I woke up feeling ok. My injuries included both big toes being badly bruised and almost blistered. My left little toe also was badly crunched. My right shin has a nasty abrasion. Both knees are slightly tingly and prickly, but not bad. Some nettle tingling on both arms. Oh yes, both knees with a few scratches from thorns. Sunburned on face arms and legs. Generally very tired and feeling rather greasy. Plus, all over, tick bites.
So, how did I end up in this condition? Let me tell you...
At 1:30 I took off for my Friday afternoon hike. I had decided to go back to Rattlesnake Ridge but to take the unmarked trail that crosses the AT near the parking area. I knew it would be a steep descent down to the Aquashicola Creek. The path had been traveled by others and I headed down. It was perilously steep and the path was made up of loose stone and I spent a good amount of time trying to keep my balance, just sliding down. About 3/4 of the way to the bottom, I realized it was going to be a beast to climb back up! But in for a penny, in for a pound and I I continued down.
When I reached the path at the bottom, it was much more of an access road than a path and I followed it north towards the power station on Blue Mountain Road. At one point I turned to look back and saw that I was on posted land. But the posted notices were only on one side of the power poles. I made it to the power plant but then I was very close to someone's house so I turned back. I got back to the steep rock hill that I had earlier descended and continued on south. Eventually I reached the huge high tension poles that traverse the top of Blue Mountain. I looked up and realized there were a series of switchback roads leading off the very road I was on. This might be a better way to climb back up, I thought. Even tho' the apex of the mountain here was considerably higher that the peak of the stone trail, the switchbacks would make the climb longer but far less arduous, I reasoned.
So, I continued on south to explore. I got to a very strange construction area where there were piles of building materials and also leach ponds of toxic waste with big red warning signs posted in them. I have no idea what this area was for. It was creepy. And I was fairly close to one of the Zinc works. I turned back and took yet another roadway that led up the mountain. I was enjoying the climb when I heard the first cicada of the summer. Now, I had heard a few young ones trying out their songs near our house but they hadn't dried out their wings enough to be in full song. However, this cicada was in good "voice". I began to think how fast the summer was passing and time in general. Whilst waxing sentimental, I heard another cicada but this one was right in the road ahead of me. Odd, I thought, as cicadas are arboreal. At the last moment, I realized it was not the sound of a cicada at all, but a rattlesnake! I jumped back from the sound as the serpent struck. Fortunately, I was just distant enough to avoid being bitten. The snake held his ground and was coiled and ready to strike again. His rattle was persistent and jarring. I got out my phone to take a video, mostly to capture the sound of the rattle. But I kept a safe distance between us. The video was not great as my camera app has no real zoom on it.
I left the snake in peace, still rattling furiously at me, and headed on up the roadway. Then I stopped an decided to post the video to YouTube. After trying but finding no connection, I was about to put my phone away when I noticed my legs were utterly beluted! Where did I get these mud splatters? Then I realized the splatters were moving. They were ticks. Dozens and dozens of ticks. I dropped my hiking poles and phone and began to madly pull the ticks from my skin. I would estimate that I had 25 ticks per leg plus more on my arms. My fingernails were long and so I was able to remove them fairly easily but there were so many. They were even getting stuck under my fingernails. Luckily the day was roasting hot and I was drenched in sweat so the bugs were having a more difficult time finding purchase. Most were just crawling. A few had actually become attached and were biting. There were many that had crawled all the way up under my shorts, so I practically had to strip down to my altogheters to make sure I got them all off.
So I was very serendipitous that I had stopped to do the YouTube posting or I would not have seen this bug mess. When I felt I had gotten them all off, I tried my best to spray them with DEET but my pump bottle only works when held upright making spraying my lower extremities very difficult. Now, I pulled up my hiking socks all the way to my knees. I found my socks were also filled with ticks as were my shoes! So, I went thru another tick removal session. After that I continued on up this same road. A long while later, I realized it was not going to get me anywhere and as it had been 3:45 when I saw the snake, I turned back. I knew when I reached the snake spot since I had marked the road. The serpent was gone and I passed safely. But at the bottom of the hill I had to go back on my original road thru tall grasses which is where I must have picked up the ticks. There was nothing I could do about it but plunge thru. At open spots I stopped and peeled dozens more ticks off my socks and some that had reached my knees.
Finally I passed thru the tall grasses for good, I thought, and I was back at the power lines. I looked up the hill and thought, steep but definitely doable. And so I started up the first switchback. It was long and steep but I was fine. The weather was roasting hot and the sun was beating down. Storms had been threatened but they seemed distant. I did several switchbacks and found the climbing to be much more challenging than I had anticipated. Still I stopped at the end of each switch back for a rest. I dearly wanted to sit down but the place was crawling with ticks and the grass fairly deep. So, I just rested on my feet. I was fine I averred to myself.
On about the 4th switchback I encountered the bear. A pretty big black bear, right there above me on the switchback. He looked at me with about as much surprise as I looked at him. He ambled slowly into the thicket. I was perplexed as to what to do. I was in his territory and should go the other way but I had to continue upward. So, I stood my ground and slapped my hiking poles together to make a clatter. Waited a minute and then went further up the path. Stopped and repeated the pole clattering. I did this several times till I reached the point where the bear had entered the thicket. He seemed to have left the area. I turned on the switchback and rapidly headed upward, frequently checking my rear to make sure I had not picked up a follower.
I think I ascended 2 more switchbacks and was beginning to feel a level of exhaustion that I am not normally used to. And the current switchback was very overgrown with tall grasses and difficult to walk thru. I followed it nonetheless till it just went way off into the woods far from the high tension lines. I think the hill became significantly more steep the higher up it went and so the switchbacks had to go far wider on each pass. I was judging my progress on my position relative to the three giant pylons that carried the wires. I think I was figuring I was almost half way up the incline. So, I decided to just climb up the hill between the switchback I was on and the next one. Can't be that hard, I thought. So up I began. OMG!!! I was barely 10 feet up before I realized that the incline was almost totally perpendicular, practically 90 degrees! And covered with rough vegetation and slippery. I had to stop and assess. It was almost impossible to stand as the hill was so steep. I had to lean into the ground to maintain my position. I looked down and up and realized up was the only option. I struggled to pull myself to the next switchback. I reached it in utter exhaustion. It was steep. The temperature was in the high 80-90's and the sun blazing. I had wrist weights on and a full Camelbak. But still my level of exhaustion was so extreme. But I was above the 2nd pylon so I knew I was halfway or better than halfway.
I needed to sit down but the grass, which was even taller and thicker on this switchback than on the previous one, was alive with ticks. So I had to content myself with leaning on my hiking poles and picking bugs off my legs. I tried to make my way along this switchback but it too headed off long into the woods. I had to keep climbing.
The next climb was perhaps a bit less steep than its predecessor but I found myself in a big expanse of lush greenery. Only when I had gone well into it did I realize it was a field of stinging nettles. My only exposed parts were my knees and arms. Nothing could be done about the knees but I did my best to keep my arms up high. In the distance I could see a triangular-shaped boulder sticking up out of the nettles and I set my sights on that. In between was a large expanse of nettles just waiting to impale me with their caustic hypodermic spines. What was my option?
I began to climb anew and it was brutal. The nettles were so thick as to be almost impassible. I reached another state of exhaustion when I spied a smaller rock, a welcoming island in the midst of this ocean of burning underbrush. I struggled to that. When I got there I was so exhausted that I had to sit. My heart was racing, my body temperature was very high, I could not catch my breath. Tick of no ticks, I had to sit. I checked my legs and there were absolutely no ticks on me! I wondered if the caustic nettles were also inhospitable to these vermin. It seemed so. Saved from one awful infliction by another.
So, I sat. I sat for a very long while. Looked down the enormous expanse that I had already covered and up at the extraordinary height I still had to attain. And at the nettles. As far as I could see ahead were nettles. I took off my Camelbak and searched thru its contents. I knew I had gaffers tape which I carried as the result of an earlier hike where the sole came off my hiking boot when I was about 5 miles up the AT. I had no way to secure my shoe and so I walked with the sole flapping, all the way back to the parking area, tripping and stumbling. Hence, the packed gaffers tape. I also had a plastic grocery bag that I carry and use to tote litter I find on the trails. I tore the plastic bag in half and using the gaffers tape I did my best to wrap and tape the plastic around my exposed knees. My legs were drenched in sweat so I knew the tape would not properly adhere to my skin, at least not for long so I taped it top and bottom to my shorts and socks. My knees were already swelling from the toxin and had turned red and shiny. They felt like 10,000 tiny hot needles were pricking in and out of my skin.
After a 10 minute rest and knee-taping session, I got up, cautiously, because my rock was sticking out of an almost perpendicular hill. I gritted my teeth and plunged upward in to the nettles. This stretch of hill offered a new torture. Hidden underneath the nettles were raspberry bushes replete with ghastly, tearing brambles. My clever plastic bag knee covers were shredded immediately and the skin on my knees suffered the same fate. But onward I climbed up past the triangular-shaped boulder and onto the next switchback. It was barely discernible as a road. It too just wandered off into the forest where somewhere in the distance it must turn back.
I began to feel quite panicky. The hill was now so steep that I lost all perspective on how much more I had to climb. I could no longer see the top due to the pitch of the incline. The third pylon did not look any closer to me than it has two switchbacks ago. And the next climb was impossibly steep and bristling with thorns and nettles. The heat was excruciating. I felt faint. I could not catch my breath. I'm not sure why I was so exhausted. Yes, it was a high climb and difficult but I am very fit. I work out every day. I hike, bike, kayak and swim with great frequency. I could only think that I had had three close encounters with nature, the rattler, the ticks and the bear and I knew my adrenaline had really been pumping, multiple times. Was this just depletion following multiple adrenaline rushes or was my almost 63 years finally catching up to me?
I do work out like I'm turning 23 not 63. Maybe I've bitten off way more than I could chew. But looking up and looking down, up was still the only option. So, after a period of rest, I began to climb again. I lost track of how many switchbacks I reached in my entire clambor up the mount but I know it was at least 9 after I began to cut straight up. The vegetation had now grown to be 7 feet high and so think that without a machete, it was only inches that I was able to move at a time.
At one point, I lost my footing on a large boulder hidden under thick brambles and slid down crunching my right shin into the edge of the rock. If I hadn't caught myself at that point, I would have slid a very long distance back to the previous switchback. But my hiking poles held me up. I was laying flat against the hill, clinging to nettles and brambles. When I had caught my breath enough I began to climb again.
The whole ascent took the better part of 2 hours. The last incline was the worst. It was so sheer that getting any purchase with my hiking boots was near impossible. But I struggled up and just as I reached the crest I encountered another, very dreaded obstacle -- a wide bank of poison ivy. I am extremely allergic to this noxious weed and there I was, about to crawl right into it. Understand that I was almost flat to the ground because of the steepness of the incline. But I pulled myself thru it and should have been at the top. But I wasn't quite. I had reached the third pylon but it was not at the crest of the hill. It was quite a way below that.
But, at this point the land leveled out from what I figured was a 70-80 degree angle to something kinder like 40-50 degrees. Best of all I had reached the point where the vegetation had been burned off the hill by the terrible pollution spewed by the zinc works below in the decades before the poisoning was stopped by the government. This stretch of Blue Mountain is part of the Superfund. When I first hiked this hill in 1999, there was not a blade of grass, not a tree, not a bug, not a bird. It was a stark, dead landscape, horrible to behold and yet fascinating to see. The zinc fumes had so poisoned the land that the plants all died and the exposed soil just blew away, like in the dustbowl. Now, 16 years later, with much effort of the part of conservationists and Mother Nature, the land was again becoming alive. But this stretch was right above a factory way down in the valley and it was taking longer to recover.
This was to my advantage. I had mostly a rocky hillock to cover. The vegetation was primarily scrub. I could even see a white blaze on the Appalachian Trail. But my exhausting was so extreme, I had to find a flat rock to sit. The sun had suddenly stopped blazing and ominous clouds were rolling across the sky. The air suddenly turned quite chilly. The chill felt great and helped to revive me. I sat for quite some time before I had the energy to do the final stretch. This last part took me far longer than I would have thought possible. And I frequently had to stop and try to get enough oxygen. It was weird.
Then, of a sudden, I was on the AT! I was on flat ground. I was out of the tick zone, the nettle zone, the bear zone and the bramble zone. From this point I had a full mile to get back to my car but about half that was downhill. At first, I was barely shuffling along due to blisters on my feet and my badly cut and swollen knees. But strangely, once off the perilous incline, I regained my energy and by the time I reached my car I was walking in a quite spritely manner. How strange the body is.
When I got home I took a shower to clean off ticks, nettle fibers, DEET and Lord only knows what else was stuck to me. Then Michael did a tick check and pulled 2 more buggers off me. The swelling in my knees went down considerably but the needle jabbing pain persisted. I mixed a thick paste of baking soda and water and coated my knees with the solution. I left it on a couple hours and tho' it didn't totally relieve the discomfort, it made it just bearable.
I checked my hiking app and realized that in addition to the extreme height I had climbed, the distance I had gone straight up was well over a mile and a quarter.
So, that was my journey. That was my tale.
