“Here is the photo of Bob I told you about. We were on a last outing of the summer, before school began. Bob wanted to go to Katahdin; we’d been talking about it for some time. The party included Mary Jo and Claud Sutcliffe and their infant son Matthew, Bob, and me. We camped overnight in an Appalachian lean-to and started up the Saddle Trail to the summit in the morning. This picture of Bob was snapped just below the ridge that leads up to the summit. It was a cloudy, cold morning up there; you can see the frost on Bob’s cap and sweater. You can also see that Bob looks gaunt and strained. He was. He limped a bit and tired easily on the hike. But he was, as always, game to go. When we gained the ridge, there were vast fields of wild blueberries in fruit. We picked and ate as we hiked. We saw several bears doing the same thing. It’s hard to say what Bob was thinking about his condition at the time. He was still talking about amoebic dysentery but the lameness must have troubled him more than he let on.
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