I had my right knee replaced ten days ago, and during my recovery, while I wait to be able to hike again—my surgeon says twelve weeks—I’ve been looking through old photos and Facebook post, reliving some of my favorite hikes…and one that definitely does not belong in that category.
You might think that my penchant for solo hiking, coupled with my absolutely terrible sense of direction, would have resulted in my being lost (or, as Daniel Boone would say, “mighty turned around”) on numerous occasions. But, actually, it’s only happened once—it was scary enough to make me take extra precautions against a repeat occurrence.
I emerge from a stand of scruffy, wind-beaten spruces and pines onto the summit of Speckled Mountain. It’s a gorgeous afternoon, sunny, but with fast-moving overhead clouds that create an ever-changing shadow pattern on the bare expanse of rock at my feet and the dense forests below me.
My first impulse is to scamper over the ledges, exploring every bit of the summit and availing myself of every degree of view. I want to find the geodetic marker that gives the coordinates and elevation, and the post that marks the highest point. I want to use a map on my phone to try to identify the several mountain ranges I can see in the distance.
But first, before I take another step, I untie the sweatshirt from around my waist and hang it securely on a branch of one of the scruffy spruces, just at the point where the trail emerges from the woods, making sure the strong wind won’t carry it away down the mountain. I’m taking no chances about being able to find the trail again when I’m ready to leave.
A year and a day ago, on the afternoon of August 29, 2016, a beautiful late-summer Monday, I planned to go for a hike.
Rather than stick to the short, close-to-home trails I’d been hiking all summer—Buck’s Ledge, Lapham Ledge, Peaked Mountain in Maggie’s Nature Park—I decided to drive over to the vicinity of Concord Pond in Woodstock and hike up Bald Mountain.
I’d done it once, several years earlier, with Tony and our dog, Remy, back when I was in much worse shape. Now, four and a half months into an unbroken streak of exercise days, and after a summer of determined hiking, I figured I’d have no problem making it to the top, and I was right.
In fact, when I reached the summit of Bald Mountain at a little past 3 p.m., I decided to continue on to the top of Speckled Mountain, a trek that entails hiking down into a thickly forested glade, then up some fairly steep terrain to an open summit with amazing views.
It only took me about 30 additional minutes to hike from one summit to the next, and it was well worth the extra effort. I hung out on Speckled Mountain for about fifteen minutes, wandering all over the mountaintop, snapping photos and congratulating myself on successfully summiting two peaks in one afternoon.
It was on the return trip that things started to go wrong. The summit of Speckled is dotted with various bald patches of ledge (the “speckles” that you see when looking at the mountain from far away). They all look pretty much alike when you’re standing on them, and it’s hard to keep track of just where you are.
Mistake Number One: I didn’t pay close attention and accidentally started down a different trail from the summit than I had come up.
Mistake Number Two: Once I had gone some distance down it and realized my mistake, I hated to turn around and backtrack uphill. Besides, I was almost certain that this second trail was one I had seen branching off from the blue-blazed trail I had hiked up, so it didn’t even occur to me that I might be striking off in the wrong direction altogether.
As it turned out, though, the trail I was on came out onto an ATV trail and stopped. In retrospect, I should have turned around right there, hiked back to the summit, and come down the same trail I went up, but—Mistake Number Three—I thought I could follow the ATV trail and end up close to where I had left my car.
I was wrong. I used Google Maps on my phone and figured out I needed to head in a different direction if I didn’t want to end up in Peru (the Maine town, not the country, although with my sense of direction, anything is possible), and then (Mistake Number Four) I decided to abandon the idea of finding an actual trail and just head off in the general direction of Little Concord Pond.
At first, I was following an unmarked path I found leading off the ATV trail, assuming it had been made by humans, but after it dead-ended in a boggy clearing filled with leftover logging slash and prolific blackberry bushes, I realized it had most likely been made by bears.
From that point on, I bushwhacked, continually checking my position on my phone and keeping the tiny patch of blue that was Little Concord Pond more or less straight ahead, except when I had to detour around dense undergrowth or steep ledges that appeared in front of me without warning.
Mistake Number Five was not conserving the battery of my phone earlier in my hike. I had used it liberally, to take photos, post them to Facebook, text my best friend, and call my daughter. By the time I really needed it for important things like a map and compass, the battery was already nearly drained.
When my phone rang and I saw that it was Tony calling, I answered and told him as quickly as I could that I was off the trail, bushwhacking, but pretty sure I was headed in the right direction and hoped I’d make it out before dark. I think I told him to skip the lecture because I didn’t have much battery left. I hung up, and immediately saw the screen of my phone go dark.
Mistake Number Six was not having a compass with me that didn’t depend on electronics to tell me which direction I was headed, but the one thing I did do right was to check the position of the sun, so I knew to keep it ahead and slightly to the right as I made my way west, back toward the pond.
The way out turned out to be a lot further than I expected, and I never did come out onto the trail around the pond. I did eventually come back onto the blue trail, but nowhere near the bottom. Rather, I connected with it at the lowest part of the saddle between the two peaks.
I had never been lost in the woods while hiking alone before, and I had been surprised to discover just how quickly I went from mild annoyance at the inconvenience to full-blown panic at the thought that I might find myself out there alone in the dark. All rational thought went out the window within ten minutes of realizing I was lost. By the time I hit the well-worn trail and saw the familiar blue blazes, I breathed a sigh of relief, but my heightened anxiety interfered with my already deficient sense of direction, to the extent that I had no idea which way to go on the trail. With high peaks on both sides of the saddle, I could no longer see the sun and I was so turned around that I couldn’t remember where I had last seen it before it dipped out of sight.
I ran 25 paces uphill in one direction, returned to my starting point, and ran 25 paces uphill in the opposite direction, hoping to spot something familiar along the trail that would give me a clue. I returned to my starting point again, and ran 50 paces in each direction—was I heading up Bald, or Speckled? I had no idea.
Finally, 100 frantic paces brought me, panting, to the marked junction of the Speckled Mountain Trail and the loop trail that leads to the ledges of Bald Mountain, and I headed down the trail toward Little Concord Pond on legs that were shaky with exertion and relief.
I finally hiked out to my car at 6:30, nearly three hours after I had started down from the summit of Speckled Mountain. As I drove out the Shagg Pond Road, I met Tony driving in, “hell bent for leather,” as they say. He told me that if he had found my car still in the parking lot and no sign of me, he was going to call 911, get up a search party, and head into the woods. He still says he was about the most scared he had ever been that day. That makes two of us.
On this bright August afternoon, a year and a day later, I’ve come back here to conquer my fears, to show myself that I can do this hike again, solo, without getting lost, and to prove that I’ve learned a few things.
I left home with my phone fully charged, and with a handy portable power bank (a gift my brother Greg sent last year, after he read about my close call), stashed in my backpack. I have extra food and water, and, even though the day is warm, I brought a sweatshirt, just in case.
Now, I lift it from the branch of the spruce at the entrance to the trail, knot the sleeves around my waist, and head confidently down the mountain.
Sometime I’ll tell you about my taking the wrong trail )poorly marked) on Blueberry Mountain off 113 in the Speckled Wilderness area with NO cell reception. Jan and I made it out quite late and her partner had called the deputies to look for us. 🥲