Then I felt something hitting my head. Hail. Oh, goody. The thunder cracked. The lightening flashed. The water rushed down the trail a couple of feet in front of us. The hail was beginning to collect on the ground around me. I bent over more, to use my pack like a turtle’s shell, to protect my back and head. It bounced off the pack and landed around my feet. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Joe doing the same. We were silent. Nature spoke for us. Joe, who had never actually seen a hail storm in progress, got to see one first hand this day. I said a little prayer for those caught up on Franconia Ridge in this. Eventually the hail and lightening ended and we continued our climb.

Next, we came to a kind of stone chute which sloped up at a steep angle. The water was pouring down over it, and there were many spots with a green slimy coating on the salmon colored rocks. No way to by-pass it, so I reached for a hand hold and went up on hands and knees, bracing against whatever I could find. In dry weather it wouldn’t have been too bad, but the rock was as slippery as it looked and all I could do was crawl. Once on top, I waited for Joe to make his way up.

The next two Agonies were easy compared to the first. Before I knew it, Joe said he saw a roof, and then I did. We broke into the open and followed a path around the side of the hut. Then we saw the mountains! Wow. Beyond the hut, the trail downslopes into a small depression. Here sits Eagle Lake, a beautiful, shallow, boggy, tarn. As my eye traveled past the lake, Mt. Lafayette took control. It rose into the clouds, the barren upper slopes disappearing into white. Further to the south, Franconia Ridge could be seen. Little Haystack, the last of the three we planned to hike, seemed very far away.

When we checked in with the croo, we asked about the two older ladies. Yes, a croo member was escorting them down. The oldest lady was section hiking the AT, at age 83. She’d sprained an ankle and was walking herself out. Joe thought she had a lot of spunk and courage to walk out, instead of ask for help, and I agreed.

We looked around to see where we wanted to bunk. There were plenty of empty spots. I suspect some people canceled out due to the heavy storms. I picked a bottom tier bunk, and Joe, as usual, climbed the ladder for a loftier nest.

We had quite a job taking care of our wet gear. While the stuff inside of our packs stayed dry, everything else was wet. The waterproofing on my boots had failed and they were soaked through. I would be hiking in wet boots again the next day. Luckily, I had a pair of camp shoes to put on. Got into dry clothes and went back to the common room. There was fresh coffee, and it didn’t take Joe and I long to light into that. Meanwhile, people were pouring in, all soaked and wild looking, each with a story to tell of being caught in the storm. The coffee went fast.

By this time the sun had come out. We took our rain coats, rain pants, and pack covers outside and spread them on large rocks to dry, as others were doing. Needed to stay with the clothes, to be sure a gust of wind didn’t take them up the mountain without us, but that wasn’t exactly a hardship, sitting and resting and taking in the changing conditions on the mountains in front of us,-- and they were changing. Ever since our arrival there had been a cloud over Lafayette, but now it cleared and we saw the top. Somehow it didn’t look as impressive as I expected. The next day I would discover we weren’t really seeing the top, but a false summit.

Another hiker, who was also drying his stuff, was an older man, quite anxious to talk of his experience on the Ridge that day. This fellow was lean and wiry, and you could tell by the look of the muscles on his legs he’d spent a lot of time in the mountains. He said he’d been coming across Franconia Ridge when the storms hit. He, at first, didn’t realize what he was in for, but soon found there was no place for protection. Long open stretches, and spots where the trail was no more than 2 feet wide. Even though he was wearing light rain gear, he became wet from rain and sweat. The wind was blowing across the ridge line, whipping at him, and he began to get seriously cold. He wanted to hunker down and wait out the storms, but was afraid of hypothermia, so he kept struggling through the hail and lightening. He had been very scared. I looked at him and figured it took quite a bit to scare this guy. He had been out hiking for 5 weeks, but he’d had enough with this experience, and was going down the mountain the next day, and home to St. Louis.