Raymond
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What happened to them?
A week ago, on Veterans Day, I had a real unrest cure.
I climbed the two 3000-footers of Garfield Ridge, and hit Galehead Mountain and Mount Garfield as well. I had a late start, so it was 3:30 p.m. before I headed down the Garfield Trail. The last stretch, pretty much from the confluence of the trail with two or more streams, was in the dark, but I had a head lamp, so no problems there.
I reached the road about six o’clock and turned right to walk the 1.6 miles to my car. I passed another parking lot on the other side of the road, and a little while later reached a blockage. A huge piece of construction equipment and a Road Closed sign behind it. I had to get to my car, so I went that way anyway.
The road was light enough that it stood out against the dark trees, so I walked most of the way with the head lamp turned off. When I saw a couple signs ahead, I turned the light on, expecting to see brown signs with hiker pictograms on them. Instead, I saw two black-and-yellow-striped signs that I recognized as marking the sides of a bridge. I had encountered similar signs the day before in the Ossipee Range, so that was lucky, and it was a lucky thing that I turned the light on, because halfway across the bridge, the bridge just ended. The far half of it was gone. It almost looked like it might be possible to jump across the gap, but I didn’t dare try it, so I went down to the stream bank and rock-hopped across.
Continuing down the road, I soon came upon another bridge. This time, it was the near half that was gone. Actually, it was still there, but in ruins. I could have tried stepping on the debris and hauling myself up onto the good part, but again I went down to make my way across on rocks. This time I wasn’t so successful. The water was really rushing through there, and a large stepping stone was partially underwater, but I tried to use it anyway, slipped, and dunked both feet in the stream. At least it was just those two quick steps in the water, not six as happened to me in September in the Adirondacks.
Still, it was enough to get my feet sopped, so I bushwhacked up through the pine trees and squish-squished on down the road. Checking the odometer on my GPS, I saw that I had reached 1.6 miles from the Garfield Trail head, so I should be just about back to my car.
A third bridge appeared, and darned if it wasn’t collapsed as well. This time I’m afraid I uttered a few expletives. The stream below was so dark and loud, it sounded scary. It didn’t appear to have any rocks across it, it was just black, and there didn’t even seem to be any way to get down to it. Maybe if it hadn’t been so dark it wouldn’t have looked so imposing, but it seemed impossible to me.
I checked the GPS again, trying to see if my car really was just on the other side of the barrier on the far side of the bridge or not, but in the clutter of contour lines and other cartographic symbols, I couldn’t make out my track. Before I flung myself across there, or waded through the water, I wanted to know for sure that the car was there. But I couldn’t figure out if it was or it wasn’t. I had had the thought early in the hike that I should set a waypoint marking my car, but I didn’t think of it in time, and it didn’t really seem necessary anyway. Well, it was necessary, but there was no waypoint, and I couldn’t tell where I was in relation to my beginning track, so I had to give up and go back, recrossing the two streams on the way.
I made it across both without falling in this time, although the first one I came to (the one in the middle), wasn’t easy. This time, I also noticed that the two streams were flowing in opposite directions; one left to right, the other right to left. That seemed very strange, and I couldn’t puzzle out why that would be so.
Back at the construction equipment, I checked out a forest road that might or might not lead to Route 3. It didn’t seem worth the gamble to try following it, however, so I decided that the only thing to do was to take the main road all the way back past the Garfield Trail and out to Route 3, then take Route 3 to the Gale River Trail end of Gale River Loop Road.
I couldn’t even call for help. My mother, worrying about me, had given me her cell phone to take on my trip, and I’d already tried to call Susan with it when I first got to the road to let her know about what time I might be getting to her house for supper, but it’d been unable to get a signal. So I knew I couldn’t even call for help and ask what the heck is going on with Gale River Loop Road and all these bridges out and how the heck do I get back to my car. I couldn’t afford to get charged for a rescue anyway, and as I’d stupidly left my map back in the car, it would be difficult to argue that getting lost was not my fault.
I headed back toward the Garfield Trail head. It had been 0.9 mile from that third out bridge back to the construction equipment, so it should be only 0.7 mile back to the Garfield Trail. I passed that other lot, the one on the other side of the road, quickly enough, then trudged on, and on, and on. No sign of the Garfield Trail parking lot. And now I noticed that the mountains in that direction were not there. I could see the sky was coming way down low to the ground, and there were definitely no mountains there. Something weird was happening, but I couldn’t figure it out.
I checked the GPS odometer again, and saw that I had come nearly two miles from the construction equipment, and still not come upon the Garfield Trail parking lot. It had just completely disappeared. I was really getting worried now, thinking there must have been some fork in the road I had missed in the dark. Where was I?
I could make out an intersection ahead. I turned on the head lamp and saw a National Forest sign.
Gale River Trail parking.
What? How could that be? Was my car here? I didn’t see it at first, but as I stepped into the lot, it appeared there, coated in frost.
I couldn’t understand it at all, but somehow I’d been saved a long walk out to Route 3, a who-knows-how-long walk along Route 3, and another long walk along the eastern end of Gale River Loop Road. It made no sense, but here was my car.
It wasn’t until about five hours later, when I got my GPS track transferred into the computer and onto the map, that I could see what had happened.
When I first came onto the road off the Garfield Trail, I had started in the correct direction, then somehow, I have no idea how, I turned a 180 and went back the way I’d just come. So that other parking lot I passed a couple times was actually the Garfield Trail parking lot,and I just hadn’t recognized it. I had noticed that there was just one car in both lots, and each car had a Massachusetts tag, but that didn’t seem unusual to me. By the time I got back to my car, it was the only one in that lot, and it too had Massachusetts plates.
The only thing I could think of was that when I first got onto the road and tried to call Susan on the cell phone, I had walked off the road into the brush. I’d turned on the head lamp and gotten myself back onto the road, but I must have walked off the left side of the road, not the right, as I had thought, and thus reversed direction.
But my GPS track doesn’t show anything like that. The track and turnaround point are clean, like a dagger point, not a mess as you would expect walking off the road and flailing about in the brush would look. But I can’t see what else could have happened to make me go back the wrong way.
That explains what happened to the mountains, too. They were to my right, not my left, as I walked back, because I was heading east, not west.
I guess it all demonstrates once again that even on foot a cell phone is a dangerous thing to operate. And I have to learn to set a waypoint for my car each and every time, without fail, not matter how unnecessary it seems.
So what happened to cause those three (the Forest Service Web site says four) bridges to collapse like that? The Web site doesn’t explain what happened. I never even noticed the Garfield Trail end of Gale River Loop Road as I was driving up in the morning, I only saw the Gale River Trail end (where I entered), but I suppose the western end was blocked off.
Oh yeah. Also, I lost my Gorillapod. Most likely on the Garfield Trail as I was descending. If anyone has found it or finds it and wants to return it, let me know. By the time I noticed it was gone, it was too dark to consider going back up to look for it.
A week ago, on Veterans Day, I had a real unrest cure.
I climbed the two 3000-footers of Garfield Ridge, and hit Galehead Mountain and Mount Garfield as well. I had a late start, so it was 3:30 p.m. before I headed down the Garfield Trail. The last stretch, pretty much from the confluence of the trail with two or more streams, was in the dark, but I had a head lamp, so no problems there.
I reached the road about six o’clock and turned right to walk the 1.6 miles to my car. I passed another parking lot on the other side of the road, and a little while later reached a blockage. A huge piece of construction equipment and a Road Closed sign behind it. I had to get to my car, so I went that way anyway.
The road was light enough that it stood out against the dark trees, so I walked most of the way with the head lamp turned off. When I saw a couple signs ahead, I turned the light on, expecting to see brown signs with hiker pictograms on them. Instead, I saw two black-and-yellow-striped signs that I recognized as marking the sides of a bridge. I had encountered similar signs the day before in the Ossipee Range, so that was lucky, and it was a lucky thing that I turned the light on, because halfway across the bridge, the bridge just ended. The far half of it was gone. It almost looked like it might be possible to jump across the gap, but I didn’t dare try it, so I went down to the stream bank and rock-hopped across.
Continuing down the road, I soon came upon another bridge. This time, it was the near half that was gone. Actually, it was still there, but in ruins. I could have tried stepping on the debris and hauling myself up onto the good part, but again I went down to make my way across on rocks. This time I wasn’t so successful. The water was really rushing through there, and a large stepping stone was partially underwater, but I tried to use it anyway, slipped, and dunked both feet in the stream. At least it was just those two quick steps in the water, not six as happened to me in September in the Adirondacks.
Still, it was enough to get my feet sopped, so I bushwhacked up through the pine trees and squish-squished on down the road. Checking the odometer on my GPS, I saw that I had reached 1.6 miles from the Garfield Trail head, so I should be just about back to my car.
A third bridge appeared, and darned if it wasn’t collapsed as well. This time I’m afraid I uttered a few expletives. The stream below was so dark and loud, it sounded scary. It didn’t appear to have any rocks across it, it was just black, and there didn’t even seem to be any way to get down to it. Maybe if it hadn’t been so dark it wouldn’t have looked so imposing, but it seemed impossible to me.
I checked the GPS again, trying to see if my car really was just on the other side of the barrier on the far side of the bridge or not, but in the clutter of contour lines and other cartographic symbols, I couldn’t make out my track. Before I flung myself across there, or waded through the water, I wanted to know for sure that the car was there. But I couldn’t figure out if it was or it wasn’t. I had had the thought early in the hike that I should set a waypoint marking my car, but I didn’t think of it in time, and it didn’t really seem necessary anyway. Well, it was necessary, but there was no waypoint, and I couldn’t tell where I was in relation to my beginning track, so I had to give up and go back, recrossing the two streams on the way.
I made it across both without falling in this time, although the first one I came to (the one in the middle), wasn’t easy. This time, I also noticed that the two streams were flowing in opposite directions; one left to right, the other right to left. That seemed very strange, and I couldn’t puzzle out why that would be so.
Back at the construction equipment, I checked out a forest road that might or might not lead to Route 3. It didn’t seem worth the gamble to try following it, however, so I decided that the only thing to do was to take the main road all the way back past the Garfield Trail and out to Route 3, then take Route 3 to the Gale River Trail end of Gale River Loop Road.
I couldn’t even call for help. My mother, worrying about me, had given me her cell phone to take on my trip, and I’d already tried to call Susan with it when I first got to the road to let her know about what time I might be getting to her house for supper, but it’d been unable to get a signal. So I knew I couldn’t even call for help and ask what the heck is going on with Gale River Loop Road and all these bridges out and how the heck do I get back to my car. I couldn’t afford to get charged for a rescue anyway, and as I’d stupidly left my map back in the car, it would be difficult to argue that getting lost was not my fault.
I headed back toward the Garfield Trail head. It had been 0.9 mile from that third out bridge back to the construction equipment, so it should be only 0.7 mile back to the Garfield Trail. I passed that other lot, the one on the other side of the road, quickly enough, then trudged on, and on, and on. No sign of the Garfield Trail parking lot. And now I noticed that the mountains in that direction were not there. I could see the sky was coming way down low to the ground, and there were definitely no mountains there. Something weird was happening, but I couldn’t figure it out.
I checked the GPS odometer again, and saw that I had come nearly two miles from the construction equipment, and still not come upon the Garfield Trail parking lot. It had just completely disappeared. I was really getting worried now, thinking there must have been some fork in the road I had missed in the dark. Where was I?
I could make out an intersection ahead. I turned on the head lamp and saw a National Forest sign.
Gale River Trail parking.
What? How could that be? Was my car here? I didn’t see it at first, but as I stepped into the lot, it appeared there, coated in frost.
I couldn’t understand it at all, but somehow I’d been saved a long walk out to Route 3, a who-knows-how-long walk along Route 3, and another long walk along the eastern end of Gale River Loop Road. It made no sense, but here was my car.
It wasn’t until about five hours later, when I got my GPS track transferred into the computer and onto the map, that I could see what had happened.
When I first came onto the road off the Garfield Trail, I had started in the correct direction, then somehow, I have no idea how, I turned a 180 and went back the way I’d just come. So that other parking lot I passed a couple times was actually the Garfield Trail parking lot,and I just hadn’t recognized it. I had noticed that there was just one car in both lots, and each car had a Massachusetts tag, but that didn’t seem unusual to me. By the time I got back to my car, it was the only one in that lot, and it too had Massachusetts plates.
The only thing I could think of was that when I first got onto the road and tried to call Susan on the cell phone, I had walked off the road into the brush. I’d turned on the head lamp and gotten myself back onto the road, but I must have walked off the left side of the road, not the right, as I had thought, and thus reversed direction.
But my GPS track doesn’t show anything like that. The track and turnaround point are clean, like a dagger point, not a mess as you would expect walking off the road and flailing about in the brush would look. But I can’t see what else could have happened to make me go back the wrong way.
That explains what happened to the mountains, too. They were to my right, not my left, as I walked back, because I was heading east, not west.
I guess it all demonstrates once again that even on foot a cell phone is a dangerous thing to operate. And I have to learn to set a waypoint for my car each and every time, without fail, not matter how unnecessary it seems.
So what happened to cause those three (the Forest Service Web site says four) bridges to collapse like that? The Web site doesn’t explain what happened. I never even noticed the Garfield Trail end of Gale River Loop Road as I was driving up in the morning, I only saw the Gale River Trail end (where I entered), but I suppose the western end was blocked off.
Oh yeah. Also, I lost my Gorillapod. Most likely on the Garfield Trail as I was descending. If anyone has found it or finds it and wants to return it, let me know. By the time I noticed it was gone, it was too dark to consider going back up to look for it.
