"This is what I do now", I kept telling myself through the long, long, rocky, sticky, humid climb up Whiteface Mountain. I ate a single, precious bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps before reaching the no-view summit. I crossed paths with a lady going north -- she had one foot in a sandal, the other in some kind of plastic bag. She was moving faster than I was. We chatted a little, and I noticed that once again my voice was croaky. This trip involves a weird combination of not speaking to anyone from one day to the next, and then using my voice a lot in the concert-presentations.
I'm memorising music and words as I walk, but not speaking them out loud because that would use my voice and make me thirsty and therefore I would have to carry and drink more water. Also, because it would make me sound like a weirdo.
It's slow going today -- the trail is boulders, up and down over multiple mountain summits. At the top of Morse Mountain, the trail feels particularly exposed and arbitrary -- I sit-n-slide down boulders among little weather-battered trees. I start up Madonna Peak, and meet a gentleman with (I think) a southern-states accent. "Another conundrum", he says, resigned, as he slowly splays backwards down boulders. Dealing with this terrain, I've generally learned to take my mother's advice to me as a child: "go down backwards if you need to, take small steps on stairs". I descend boulders backwards like a ladder; I sidestep, I crawl.
There's a storm coming in, and I'm trying to get up and over the Madonna peak before it breaks. I'm tired, and sticky, and rather grumpy at this point. I push up the last bit of ski trail to the summit, where the clouds are ominous and almost close enough overhead to touch. Layers of blue-white-pink-grey clouds are swirling and re-distributing themselves; I want to take a picture but am urged off the summit by the gathering wind and the instinct that those clouds will soon stop dancing and start spewing. I can see Mount Mansfield over the other side of Smuggler's Notch -- as I'm watching, a needle of lightning shoots out of the sky and strikes Mansfield's ridge. This is a timely reminder for me to watch the weather and be careful.
It's slidy-downhill to boggy-downhill to, just before dusk, Sterling Pond shelter. I've been here before on day-hikes and I love it. I dump my bag and my boots, and head down to the pond in my flip-flops.
This is one of the most beautiful places I know. While I was basking in the beauty, aggressive (and massive) dragonflies like angry helicopters buzzed and circled me, trying to see me off their watery turf.
I'm the only person in the shelter, and for once I'm too warm in my sleeping bag with amazing-merino-sister-top, two fleeces, hat and gloves. I nix the fleeces, and sleep early. Then around 10pm, I'm woken up by the most massive, violent storm I've ever heard. Rain hammers on the metal roof of the shelter like a snare drum; thunder booms like a mile-wide bass drum and the lightning crashes are more of a china-cymbal white-noise sound. At first, my instinct was to curl up with my spine against the storm, protecting the soft parts of myself in case the shelter broke under the battery of the storm. Then I realised it was too loud to sleep anyway, and I could enjoy the storm's percussion under the sturdy (and amazingly, leak-free) shelter. I lay on my back, toasty and dry, listening to the loops of thunder and lightning, the polyrhythms of the rain, and the slow onwards journey of the storm system.
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