Week 5 Theme

Every year all of my brothers and sisters along with our spouses and children plan an outing that usually involves some type of torture. The summer of 2003 the decision was made and the planning began. We would hike Mt. Katahdin in August. My older brothers were given the job of making the arrangements and gathering information. My sisters would take it from there and organize everyone with what we would need for the day. The last three would be ready where and when we were told.
On a hazy Sunday morning in August we were on the road to Katahdin having an hour drive some of us slept and a few went over list to make sure we had everything. I was a sleeper along with my two children. There were 24 of use divided into five mini vans. We reached the mountain at 7:00 a.m. and everyone unloaded his or her backpack. Only one of my sisters was not making the hike because of knee surgery two week before. She still insisted on waiting at the bottom for our return. The excitement of the hike built as everyone unloaded in Bubbling Broke parking lot. We were ready to hike and the mountain looked beautiful. I think now is the time to tell you that not something we do because we are in shape it is only an activity we do once a year and for the most part we are not in the best of shape but we are all stubborn. We would pay for this stubbornness later.
We took a few group shots for the before hike and started the hike moving along at a good pace and found the hike from the parking lot to Chimney Pond rather easy and a lot like walking the paths at my parent’s camp. Some would stop and take pictures of the scenery others were looking for wildlife. We were able to laugh and have a great time. We stopped for about 20 minutes to enjoy the pond and take pictures. The kids also found that there is a range behind every tree because when the first rock was throw a range was there to tell them that everything is to be left as is and to not disturb anything more then we needed to.
After the 20 minutes we continued up Saddleback to reach the top of the mountain. This was a little harder climb with large boulders to climb over when we were beyond the tree line. This was more hiking then we were prepared for but we were a very stubborn family and keep moving up. Sometimes we would stop to rest and then move on but found that if we stopped we had a hard time moving again so we tried to move on with keeping our eye on the next part of the trail we could see. Once up Saddleback we reached a summit where we rested for the last leg of the hike. We could see the top and to tell you the truth it was a whole lot closer looking then it was. Some of us decided to wait for the rest of the group to return from the peak and the rest of us set out to prove we could do this. Climbing this part was like moving forward two feet and sliding back three. The ground was loose rock that slid under your feet and made the going slow. Finally we reached the top and what was waiting for us? A sign saying we were on the top of Mt. Katahdin and a young man who counted the people as they reached the top. There was no brass band or someone throwing confetti, which was what we thought we had earned at the very least. We gathered together and had the nice young man take our picture. I guess that might have been another one of his jobs too.
After a brief rest we went slip sliding down the mountain to be once again reunited with our family members. We did more sliding on our buts then walking because if we thought the climb up was bad then the walk down was worse. Those loose rocks keep us sliding and the only way we stopped was when we finally lost our footing and landed on our backsides. Once we slid our way down to start our decent back to Chimney Pond we were asking what would have to happen to be air lifted out, during this discussion I mistakenly thought the path I decided to take down over a rather large boulder was going to work and I fell and landed on my chins and slide about a foot and a half. Let me tell you this hurt so much that the last thing I wanted to do was get up and look. Of course I did and sure enough they were scraped from knee to ankle. The skin over my shins were rising like the yeast bread that my mother cooked every Saturday to go with our dogs and beans. They looked bad and felt like they were on fire but this was not even going to get the airlift we all wanted so badly. No I had to get up and continue.
Well wounded and all we made it back to the parking lot and fell to the ground and felt like we would never move again. As the adults laid around waiting for the bright light to welcome us into the after life we noticed the kids were up and walking and some even running around. What was this? These kids had climbed the same distance as us and they still had energy to burn. Then we remembered that we had twenty some years on them and could only turn our heads away because it hurt to see them moving. We hurt lying around but that was nothing compared to the pain that shot throw us when we had to get up and into the vans we felt like we were tearing the muscles to shreds. Well I did it and will never do it again because while the pain of childbirth has dimmed the pain of climbing Mt. Katahdin has not.