Climb Beyond the Crest: A Visionary Tale On the Appalachian Trail

By Don DeFreeze

Are there things you have to do today? Aren’t there always? What would you think or do if you could cut those strings tying-up thoughts, drive and intent? What would it be like? What if I told you that such a state is inevitable? Think about it.

Reflection and contemplation are beneficial and can improve our nature. Solitude can enhance contemplative clarity, and what better place to do so than on the Appalachian Trail, where pivotal conceptions can enrich the way life is spent.

What’s holding you back from the acuity that a long hike can produce? Take this inspirational journey into Appalachian wilderness. Feel the changes in mind that liberate thought over a hike’s adventure. Become part of a sobering perception that will forever revitalize the very way you consume time.

Climb Beyond the Crest is the second installment of the Please Read trilogy revealing the dynamics of an Appalachian Trail hike at the start of the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543914801

Book preview

Prospects

Climb Beyond the Crest begins deep in Appalachian wilderness where Don sits and wrangles with the quandary that surfaced at the end of the series’ first book titled Please Read. He’s enthusiastically launched his backpacking mission on the Appalachian Trail, but his plan to reach the target shelter is in doubt.

In the manner of any extended hike, the ability to fully engage wilderness solitude is first hampered by our train-of-thought brought to the trailhead. It’s impossible to let go of life’s baggage in a snap, a flick of the switch; preoccupations need a period to thaw and fade. Focusing on personal experience in the first leg of the hike highlights Don’s historical origin and sets base perspective and expectations. That phase of acclimation is superseded by the next phase of perceptual acuity illustrated in Climb Beyond the Crest.

Appalachian isolation can jog many ideas relevant to a natural approach concerning reality. Some concepts explored may stimulate a response or seem provocative. Reader comments are more than welcome, or better, join an Appalachian hike with Don through the guide-service website excihiking.net.

I can ignore the twinge dogging my knee but can’t dismiss its implications. As I sit and rest on a log lying along the Appalachian Trail deep in mountain wilderness, my hike thus far has separated me in distance from the hectic commotion that irks me in man’s artificial reality, or the Human Tree, but the mental strain that’s attached to navigating the Human Tree’s demanding world cannot be extinguished so easily. I’m fed up with the relentless pressures back home and the necessity to constantly formulate self-employment schedules along sketchy parameters—anxiety heightened by doubts and failure. Here, beyond the rules and boundaries of any contemporary community, the only decisions I’d like to make are where to take a break and what to eat.

Now, I must seriously weigh the facts about my leg’s mobility, apply critical thinking and decide whether to continue my ambitious hiking mission, or terminate this wilderness journey, walk the hours back to my car in disgruntled defeat and then immediately return to conventional living with all its headaches. With less than half the day’s planned hike completed, will my troubled knee last the long backpacking transit to come?

With nothing but silence comforting me while I rest beside the trail, there’s no other person to provide feedback to help in my decision, which can be trying, but I am used to it. Back in the Human Tree, drafting an economic stratagem in my freelance mindset without anyone to consult is often challenging. Whether it’s driving a cab, handyman jobs or haphazard commerce, formulating a course of action for any time-period starts as a bare canvas lacking targeted proportions, except the earnings I expect or need. All personal motions must be planned right down to a sleep segment, which could be in the day or night, or neither, if active for more than 24-hours, as I try to remain viable within a Human Tree that controls the basics to survive.

Variables are many to be considered while monetary pressures never relent. Although self-reliance means I don’t have to be anywhere specifically at any given time, I mostly feel a need to be somewhere being productive all the time. Shoving domestic duties and the upkeep of a paralyzed roommate into a living juggling act has added even more volatility. Establishing a gainful, rolling plan in that scenario is fraught with nervousness, especially when trying to concoct a week’s puzzle while staring into an economic abyss, facing an empty well. That chaotic type of subsistence and constant scramble should be a far-fetched illusion out here in the middle of Appalachian serenity… I look around the forest in verification.

Though I sit in restful repose in this deep forest vantage of stoic Appalachian wilderness, I can’t stop contemplating the manner I direct my economic affairs in a distant modernized land. I wonder if I should give up my entrepreneurial flag there and return to a punch-clock paradigm, as I have considered before, where a fixed schedule’s routine would at least provide a base to center personal activities around. A cynical shaking of my head from side-to-side coincides with my pent-up frustration, built-up over the years, considering I must plan for each life segment and individual moment from a blank start. How much easier it must be for those who are contractually employed, including the so-called lonely bosses at the top who are charged to be leaders but at least given guidelines to coalesce their decisions around.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone, just once, handed me a chart framing a winning schedule for any work week?

On top of it all, I live absent of any substantial social network providing trusted advice or input. Maximizing profits means I must forego popularity. Although I can mindfully connect with just about anyone, the nimble way I need to adjust to conditions results in stilted acquaintances, cab driving conversations vanishing upon passengers’ friendly exits. Yet for others I often see racing around too busy to note a stellar blue sky, obligations associated with family or remaining popular combine with structured lifestyles to limit freedom, having little free space to act individually—They don’t know what they are missing. Connecting to reality’s essence needs to rise from the self.

In my case, complete independence has allowed me to hike this trail today, but broader personal freedom doesn’t come psychologically cheap! Though I may be able to disappear in a flash on any adventure, because I don’t have the ties which would expect my consistent appearance, I must bear a thin backdrop when it comes to opinions or deep sentiments of others.

Internal deliberation concerning my life’s routine runs its course and fades. As I return mental focus to the sight of the trail, I reach alongside the log I sit upon, finger-pick a small rock from the supporting bank and toss the stone, with underhand ease, across and over the flat AT (Appalachian Trail), and while the stone rolls downhill, I sullenly listen to the leaves it rustles, interrupting complete silence. Physically getting up from this log seat is about as inviting as mentally wrestling with my current problem. With a brief grunt and moan while sluggishly leaning forward before I stand, I figure a walk while I’m free of my weighty backpack will stir reasoning. I need to be totally honest about my chances of completing the extensive hike I’ve planned now that my left knee has been compromised.

While I slowly backtrack on the flat trail angled into a steep slope, I try to block out my location’s isolation and exchange it for the thought that this peaceful spot could be in a park just minutes from my residential home. A deep breath releases pressure born from my perceived predicament and clears the way for a more honest assessment of my condition. Now able to freely roll my shoulders and easily turn my head to each side without the huge pack strapped to my back, walking while temporarily detached from the pack’s weight feels refreshing. Most enjoyable, average pace is not hindered while I view some passing forest details in the sharply inclined terrain flanking the level trail’s straightaway. The bothersome discomfort, centered in the knot at my left kneecap’s side, isn’t bad enough to be a significant distraction from my musing.

As I reach the trail’s acute left hook up the steep slope where my hiking plunge had wrenched my knee just minutes ago, I merrily realize that I may be getting a little carried-away evaluating my left leg’s hiking ability by walking this far from my backpacking unit. Joking, I don’t need to walk up the ridge I just roller-coastered down, do I? A hand wave is bid to the sharp trail twist as I turn around and head back toward the rest spot and backpack.

Trying to whisk forward induces a moderate pang at a swift leg bend to the knee’s fulcrum during a stepping cycle. An immediate slow down reduces the crimp to its previous discomfort. There’s no denying the parallel feeling these poking symptoms point to in the past. I remember dealing with the ceaseless aches emanating from the same knee problem for weeks before it turned normal, the original injury happening during a slip while making a rapid decent almost two months ago. If I don’t make any bolting movements, sudden stops or resist going down inclines, the left knee’s affliction should remain stable within a bearable irritation level. Hah, I say in a sarcastic gesture reflecting the edgy topography involved in any Appalachian mountain hike which this one must include.

As I carelessly stroll along with fleeting amnesia regarding my deep-woods disposition, the approach of the BPSS (Back Packing Super Structure), standing erect upon the embankment running along the trail’s right side, appears in disconnect compared to wilderness. The sight of meshed manufactured products, synthetic colors and gleaming metal frame conspicuously stick out in contrast to the natural surroundings and draws attention. Visibly abundant accessories, efficiently interwoven to allow a maximum of goods to be installed upon the massive backpacking unit (BPSS), suggest that there are even more desirable items inside the overloaded pack that might make a tired, weary and deprived traveler, so far from any store, salivate and plunder its contents. The scene prompts me to comically say, Impressive…but, gee, I’d hate to be the one lugging that pack all over these mountains! I pass by the massive super pack (BPSS) with deference as if it were just another’s cache and train my stare down the trail and its forward straightaway. It doesn’t take many steps before the loaded lifeboat’s intangible tether tugs from behind and freezes my position.

With hands on hips and lackadaisical gaze toward the AT ahead, I give an upward shoulder shrug to the pop idea that the compromised knee’s threat of immobility is nowhere near imminent and the end to the knee’s functional longevity is indeterminately far off... And there to the left, across the valley’s expanse riding level in a bright tan strip stamped into this cove’s complimentary parallel ridge, must be the return AT after it probably rings this large cove’s inner crux, suggesting that the trail runs nearly flat for at least the length that it curves around this small valley; I want to travel there. In formative reflex, I meander back to the BPSS with drooped, wagging head as I finish mentally wrangling over fully selling myself on the decision to proceed with my planned, ambitious mission.

As I continue haggling over my borderline decision, the process to button up the BPSS for travel picks up speed so I can move ahead swiftly. The returning thought of daylight limitations vies to crowd out a few positive snippets that maintain a reluctant green light to move forward on my journey: The knee’s re-injury should be a little more resilient than when it first failed over a month ago. I can’t see coming this far and just going back. I plan to finish my mission tomorrow anyway.

Finally, as discourse over my decision subsides and reservations about completing my objectives are waived for the moment, I revert to calmness and spare a few seconds to snap a photo for documentary purposes, or in case of a wayward demise. The 35mm camera is placed atop the same embankment that the BPSS rests against, and the snapshot timer allows me to rush back and pose on the log, where I had been sitting earlier, as if I’m leisurely reviewing the topographic (topo) map. After the shot, I slip the camera into the BPSS’s smaller auxiliary pack, near the unit’s top, while I wonder who would take the picture showing me ditching if I suddenly lost my left leg’s hiking track.

Another downside to mixed feelings hinges upon the act of merging my back with the hefty BPSS. That job must be addressed. Focusing on the steps to re-engage the monstrosity of the odiously cumbersome backpack helps deflect the coming huff over bearing its full burden. With it already positioned at a preferred height and orientation, things should go simple. I back into the unit and slip both arms underneath the shoulder straps with minimal shifting of its bulk. When first pressed against the pack’s cushioned panels, a cold sting from my air cooled, sweaty tee shirt sends a chill up my spine and into my head with an icy blast. Leaning forward and driving my shoulders into the tightening straps comes as an accustomed move, and I stand erect following a short struggle.

After a two-step stumble while jostling the pack upward and snapping the waist buckle together, bearing the BPSS’ full dead weight predictably affronts any sense of being a happy-hopping-hiker. With an outstretched hand to avoid a strenuous bend, grasping the hiking staff completes my voyaging unit’s coupling.

With a stern look of determination, facing the AT ahead leaves the huge BPSS apparatus behind me to physically separate the trail gone past. The first deliberate step is leisurely followed by the second and casual third while my eyes roam the bright blue sky-glow slicing through the whole of the early spring’s nearly naked forest canopy; the highly-exaggerated mountain slope combining with the trail’s level cut creates a striking off-kilter relief. The mid-afternoon sun barely rides above the heights to my right which becomes amplified as I move toward the cove’s core.

With a sense of progress, I feel an emotional severance from what would be if I did bailout and hiked back to my car in defeat. As if by the ignition of a long space mission’s final stage rocket, the point of no return is passed as the last remnant thought maintaining a return to my suburban home today is ejected and falls away into the disappearing space astern. Now that I’m fully committed to a future outcome within this wilderness without any access to any implement except those which are at my very nexus, I yield my physical domain to the isolated realm before me. I am uncertain about an outcome though pleased to have jettisoned the mental weight of concerns and duties associated with my historical origin as my feet propel me forward.

Refraining from flying forward while I monitor minor knee discomfort, I chug along steadily in hiking motion in the lone stillness and silence within this tucked away wilderness cove which strikes me as somewhat chilling. Wading along an Appalachian ridge-span’s girth and its ageless environment has unavoidably seeped into my captain bridge’s brow and is melding perspective. This paleo-historic landscape could easily mirror the stage of its deep prehistory when it was filled with dangerous predators. Suddenly in a fancy, I envision a large, dynamic Jurassic creature’s startling appearance, maybe an allosaurus, speeding at high velocity directly toward me from the far faded recesses of the trail’s straightaway. Its monstrous torso rides upon two reptilian thighs as tall as I while lashing two maniacal arms thrust from its upper thorax.

Charging, the reptilian carnivore’s immensity freezes me in shock, oh-no! I only have a split second to stare into the dinosaur’s cold eyes revealing the live killing machine’s calculated malevolence before it snaps its head and plucks mine off, with its teeth slashing like daggers. Its attack so efficient, I’m left as a headless stiff standing in place as it speeds off in mischievous search of a new nip. The atmosphere sure feels that primordial around here.

There’s no doubt that such creatures wreaked their mayhem atop this very location. Those events might have taken place well above this trail before erosive forces reduced ground level to this cove, but the very bedrock fragments I can see protruding in places certainly supported the land back then. Ancient dinosaurs and creatures could have lived, been fossilized and then been washed away while these rock formations surrounding me were buried in their silence, the bedrock forming sediments having been laid in a sea long before the continent of Pangaea’s existence had seen the emergence of dinosaurs during the Triassic period some 200 million years ago.

Most likely older, I’d bet the rock structures I see were formed before the continent called Rodinia broke up over 700 million years ago, predating most complex life, and even older, the base root of the rock foundation I walk upon, still buried under foot, probably go back a billion years or more to the Precambrian, prior to multicellular life. These rock outcrops I pass are at the very heart of what makes the Appalachian Mountains so special and that’s their legacy over geologic time. These mountains are extremely ancient! It’s palpable.

Examining the varying geologic make-up along the AT is intellectually stimulating, and the rock formations I pass appear to be some of the oldest and minimally deformed compared to others. In comparison, more ancient rocks can be found in the multiples of billions of years old granites and volcanic basalts found in South Africa or the Laurentian Plateau, but Appalachian formations seem to exude antiquity beyond a trained eye.

Unlike the abstract rock blend derived from molten material like lava, which visually reveals little about its age, the sedimentary rocks in this cove have obviously taken great time-lengths to create. The layered cake that these rock protrusions appear to emulate, with sloths of soil and debris icing over them, must have been formed through deposition and built-up by the gritty sand grains I can see embedded in them. Most likely, in the formation of these rocks, increasing pressure must have cemented accumulating soil particles as more and more sand and sediments were deposited and stacked atop a geologic cake to eventually form rock, having changed little at this place ever since. The geologic history of other nearby formations, including the region I’m headed, might not be as simple in their assembly.

As I approach this valley cove’s crux joining two nearly identical ridge spans, I see that it doesn’t merely curve round to the other side but is hacked in a V. Although the trail remains flat, it must make an awkward interchange at the separating cut. Details coming into focus show mostly dark gray, almost black exposed rock, maybe shale, comprised of thin rock plates seemingly jammed together with a dripping water trickle at the crux’s wedge center, and the increasing dampness in this corner’s darker recess heightens an eerie feel of subduction into an ancient past.

While ratcheting down my pace to gingerly pick my way through the sharp turn’s wet, chaotic and choppy footpath that’s smattered in rock chips, I realize that my contemplation concerning the surroundings hasn’t been interfered by feelings of any knee pain. That’s a good thing because my pack is nearly scraping jutting rocks which bound my hiking weave; each step needs to be sound.

Breaking from my eye-boot coordination, I take a swift look up and to the right which puts me face to rock-face, within inches, and I’m hit by a mental pressure wave generated by the huge dichotomy of time separating our individual spans in Earthly existence compressed into the tiny space between us. The Paleozoic rock’s peaceful longevity seems unbothered by my brief passage.

I could pinch off a rock-piece from the frail and fractured rock structure as a souvenir of Appalachian history, with a sense that I am expanding my own, but as I continue hiking, I’m overwhelmed by just the opposite. Rather than possessing a chip of these ancient rock plates as a gemstone in my hand to be revered, I’m the rare nugget being possessed by my surroundings, my existence a blip compared to theirs. I’m swallowed up by the majestic Appalachians.

I walk among mountain monoliths with origins going back millions of times further than anything I know of the Human Tree. They pre-date complex life-forms’ appearance on Earth. It happens that the whole developmental history leading to the unique attributes associated with today’s macroscopic life lay unfolded during the era that these rock formations were being naturally produced. The rustic rocks radiate vibes which seem to portray a knowledge about a story they presided over—the story of life on Earth.

The concept energizes my stride and mental loftiness as I roll out from the sharp valley crux and hike a leveled straightaway channeled into the ridge-side, like the trail section just completed. My knee pain and shoulder strap pinch fade into secondary mental status as I enthusiastically focus on gaining distance as quickly as possible.

What if I could journey to this place in the distant past at the same time the bedrock in these mountains were being forged in the sea and then watched as life’s history took place? I’d have the most amazing biologic events of the known living universe unfurl before me. But before I’d experience that magical story in my time travel scenario, at the age of these rock’s birth, I’d walk in a realm with no sophisticated life-forms, while the sun, booming in a familiar fashion as today, would illuminate a near barren ground.

Brilliant blue sky, abounding with fresh oxygen introduced over eons through microbial growth, would boast no flying animal able to take a breath. Hiking in summer heat could be done without gnat-fly irritation, or any other abhorrent insect for that matter. The chance to engage another creature would be nil, because they wouldn’t exist yet. Hiking anywhere on the planet at that time would reveal a naked world, a very empty place indeed.

The Earth might have been a very empty world in those rudimentary Precambrian times compared to our sophisticated biosphere of today, but the largest biologic hurdles needed to sustain the amazing show to come were quietly handled in the wings before the curtain went up on the world stage.

To start, the appearance of single celled life was critical if there were to be anything more complex. The microbe is such a unique occurrence that it cannot be constructed in any lab and has not yet been found anywhere in the vastness of space. How its chemical mechanics came to be is simply miraculous. Its main components of Mitochondria, RNA, and the nucleus, DNA, must have existed in some form separately, and replicating before they welled up together, suggesting that the two highly opposite environments preferred by each must have existed at the same time on Earth.

These two tiny entities fused to become dependent and reciprocate each other’s needs to survive. Though microscopic, this fusion and the myriad of complex systems that integrated to make up a living cell were essential feats which formed the most important building block ever to exist. Those precious living cells would be all that would be for billions of years.

Although extremely ancient, more than microbes existed by the time the base of my companion Appalachians around me began to form. Independent, single celled life had clumped together and, somehow, directed certain cell groups to specialize in certain functions to keep an autonomous whole alive. That’s another set of mysteries as hard to solve as the puzzles leading to the existence of a single cell. Riddles are many, such as the ultimate separation between plant and animal; at one-point cells were indistinguishable. But how did these brainless cells originally get together to serve each other in the first place? I’m sure they didn’t converse and hand a hammer to one cell and a tape measure to another to build a larger creature. What type of capricious decree directs some cells to undergo meiosis and have their separate gametes conjugate to spawn other similar creatures with no direct benefit to the donor’s life?

Yes, the primitive creatures that existed while the ancient bedrock I walk upon were being forged, such as jellyfish and sponges, seem immaterial on a human scale but do set the world’s fundamental stage in the Precambrian. Way back then, it would have been a barren world to our human sight, yet a miraculous gem. It was a sweet spot of formation when compared to any other place or alien world we know, or anywhere else in the observed universe. Just cruising through this countryside gives a feel of such a special ancient period.

To my left and across the pocket of this secluded valley spans the steep ridge-side where I rested, and the same warm sun that shone in ancient times looms high over that ridge’s mountain swath. My walking pitter-patter, fueled by enthusiasm, has drawn sweat as I near the horn curving out of this large cove. Sunlight raising my left temple’s temperature coincides with the questions I have about the type of terrain I’ll see beyond the ridge-cape I’m beginning to round to the right. A quick, hoisted shot by the staff bids farewell to the fading stretch of land that time forgot and my enjoyment I had hiking through it.

As the sun’s heat transits to my backside, I begin trying to peek at what I must hike immediately past the point I’m eclipsing and am satisfactorily gratified by what I see. Geographically, the new relief