The other day I felt a familiar tension at a trail junction on the way down Mount Moosilauke. I’d walked 1.9 miles – just over half of the return trip. That’s an objective fact but, psychologically, it always feels, at least to me, that at that point the trailhead should be only half a mile away, not another 1.7.
I often trudge that last part with a certain sullen resentment. Irrational to be sure, and certainly not fair to a lovely trail, but there it is. Fact is objective; feeling is subjective.
That may be why I return to the hills so often: for the way objective facts are changed by subjective realities - rather like outer and inner weather. What is a mile, really? A half mile? A tenth?
Many of my pleasantest trips have been on fairly difficult routes and I recall some treks up small bumps as having been brutal. On mountains I climb frequently, like Mansfield, Moosilauke, and Lafayette, each trip is almost completely different. I’ve done the Gorge Brook Trail up Moosilauke in less than an hour and a half and in more than three. Clearly it’s not the mileage, it’s me. Perception, not reality, dominates my hiking.
The perceived experience varies because of the complicated interaction of personal condition, mood, time of day, temperature, humidity, presence or absence of rain or bugs, amount of traffic on the route, and memories of previous trips. The Rollins Ridge between Passaconaway and Whiteface, which I traversed regularly as a camp counselor and outdoor program leader, still makes me hot and sweaty just thinking about it. The notion of climbing South Twin from Galehead fills me with foreboding, so vividly do I recall descending that route more than forty years ago.
That came at the end of a strenuous hot and humid day on the Appalachian Trail in the western White Mountains: a long - very long - sequence of stepping carefully down a steep staircase of eroded rocks and roots, occasionally slipping and sliding – perhaps “rolling” would be a better term - fifteen or twenty feet at a go. The only good thing we could say about it was that at least we weren’t going up.
I’ve just now checked the White Mountain Guide for a description of that part of the trail. To my surprise it’s only .8 of a mile and the Guide passes over it in a phrase (“steady, steep descent”). It does not apparently signify as the Death March I so vividly recall.
So the tension between objective truth and subjective reality continues to define the mountain experience as, I suppose, it does everything in life. Perhaps that tension is made more vivid, more obvious, because the mountains are such a physical experience for me and, no matter how many times I go, even on familiar routes, the question “Can you still do this?” hangs over the entire enterprise.
But still, I go.
