Lucy Letcher - The Barefoot Sisters Southbound

CHAPTER 1
The Wilderness

CHAPTER 2
Southbounders

CHAPTER 3
The White Mountains

CHAPTER 4
Isis Alone

CHAPTER 5
The Gathering

CHAPTER 6 .
The Rocks of Pennsylvania

CHAPTER 7
As Long as Its Fun

CHAPTER 8
Boots and Snowshoes

CHAPTER 9
The Scales

CHAPTER 10
The Last of the Sobos

CHAPTER 11
Bye, Never See You Again

CHAPTER 12
Sobos on the Wrong Side of the Tracks

A sudden gust of wind lashed my face with rain and ice crystals. Just ahead of me on the trail, my sister Lucy picked her way through a maze of granite boulders dotted with sparse lichens. I imagined how the two of us would look to a passerby: two tall women in black pants and teal Gore-Tex jackets, wisps of blond hair plastered to the sides of our faces, bulging packs, bare feet. Crazy.

The low clouds and sleet lifted for a moment, revealing the final climb ahead. Perhaps half a mile and we would be standing on Baxter Peak, the highest point of Mount Katahdin. This would be the fourth time Id reached that peak. The climb alone had always given me a sense of strength and accomplishment. But this time, the summit of Katahdin would be more than just another mountain. It would be the beginning of a long pilgrimage through pristine forests, hedgerows, national parks, mosquito-ridden swamps; through towns and cities, over back roads and major highways; into a Superfund site. It would be a journey across the rumpled spine of the eastern mountains and an equally demanding passage across our own interior landscapes. Although I did not know it at the time, my sister and I would devote more than fifteen months of our lives to the Appalachian Trail.

We stood for a moment before the venerable signpost marking the summit. Scored with graffiti and the constant onslaught of weather, it stands perhaps three feet high, a wooden A-frame painted Forest Service brown with recessed white letters:

KATAHDIN 5268 ft.
Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail

Below this were a few waypoints: Thoreau Spring, 1.0, Katahdin Stream Campground, 5.2. At the bottom of the list: Springer Mountain, Georgia, 2160.2. More than two thousand miles. It was simply a number, too large and incomprehensible to have any bearing on me. The farthest I had ever walked in a day was ten miles and that was with a daypack. Now I was contemplating a journey of months, covering thousands of miles. All of a sudden, there on the summit with the clouds screaming past us, it didnt seem like such a great idea.

I turned to my sister, half-expecting to see the same doubt mirrored in her face. But her eyes were shining, and she smiled with an almost feral intensity. It was a look I would come to know all too well over the next year and a half, and it meant, I am going to do this and no one had better try to stop me. Were really doing this, she shouted over the winds howl and the lashing rain. Were hiking the Appalachian Trail!

And with that, we turned to head down the mountain. We found the first white blaze on a rock near the signpost: a swath of white paint about two by six inches. There was nothing remarkable about itit was just a streak of pigment on the rocks, worn by the weatherbut we both stopped, briefly, to lay a hand on it. We knew that we would be following these blazes from rock to rock, tree to tree, all the way to Georgia.

The rain picked up as we descended below treeline. The cold stones underfoot gave way to mud that, ankle-deep in places, made a satisfying squish-ploop sound, and the rough roots of spruce and fir stretched across the trail. It was noticeably warmer in the forest, where the trees blocked the wind. Conifers on the high slopes gave way to maple, birch, and beech, their leaves still touched with the delicate yellow-green of spring. Clouds of blackflies crawled into our hair and into the cuffs of our clothing, leaving streaks of blood and lumpy welts wherever they bit.

As I walked, I thought about the last few weeks before this cold, rainy summer solstice. Ten days earlier, I had earned my diploma from Carleton College in Minnesota, with a double major in music and biology. The next day, I had flown to Bangor, Maine, driven an hour to my mothers house on the coast, and started packing. I had played the piano in all my spare time, not knowing when I would get a chance again. In the evenings, I took long walks with my sister; Lucy and I had barely seen each other in the past four years, except for vacations. Now we were planning to spend six months in each others company.

We reached the campground just at dusk and pitched our tent under a picnic shelter. Both of us were too exhausted to say much. We hung the sopping-wet jackets and pants over the rafters to drip dry, cooked our supper over a smoky fire, and drifted off to sleep to the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof. My last thought, before I sank into dreaming, was this: at least we dont have to worry about wet boots in the morning.

My whole body groaned with the effort of lifting my full pack in the morning. Besides our regular gear (tent, sleeping bag and liner, sleeping mat, stove, water bottles, med kit, changes of clothing), we were carrying twelve days worth of food. After Katahdin, the Trail traverses the Hundred Mile Wilderness, a 119-mile stretch of remote forests with no access to towns. We wanted to be well-prepared. Wed left most of our gear at the foot of the mountain while we hiked Katahdin, since the steep, broken rocks are hard enough to negotiate even with a daypack.

Id thought I was in good shapein college, Id been running every morning, and I had just gained my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. But backpacking was something else. A friend who had finished the Appalachian Trail several years earlier had told me, nothing gets you in shape for the Trail, short of putting your pack on and walking.