally, had swirling pools deep enough to dunk in. The water was cold but not icy. E filtered while I bathed and frolicked, but then I heard him groan plaintively. He had spilled the Nalgene, and was frustrated and upset. Just then, a man and his dog walked up and began splashing about on the other side of the bridge, just upstream from us. It was very sweet. I offered to take over filtering but E made a face and said he didn’t want to drink the water the dog had been swimming in. And we had enough to get to the next stream.

If only it had been so simple. When we finally arrived at the last water source of the day, the banks on either side of the bridge were thick with impenetrable bushes. We peered down at the deep, murky, unreachable water in dismay. We followed the dirt road back a ways on either side of the bridge to see if there were any easier access points, but the bushes extended as far as the eye could see. E even clambered over the side of the bridge to see if he could dangle from the edge and reach the water with our scoop, but it was too far away. Back on the bridge, we paced back and forth, conflicted. A thru-hiker passed by with a friendly greeting and bemused expression, and my face burned at our obvious predicament. Would we need to retrace our steps back almost two miles back to the previous stream?

Of course not. But we did eventually backtrack to a sparser section of woods and bushwhack our way to the stream. The water at the edges was thick with plants, and moved slowly, more like a marsh than a stream. E teetered out on a log to get to moving water, passing the pouch back for me to filter from my perch on a rock, where I was under assault by a cloud of mosquitoes. We did this four times, filling all of our bottles, and then filled up the Sawyer to filter at the shelter that evening. It was uncomfortable, but we did it.

(I suspect this bridge is also where I leaned my pack against a patch of poison ivy. Some of the oils must’ve transferred to my skin, because I had an itchy rash on my rib cage that lasted more than a week after I returned home.)

In less than a quarter mile after the bridge, the trail turned off the road into an open, airy section of woods. There on our right, down a gentle slope, was a pristine rivulet flowing fast and clear over the rocks—a tributary of the stream we had just passed. Long-distance hiking requires a healthy sense of humor.

Still kicking ourselves for making things so much more difficult than they need be, we pressed on. Minutes later, E snapped to attention: “Bear!”

It was a big one, downhill from us, at the edge of a grassy clearing, standing on his hind legs with his paws up on a tree. “Oh my god.” I clacked my poles together, because you’re supposed to do that, and the bear looked back at us, almost insolently, and completely unbothered. I started fumbling with my fanny pack, thinking I should get a picture, but E urged me to keep walking. I handed him one of my poles, just in case the bear decided to follow or charge us, and we booked it up the trail as fast as we could without running (you’re not supposed to run).

“I didn’t know they came that big!” E kept saying, as we quickly climbed the hill, occasionally looking back to see if we were being followed.

At the shelter, which really wasn’t all that far away from where we saw the bear, we were happy to set up the tent in a clearing surrounded by other tents. Safety in numbers, and all that. There was another couple near us, two women, one of whom had just joined her girlfriend (we assumed) that day. The sole of her boot had come unglued from the upper, and I was pleased to be able to help by giving her my tiny emergency supply of duct tape to patch it back together.

A young-looking father and his four carbon-copy teen sons squeezed together at the picnic table to make space for us while we made dinner. After they finished their card game, one of the boys read a bit of scripture and they all took turns reflecting on their day, and how it related to the reading. It was rather sweet.

But not as sweet as the incredibly moist, almost juicy, apple cider donuts we had for dessert—easily the best apple cider donuts I have ever had in my life, and it wasn’t even the hiker hunger talking.

Long after I drifted off to sleep, E shook me awake. Something big was making a lot of noise in the woods, somewhere nearby. Then there was a plaintive squeal, which quieted to a soft bleating that went on and on. Not human-like, but still piercing. Then the sound of dragging, and then, eventually, silence.

Day Seven: Wawayanda Shelter to Wildcat Shelter (12.1 trail miles)

It was a busy night, what with the nighttime attack (possibly a bear attack?), and a rain shower, and the disturbing sight of millipedes crawling on the outside of the mesh tent interior, their leggy undersides exposed to our headlamps. I read my book while E slept in and we got a late start.

We took a side trail to a park office so we could prepare coffee at a picnic table and use a real bathroom (we were low on tp and I wanted to grab a couple extra handfuls to see us through the rest of the trip). The park staff were nice enough to let us come in to the office to fill our bottles, although we forgot to ask if we could charge our electronics; our phones were low on battery.

Although the trail was easy enough to start, it soon climbed to an undulating ridge with a lot of steep scrambles, up and down and up and down. “Hard hard long long very long. Very hard,” is how I summed the day up in my journal that night.

The weather was patchy and variable. We stopped at an expansive view and pulled out our cheese and crackers for lunch, but within moments a scattering of fat raindrops began to fall. The cool breeze and rain were almost welcome, because it had been so hot and humid, so we covered what couldn’t get wet and kept eating, only to still have to pack up and go when the wind died down and then picked ominously up, followed by the rumblings of thunder.

The rain had made the smooth rock surfaces slippery, and there was a dicey descent where I passed my poles to E to grasp rock holds with my hands, and still almost lost my footing climbing down a big boulder.

It seemed every time we took off our packs to break at a view, the edge of the storm would find us, prodding us along, back into cover.

We passed a group of day hikers who told us about an amazing ice cream shop at an upcoming road crossing—they insisted it couldn’t be missed. Ice cream sounded incredible but it would all depend on how far out of our way we would have to go. I was already so tired, and we weren’t even halfway done.

We crossed the border into NY. I had hiked the entire New Jersey section of the Appalachian Trail!¹

We met a young, 20-something thru-hiker, and asked how his hike was going. He didn’t seem to be having the greatest of times. He said he almost quit after a month on trail, once the novelty had worn off.

E and I discussed this when we were alone again. We both struggled to imagine continuing on with a thru-hike if we weren’t enjoying it. Plus, at the end of every long-distance hike I’ve gone on, I’ve felt like I could keep going. Certainly I enjoyed finishing, because I had done something, and come to the end, but if there had been more trail, I would have wanted to hike it. Still, it’s hard to really know, if the longest hike you’ve done was only 27 days. Anything beyond that is shrouded in the haze of the unknown.

Notably, for the first time ever, E said he wouldn’t rule out an AT thru-hike. He had enjoyed himself over the past few days, even though he had been an AT skeptic (turned off by the descriptions of crowds, and the frequent crossings through towns), but well—turns out the man likes hiking as much, or at least almost as much, as me. While the AT wouldn’t be our first choice (of the Triple Crown hikes, we would prefer to do the Pacific Crest Trail) we’d probably have a good time all the same. We’re built different, we agreed.

A short time later, still tired and getting careless, I fell hard on a turned ankle. I caught most of my weight in my poles, but it hurt enough to bring me nearly to tears. But, I could still walk on it, with only a little bit of tenderness.

At a power line clearing, E asked to take a break on a large, flat-topped boulder. I lay down on the warm rock, completely wiped. After we caught our breath, we turned our attention to our itinerary the next day. The plan had been to hike 9.9 miles to the road crossing before Harriman State Park, where E would catch the bus to NYC at 12:13, or the last bus at 2:18. Then I’d continue on to the next shelter in Harriman.

But the forecast the next day was for rain and afternoon thunderstorms. E was questioning whether I could travel the distance fast enough (I said I could if we left early enough!), or whether he would need to go out ahead of me. But the thought of standing at the roadside in the rain waiting for the bus filled him with dread. And he wanted more time at home to recover from the trip before going back into the office on Tuesday.

Pouring over the guide, I noticed that the simple line map of Greenwood Lake, NY, two miles east of the trail, showed a NJTransit bus stop. We used our dwindling phone batteries to confirm that there were buses to the city from there—frequent buses, in fact. We soon formulated a new plan. E would stay at Wildcat Shelter with me that night, and then retrace our steps two miles back to the road crossing and get a bus from Greenwood Lake, hopefully before the rain even started. I would continue on to Harriman. Unless my ankle was feeling worse—then I could go home early, too.

Satisfied with our new plan, we hiked down to the road crossing. This was the one with ice cream. We were still torn, but when we saw a sign at the trailhead advertising water and a charging station for hikers at the creamery, it was an easy call. My phone was down to 17 percent and my spare battery was out of juice.

There was a long line snaking in front and around the building, and the half dozen picnic tables next to the creamery were full of boisterous holiday makers. Our thru-hiker friend was just packing up. I asked him if it was worth the wait, and he said, “Oh yeah.” Plus, what else were we going to do while our phones charged? E guarded our things while I stood in line. Another thru-hiker walked up after 15 minutes and I considered offering to let him join me, in a gesture of hiker-solidarity, but we hadn’t even seen or spoken to him before, so I didn’t. When I finally got to the counter I ordered one scoop of coffee and another of coconut ice cream with chocolate-covered almonds (like Almond Joy in ice cream form).

I told E that the girl asked if I wanted to sign their hiker register. “How did she know you were a hiker?” he joked.

“I dunno babe, probably the plastic bag I’m using as a wallet.”

The ice cream did indeed live up to the hype. And getting our phones charged was a huge boon. But it was getting late so we left when mine got to 90 percent. We booked it along the first mile of trail, a wide, gentle dirt trail, then climbed to a few jumbled slabs of rock called the Eastern Pinnacles. I pointed out a cliff in the distance that might have been Cat Rocks. “Does it look like a cat?” I asked.

“Not really.”

The curving tail at Cat Rocks.

But when we got there it did. There was a large round flat cliff, and a smaller one that was clearly the head, and a jumble of boulders descending down from the body like a curved tail. The drop from the clifftop was sheer and long, and there were several deep fissures between the rocks that made my stomach flip as I stepped over them.

The light was fading so we booked it to the shelter.

Walking by mountain laurel at dusk.

With rain predicted in the morning, this might have been one of the days I preferred to sleep in the shelter, but it was already almost full, with four or five sleeping bags laid out on the floor. So we went downhill to a big clearing and set up our tent in a small flat area, leaving a respectful distance from the other two tents.

We made light conversation with some of the other hikers while we cooked dinner—a Knorr Cheddar Broccoli Pasta Side thickened with half a packet of instant potatoes, with hot sauce. After we ate, I asked E if we could make the second half of the instant potatoes; the first stirrings of hiker hunger were upon me.

My first full day on trail, the mountain laurel was only just starting to bud, the flowers still tightly furled pink nubs.

But over the course of the week, the blooms had started to open, delicate and ethereal.

1. Obligatory acknowledgment of the tiny trail section we skipped near Unionville, but close enough.