🧵1/9August 15, 1983: As I entered Sages Ravine, I crossed the Massachusetts border.

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

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August 15, 1983: As I entered Sages Ravine, I crossed the Massachusetts border. Ten states down and four to go.

#backpacking #landscapephotography #hiking #hikingadventures #Massachusetts #forest #mountains #nature #AppalachianTrail

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

🧵2/9
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From Sages Ravine, the Appalachian Trail climbed steeply to another wooded plateau. In the middle of a cool dark hemlock forest, it crossed Bear Rock Stream near the eastern rim of the plateau. I took a short side trip to one of my favorite places on earth,

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

🧵3/9
following the stream east off the trail for about fifty yards to a spot where the flat ground ends like an abrupt stroke of a giant axe and a high cliff towers above the broad, bucolic upper Housatonic Valley.

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

🧵4/9
The southern tip of the Berkshires seemed to spring just as suddenly from the flattish valley floor a few miles away on the valley's eastern edge. A few feet behind me the stream plunged over the edge of the plateau, beginning a tall series of cascades. I took another fifteen-minute break there.

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

🧵5/9
After Bear Rock Stream, the next mile-and-a-half of the Appalachian Trail ascended Race Mountain, picking its way up a boulder-strewn slope softened by a carpet of fallen hemlock needles. The last half-mile of that climb threaded a narrow perch atop massive naked rock cliffs.

[gsteffanos@mstdn.social]

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The AT then crossed another rocky, scrubby summit area. Hawks drifted lazily on the smooth thermals of a mid-August afternoon, soaring high above the valley below.