Our hike along the narrow ridgecrest of Anakeesta Ridge was difficult to manage but easy to see. Greg and I would simply follow the ridge as far as daylight would allow, looking for interesting sights, and then backtrack to the Boulevard and the Appalachian Trail before it got dark. So simple even a caveman could do it.
After a particularly difficult section which kept us descending faster and farther than we had expected, we stopped to rest and wonder. I looked at my watch and commented, “It’s three o’clock. We’re gonna run out of daylight.”
Greg muttered, “Yeah, I know.”
“Just out of curiosity… how long have you known?”
“Since we stepped out of the truck,” Greg responded. I giggled under my breath and braced myself for yet another comment about my age or pace or propensity for frequent rest stops – all of which are favorite topics of Greg’s commentary during our hikes. Instead, Greg added, “And that’s not our only problem.”
“What’s the other problem?”
“We’ve been heading south for the last 10 minutes.”
I understood the significance immediately: “No way! Are you sure?”
“Yep. At least 10 minutes.”
Greg and I both like compasses, and we use them often on these hikes. I don’t recall where Greg carries his. Probably in one of his pockets. I hang mine around my neck, tucked under my shirt so it won’t get caught on branches. So Greg held out his compass to show me. I looked back north up the ridge we’d been descending and looked south down the ridgecrest in front of us. Yes, south.
Anakeesta is an east-west ridge with an occasional north-south wiggle, but not a tenth of a mile, and not where we were standing. South just wasn’t supposed to happen. So I did something that I hate to do on these hikes because it feels like I’m cheating – I pulled out my GPS and poked around on it until the electronic bread crumb trail popped up on its topo map. And there it was, a straight blue line about a tenth of a mile long showing us travelling straight down toward the bottom of the screen – south, straight south.
The next five minutes involved a lot of staring down the foggy ridge, staring back up the foggy ridge, staring at each other, shaking the compass, poking more GPS buttons, and general bafflement. It’s like those moments when my car dies, and I open the hood and stand there staring at the tangle of wires and metal wondering what it all means. Because I know nothing about the mysteries of internal combustion engines, I have no business looking under the hood, but I do it anyway in hopes that there will be a flashing, neon sign with an arrow pointing to the problem saying, “Replace this.” There’s never a flashing arrow under the hood, and there was no flashing sign for us on that side ridge.
Without going into the details of our conversation, I’ll just say that we had no idea how we wandered off Anakeesta’s main ridge and onto an obscure, southern side ridge. No idea whatsoever. We had stayed on what seemed to be not merely the main ridge, but the only ridge. There was just no other route to take. I’ve sometimes seen the trail under our feet just disappear into the dirt, rocks, and leaves, but this was the first time an entire ridge simply dissolved into clouds and thin air. I wondered if we had wandered into the Anakeesta Triangle where planes, ships, hikers, and ridges disappear. I don’t know. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get it.
But there we were, on that small, unnamed ridge. As we stood there dazed and confused, the only reasonable option was to backtrack up to the main ridge. We’d try to find the split in the ridge where we had made our mistake, but because it was getting late – we still had about five miles of hiking to get back to the truck – we’d have to hustle back to the Boulevard and the AT. The point where we were standing would have to suffice as our “destination” for the day. But then we heard cars below us… [To be continued]
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